IR Scholars

— by Hana Girma Mamo —

Introduction

   Before the post-cold war era, the world system stood for securing the sovereignty of any nation. No other idea has ever challenged this notion as a principle and a practically applicable concept. The convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide came into effect on 12 January 1951. This document is the first treaty that challenged the principle of sovereignty, which has a strong foundation after the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This treaty requires signatories to take preventive measures to prevent genocide crimes from happening, stop genocide crimes committed in their territories, and prosecute those who are responsible for the act. If a state fails to do such a thing, it gives authority for the global community to act and protect the civilians even without the consent of the given state. This convention fuels the debate around humanitarian intervention after World War II. Events like the Rwanda genocide, Kosovo, and Syria raise a question of morality whether it is okay to watch atrocities committed in states and the international community turns its back because of sovereignty. In 1999, the Secretary General to the United Nations, Kofi Annan, addressed the General assembly with a big speech with a challenging question to be answered by the international community. This led to the establishment of the Canadian-sponsored international commission on intervention and state sovereignty, which conducted a study on humanitarian intervention and came up with a new perspective to look at. This report made sovereignty a responsibility of the state, not only as a right, and rather than looking at intervention as a right of the international community to intervene, it shifted the notion of right to a responsibility to protect, not as a right to intervene. So after the post-cold war era, the name humanitarian intervention was replaced by the new doctrine called the  “responsibility to protect”. This idea of responsibility to protect was an effort to create a common ground as to how the international community should respond to mass atrocities without the erosion of the principle of sovereignty. Even though it has some new ideas and perspectives to look at, it was the same with the previous humanitarian intervention doctrine. In this short writing i will try to explore the emergence of responsibility to protect in the post cold war era, key elements shaping the practical use of responsibility to protect, success and limitation of responsibility to protect in mitigating grave human rights violation, political dynamic and their influence on the application of responsibility to protect, and the obstacle of balancing intervention with national sovereignty will be briefly discussed.

Post-Cold War Development of R2P

As we all know, after the Cold War, many nations were newly independent countries. Because of this, those nations, while trying to stand by themselves, face ethnic inequality, corruption, and bad governance, which lead to internal conflict. The post-Cold War era witnessed several humanitarian disasters that demonstrated the limitations of existing international mechanisms in addressing human rights violations. These events, ranging from genocides to ethnic cleansing, sparked intense debate on whether the international community should fully focus on state sovereignty or try to protect human lives irrespective of the fact that they are citizens of a specific country. Below, I tried to discuss the main events that showed the defect of the existing international system immediately after the Cold War.

Somalia (1992-1993)

The early 1990s saw a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Somalia. The country had descended into civil war following the overthrow of the Siad Barre regime in 1991. As the Somali National Alliance and rival factions waged war, famine and disease spread across the country, with over 300,000 people dying from hunger. The United Nations, led by the United States, intervened in December 1992 through Operation Restore Hope.^[1] However, the intervention was at first said to be humanitarian; it became really difficult to distribute the humanitarian aid. Due to this reason, the humanitarian aid changed into direct conflict with the local warlords. Scholars characterized this situation as the UN peacekeeping mission had an Unclear mandate and mission creep.^[2] In addition to this, the action of the peacekeeping mission intensified the debate over the challenge of state sovereignty vs. humanitarian action. Furthermore, the humanitarian intervention failed to protect all civilians, which was the first aim of the intervention.  Lack of local understanding also contributed to the failure of the mission, meaning the community was religiously and culturally tied, which led to a lack of support for the peacekeeping force.

Bosnia (1992-1995)

  The Bosnian War was the ideal conflict that represented ethnic cleansing. It was a tragic demonstration of how ethnic violence and the collapse of state structures can lead to mass atrocities. In the 1990s, Bosnia-Herzegovina sought independence from Yugoslavia, which provoked violent reactions from Bosnian Serb forces. Throughout the conflict, widespread ethnic cleansing occurred, most infamously in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.^[3] The UN, with peacekeeping troops stationed in the region, failed to prevent these atrocities, claiming that their mandate does not allow them to intervene militarily. From the result, it was clear that the peacekeeping force failed to do its main task because of a lack of a clear and coherent understanding of the situation and the mission in the first place. Despite warnings and calls for intervention, the international community hesitated to act decisively, and only the intervention of NATO forces in 1995, after years of inaction, brought the violence to an end. The Bosnian conflict revealed the inadequacy of traditional peacekeeping and the need for a new framework that would allow for more forceful and timely interventions to prevent atrocities.^[4]

Rwandan Genocide (1994)

This event was highly influenced by the “Moqadisho effect”.^[5] USA, a country that is considered as the world police due to its influence, was very reluctant to intervene because the Somalia event was considered a mistake. The event was the most infamous example of the international failure to prevent mass atrocities. In April 1994, ethnic violence erupted between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi population. Over 100 days, an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by government-backed militias.^[6] Despite early warnings and calls for intervention from UN peacekeepers already on the ground, the international community, including the United Nations and major Western powers, failed to act. The scale and speed of the genocide, coupled with the lack of political will to intervene, demonstrated the failure of existing international mechanisms to respond to such large-scale atrocities. Furthermore, it was a reflection of how humanitarian intervention was used selectively. Mostly, powerful states intervene in the internal affairs of a state when they have geopolitical or other interests at stake.  The lessons of Rwanda emphasized the need for a more comprehensive and decisive international response to prevent genocides and mass crimes against humanity.

Kosovo (1999)

  In 1999, the conflict in Kosovo between ethnic Albanians and the Yugoslav army under Slobodan Milošević escalated to the point where NATO intervened militarily without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council. The intervention was framed as an attempt to prevent widespread ethnic cleansing and atrocities committed by the Yugoslav forces against Kosovo Albanians.^[7] While NATO’s intervention halted the immediate violence, it raised significant concerns regarding the legality and legitimacy of military action without UN Security Council approval.^[8] The time can be characterized as a time where the European continent is trying to fully integrate, and due to this fact, NATO can just stand and see the situation escalate. Even though the intervention was considered to be a successful one, it was also a clear indication of how intervention is affected by the other external factors besides the existing humanitarian crisis. The Kosovo intervention thus illustrated both the promise and the danger of humanitarian intervention. It demonstrated the growing recognition of the need to act in the face of mass atrocities but also exposed how powerful states’ decisions can be influenced by their interest.

The Blair Doctrine

In the wake of Kosovo, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, championed the idea that the international community had a moral responsibility to intervene in situations where governments were committing atrocities. His speech in 1999 emphasized that humanitarian intervention should not be hampered by concerns over national sovereignty if it meant preventing genocide or mass suffering. His main speech was:-

 “The most pressing foreign policy problem we face … to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts and to do so by bringing together a more subtle blend of mutual self interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish.”^[9]

He characterized the Kosovo intervention as a “Just War” based not on any territorial ambition but on values. His speech later contributed to identifying when and whether to intervene in the formulation of responsibility to protect, especially when the intervention is going to be military.

The Emergence of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) After the Cold War

After the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, when the tension between the two superpowers decreased, the world’s focus came to other challenges like ethnic conflict, civil war, and humanitarian disasters, which were limited to a territory of specific states. High-profile events like the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre showed the limitation of the traditional notion of sovereignty and raised the question of whether the international community has a responsibility to intervene in the internal affairs of a state in case the state is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens.  In 2000, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, in his millennium report, raised a question to the members of the UN as follows:-

“… if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?”^[10]

In response to this question and challenge, the government of Canada sponsored an independent commission called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (hereinafter ICSS). The main aim of this commission is to find a common ground between intervention and the principle of sovereignty so that the international community can be on the same page for responding to grave human rights violations.^[11] In 2001, the commission came up with a report that incorporated the notion of “Responsibility to Protect” (hereinafter R2P). The notion of R2P was a groundbreak in reshaping the discourse on humanitarian intervention. In addition to conceptualizing the notion of  R2P, the report articulated 3 pillars of the R2P, criteria for intervention, and the role of the UN, and addressed the tension between the norm of nonintervention, which is deeply rooted in the principle of sovereignty, and the need for intervention in human-made humanitarian crises. From the report, we can understand that the R2P  is inherent in the traditional principle of state sovereignty, which first and foremost respects a state’s sovereignty while also obligating the state to protect its civilians from grave human rights violations. When a state is unwilling or unable to protect its citizens from atrocities such as genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity, the international community has a responsibility to intervene, provided that certain conditions such as just cause, right intention, and the authorization of the United Nations are met.^[12] To deeply understand this doctrine, we need to briefly look at the pillars of the concept and the criteria for intervention. In 2005, the United Nations conducted a world summit, and the commission report won a unanimous vote by 150 heads of states in the 2005 world summit outcome document.^[13]  Even though this document is a political declaration or simply a statement of intent, it showed that the international community was not strictly attached to the traditional principle of sovereignty as in the previous decades. Key Elements Shaping the Practical Use of R2P in Humanitarian Crises

1. Basic principle of R2P

The first basic principle of this principle dictates that state sovereignty implies responsibility, and this responsibility primarily lies in the state itself. Traditionally, states consider sovereignty as their right, and this right can not be questioned by anyone. Whatever a state does in its territory is considered to be its business, even if it is killing its citizens. The responsibility to protect shifted this idea and reminded states that they shouldn’t take sovereignty as a license to do crime or fail to prevent a crime on their territory. The second basic principle is that if a population is suffering serious harm due to internal war, insurgency, repression, or state failure, and the state is unable or unwilling to address the crisis, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.^[14] This means the failure of a state to fulfill its responsibility will result in the erosion of its sovereignty, and the state can’t do anything about it.

2. Basic elements of R2P
3. Responsibility to prevent

Responsibility to protect gives the priority to this basic element.^[15] Prevention of a crisis is primarily the responsibility of a state through creating a system that ensures accountability, good governance, protection of human rights, and through promoting social and democratic rights. Even though it’s the primary responsibility of a state, most developing nations need support to achieve those things. So, R2P emphasizes that the international community must step up by providing support for local initiatives to achieve their mission. According to the ICISS 2003 report, development assistance, mediation effort, and inducement could be the form of support expected from the international community to address the root cause of the conflict before it escalates on a large scale.^[16] But the international community specifically countries who have the power to prevent a given crisis prefer to invest their resource on the preparation of war, military intervention and to peace keeping thinking that rather than wasting money in prevention let’s wait and see how the event is going to turn out and if it’s something dangerous for us we will intervene. This kind of understanding not only fails to prevent the crisis but, in most cases, it will be a late response reflecting the failure of the international system. This was reflected in the Rwanda genocide. According to the commission report for effective prevention method to be implemented there has to be three vital conditions to be met:-^[17]

• There must be an already established knowledge of the fragility of the situation and the risk associated with it
• There must be a specific understanding of the policy measures available that are capable of making a difference to the situation, the so-called “preventive toolbox”.
•  There must be a political will to apply those measures.

2. Responsibility to react

If the first measure, which is a responsibility to react, fails, the responsibility to react comes into the picture. Reaction involves the use of diplomatic, humanitarian, or economic measures to halt or prevent atrocities.  If the situation requires the responsibility to react may also include military response but it’s only when the situation is extreme and there is no other way to avoid the crisis. . as a first principles, in the case of reaction just as with prevention, less intrusive and coercive measures should always be considered before more coercive and intrusive ones are applied.^[18]  In case of reaction, the priority must be given to those coercive actions which are less than the military intervention. Economic sanctions, using an already established international judicial institution like the international criminal court (ICC), can contribute to limiting the spread of the crisis by showing that the international community is watching and will not keep silent to what is going on in a specific country.  If it comes down to military intervention, the four criteria, which are the just cause threshold, precautionary principle, right authority, and operational principle, must be met. The criteria for the military intervention will be discussed in detail below.

3. Responsibility to rebuild

The responsibility to protect does not end after stopping the atrocity by any means. This is especially important when military intervention takes place in a state. The idea is that, in the first place, the intervention took place because the state could not prevent the crisis, so even after the crisis, the state should not be expected to have the capacity to rebuild its nation so that such a thing would not happen again. Because of this, the concept requires the intervening party to make some effort in the reconstruction of the nation so that the action can be fully considered under the R2P. This rebuilding process can take the form of peacebuilding, justice, and reconciliation, as well as development. During this time, the intervening authority should keep in mind that staying too long after intervention could also have some negative aspects. To name some, it could be considered as an erosion of sovereignty, and it may cause the feeling of dependency from the local government to the intervening authority. So a balance must be made between the international and local actor’s responsibility.

Basic criteria or principles for military intervention to be implemented

The ICISS report provides 4 criteria to be met for a legitimate military intervention, and those criteria are the just cause threshold, the precautionary principle, right authority, and operational principle. Let’s discuss them one by one.

1. The just cause threshold

As I said in the previous pages, the just cause threshold was derived from British prime minister Tony Blair’s speech. According to this criteria, military intervention is justified if the intervention is conducted to halt or avert a huge amount of loss of life with a genocidal intent or not and a state were unable or unwilling to act. Secondly the if it is to avoid ethnic cleansig which most of the time carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.^[19] If one of the situations exists, military intervention is acceptable, but the main problem with the report is that it does not define what a large scale or huge amount of loss of life means. This leaves a big space for interpretation and can be a reason for a late response. Most of the time, states don’t want any military intervention from outside, and due to this, they tend to hide the number of incidents and the level of the crisis. In addition to this, a lot of misinformation can also be a cause of military intervention where intervention is not necessary. So, this should be assessed in a precautionary way. The other issue is the issue of a failed state, where no government has the responsibility to protect the people. In case of a failed state, the fact that the civilians are in danger because of the action of a non-state actor does not make a difference when it comes to the just cause criteria, meaning the international community must intervene if the above indicators exist.

2. The precautionary principle

    Under this principle, four conditions must be fulfilled, namely, right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects.^[20] Right intention means the military intervention’s primary purpose should be to halt or avert the man-made crisis, not due to other political reasons. For example, changing a regime is not acceptable, but if the cause of the crisis is the regime, minimizing its power and facilitating elections for the civilians would be the right action. In addition to this, changing an existing border using military intervention is also an act that is not covered under this concept. Even with the right authority, the right intention might be manipulated due to political reasons. Secondly, there is the last resort criterion, which dictates that before military intervention takes place, other available measures must be taken into account to stop the crisis. Available measures could include diplomacy, economic sanctions, and using the ICC to achieve justice. Without going through those processes, jumping into military intervention can be considered a misuse of the concept, which leads to a much bigger crisis than averting one. Thirdly, there is proportional means, which is deeply rooted in international humanitarian law and is regulated by the four Geneva conventions and additional protocol one. Those laws regulate international armed conflict, and any conflict must follow the principles laid out under those laws. One of the main principles of those laws is the use of proportional force. Proportionality dictates that any war aims to win, and using excessive force to inflict unproportional damage violates the rules and regulations of war.  Finally, there must be a reasonable prospect of military intervention, meaning before the intervention, the plan must predict a chance of success which can be visible after the intervention. The success relates to the protection of civilians. If the intervention can not see a way for the protection of civilians or if the intervention is predicted to cause a much more crisis, it is in the best interest of the concept to intervene.

3. Right authority

    The right authority relates to who will decide when to apply the responsibility to protect in a given crisis. The commission report does not suggest any new perspective about the right authority. According to the United Nations charter, the United Nations Security Council was given the responsibility to keep the peace and security of the world. The commission report also gave the authority to decide when to apply the responsibility to protect to the UN Security Council. This confirms the problematic international system where the decision of the council is hard to implement unless the permanent members’ interests are the same. The commission, simply by giving responsibility to the council, urges the council to act responsibly and morally. Furthermore, in the case the UN security council fails, it gives the authority to the UN general assembly and regional organization, but in reality, it is difficult to put it into practice. Also, what if the country who needs intervention is the USA, China, Russia, or any powerful state that would intervene for the sake of humanitarian intervention? What if the decision of the UN General Assembly and the regional organization affects the interest of the powerful state? All this makes the second authorities less reliable.

4. Operational principle

    Before the intervention takes place, the military force must have a clear objective to achieve so that there would not be a mission creep, which would lead to a negative outcome of the intervention. In addition to this, all the intervening actors must follow a common military approach, which can be achieved by having a unity of command, and finally, the military force should have maximum possible coordination with humanitarian organizations so that the civilians can get the appropriate necessary aid.

Responsibility to Protect vs Sovereignty

  The Westphalian concept of sovereignty seems to be challenged by the responsibility to protect in the post-Cold War era. The responsibility to protect concepts always apply without the consent of a state, and if a state willingly invites or asks for help from outside, the responsibility to protect would not come into the picture. This means the application of responsibility to protect always results in the erosion of state sovereignty. R2P argues that this sovereignty is conditional upon the state’s ability to protect its population from atrocities. If a state fails in this regard, the international community has the right and duty to intervene. The ICISS work shifted sovereignty from the right of a state to the responsibility of a state, and this shift seems a sound common ground. But the concept problem does not emanate from its contradiction with sovereignty but with the misuse and wrong usage of the concept by the powerful states.

Criticism of R2P

1. Selective Application

One of the key criticisms of R2P is its selective application. Many argue that the international community often applies R2P only to weaker, more isolated countries while overlooking the actions of powerful states. For example, NATO intervened in Kosovo but did not take similar action in the Rwanda crisis, despite similar levels of violence and human suffering. This inconsistency undermines the legitimacy of R2P as a universal principle.

2. R2P is just another name for humanitarian intervention

Because of the misuse of the concept, most people think that the concept is the same as humanitarian intervention, except for its name. But as we discussed in the above pages, the responsibility to protect put military intervention as a last resort and even focused on a rebuilding process after the crisis stopped.

3. R2P applies only to weak and friendless countries, never the strong

These criticisms so far can not be debatable because we have not seen the concept applied to any powerful states yet. Even in the future, it is really hard to predict that this principle would be much stronger in the international system and applied to any nation regardless of its economic and military power. The world did not arrive in a place where humanity is the most important thing that needs protection more than anything.

Case studies: Libya, Syria, 2003 US intervention in Iraq, and Russia’s claim to the Crimea.

    In the case studies, I choose only to focus on how the concept was misused and how it is wrongly used to legitimate the action taken by the intervening parties. The first ideal case is Libya. The 2011 intervention in Libya under the auspices of R2P is one of the most controversial cases. The initial purpose was to protect civilians from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces as they attacked rebel-held areas. However, the intervention quickly morphed into a broader campaign aimed at regime change. The collapse of the Libyan state after Gaddafi’s removal has led to a power vacuum and ongoing instability, fueling violent militias and leading to mass displacement. Critics argue that the intervention had a hidden agenda and all the intervening forces had their interest. For example, France wanted to re-engage in North Africa and correct past failures,  prevent refugee and migrant surges to the EU, and remove Gadhafi due to his support for militant groups, which led to regional disruption. On the side of the US, it had the intention of maintaining regional influence and countering extremism in North Africa, cooperating with France and the UK, as well as managing oil resources and regional stability. In Libya, even though the concept of responsibility to protect was raised and used, the regime change and the lack of diplomacy, which led to the immediate use of force, makes it the ideal example for the misuse of the concept. Secondly, despite widespread evidence of atrocities, including chemical weapons attacks, the international community has been unable to agree on a coordinated intervention in Syria. The geopolitical complexities, especially the involvement of Russia and Iran on the side of the Syrian government, have hindered action at the UN Security Council. This shows the selective application of the concept in general. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq, claiming that the country was developing weapons of mass destruction, can be categorized under the wrong use of R2P because the first aim of intervention was not humanitarian in the first place. The US started to raise the concept after it was found out that there was no weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, and it wanted to justify its action. The same is true for Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, claiming the action was intended to protect ethnic Russians. I believe there is a big difference between the Libya intervention and the intervention in Iraq and Cremia. The Libya intervention was authorized by the UN security council, and the only problem with the action was a lack of right intention and mis-steps while using the concept.  But when it comes to Iraq and Cremia, the action can not be categorized under the R2P because it does not have the authorization of the UN security council, and the invasion was merely conducted because the countries wanted to sustain their interest. After the development of the concept, those events highly influenced the minds of states where they see the concept as a means of colonization.

Conclusion

    The emergence of R2P after the Cold War was a response to the failures of the international community to prevent mass atrocities. Events like Somalia civilwar, Bosnia, rwanda genocide, and Kosovo influenced in turning the attention of the international community to look at the existing system. The work of ICISS contributed to minimizing the debate over humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty by bringing a new concept to the table, namely, the responsibility to protect. The concept provides a clear framework for the application of the concept to achieve the necessary outcome after intervention. Unlike humanitarian intervention, this concept recognizes military intervention as a last resort.  While the framework represents a significant development in international law and humanitarian action, its implementation has been inconsistent, often shaped by political considerations and the interests of powerful states. The R2P, after its construction, was either misused, as the case of Libya shows, or wrongly claimed by powerful states as a justification for their wrongful act, as the cases of Iraq and Cremia showed. Even though the concept by itself is a proper response to atrocities committed in the world, the international system, which is the result of World War Two and the Cold War, makes the pure practical applicability of the concept difficult. The 2001 ICISS report did not solve this problem, even though it tried to stipulate a choice by giving the secondary authority to the UN General Assembly and regional organization. Currently, the ongoing conflict in Africa and Asia is also the best example of the problematic international system where human rights are only implemented and enforced as a secondary agenda. In the current world where there is so much interconnectedness, the atrocity committed in one state can not be contained there; rather, it will bring the problem to neighboring countries and the continent, and before we know it, it will become a world problem. The best example is irregular migration, where people flee from their homes to escape atrocities. The emergence of terrorist groups, which at first make the life of local people and then become a world threat, can also be the motivation of the international community to focus on the R2P concept correctly. R2P, to be fully effective, the international community must overcome its selective application, ensuring that interventions are not driven by geopolitics but by a genuine commitment to preventing atrocities and promoting human rights.

Footnotes:

^[1] United States Marine Corps, Restoring Hope: In Somalia with the Unified Task Force 1992-1993 (Washington, DC: United States Marine Corps, 1994)

² Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008)

³ Médecins Sans Frontières, Speaking Out: Srebrenica 1993-2003 (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2003), https://www.msf.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/MSF%20Speaking%20Out%20Srebrenica%201993-2003_1.pdf p. 12.

⁴ Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “A New Perspective on Peacekeeping: Lessons from Bosnia and Elsewhere,” Global Governance, 3.1 (1997): 1–15

⁵ Philip Benjamin Dotson, The Mogadishu Effect: America’s Failure-Driven Foreign Policy (University of Nebraska at Kearney, 2023), https://openspaces.unk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=hist-etd, p. 2.

⁶ Emily A. Milnes, “The Rwandan Genocide: A Study for Policymakers Engaged in Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, and International Development,” Pepperdine Policy Review, 13 (2021), https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/ppr/vol13/iss1/5 [accessed 9 February 2025], p. 1

⁷ Edward Newman and Gëzim Visoka, “NATO in Kosovo and the Logic of Successful Security Practices,” International Affairs, 100.2 (March 2024): 631–653, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae014 , p. 8.

⁸ ibid

⁹ Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008)

¹⁰ United Nations, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century (United Nations, 2000), https://www.un.org/en/events/pastevents/pdfs/We_The_Peoples.pdf [accessed 11 January 2025].

¹¹ Evans, Gareth, Mohamed Sahnoun, Gisèle Côté-Harper, Lee Hamilton, Michael Ignatieff, Vladimir Lukin, Klaus Naumann, Cyril Ramaphosa, Fidel Ramos, Cornelio Sommaruga, Eduardo Stein, and Ramesh Thakur, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (International Development Research Centre, December 2001)

¹² United Nations General Assembly, 2005 World Summit Outcome (A/RES/60/1) (2005),

¹³ ibid

¹⁴ International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001),p XI-XII

¹⁵ ibid

¹⁶ ibid

¹⁷ ibid

¹⁸ Christian Bundegaard, ‘The Normative Divide in International Society: Sovereignty versus Responsibility’ (2010) Danish Institute for International Studies

¹⁹ International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001),p 32

²⁰ International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001),p 35

References

1. Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008)
2. United States Marine Corps, Restoring Hope: In Somalia with the Unified Task Force 1992-1993 (Washington, DC: United States Marine Corps, 1994)
3. Médecins Sans Frontières, Speaking Out: Srebrenica 1993-2003 (Médecins Sans Frontières,2003),https://www.msf.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/MSF%20Speaking%20Out%20Srebrenica%201993-2003_1.pdf p. 12.
4. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “A New Perspective on Peacekeeping: Lessons from Bosnia and Elsewhere,” Global Governance, 3.1 (1997): 1–15
5. Philip Benjamin Dotson, The Mogadishu Effect: America’s Failure-Driven Foreign Policy (University of Nebraska at Kearney, 2023), https://openspaces.unk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=hist-etd, p. 2.
6.  Emily A. Milnes, “The Rwandan Genocide: A Study for Policymakers Engaged in Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, and International Development,” Pepperdine Policy Review, 13 (2021), https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/ppr/vol13/iss1/5 [accessed 9 February 2025], p. 1
7. Edward Newman and Gëzim Visoka, “NATO in Kosovo and the Logic of Successful Security Practices,” International Affairs, 100.2 (March 2024): 631–653, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae014, p. 8.
8. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001).
9. Christian Bundegaard, ‘The Normative Divide in International Society: Sovereignty versus Responsibility’ (2010) Danish Institute for International Studies
10. United Nations General Assembly, 2005 World Summit Outcome (A/RES/60/1) (2005), United Nations https://undocs.org/A/RES/60/1
11. United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (A/RES/260) (1948), United Nations
12. Shukla, S., ‘Humanitarian Intervention: Power Politics or Global Responsibility’, India Quarterly, 57(3) (2001), pp. 79-96 http://www.jstor.org/stable/45073247