UNSC and ICC Patern(al)ship in the Praxis of the R2P: Insights from Darfur and Libya
Questions must be raised about ostensible judicial activism and impropriety; the putative independence of the ICC in relation to the UNSC and, the direct involvement of the ICC in active conflicts especially in African states.
Turkey’s Dilemma: How to Act on Syria without Losing Soft Power
Turkey should push for humanitarian assistance and sanctions, whilst putting serious diplomatic pressure on the Assad regime.
What Can Be Done in Response to the Crisis in Syria?
The best response to the crisis in Syria is the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to oversee an inclusive political process for a new Syrian constitution.
Syria and the Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric Meets Reality
Syria surely demonstrates, in all too graphic detail, the limits of R2P and the pressing need for creative thinking about profound reforms of the UN which address the P5 veto in the Security Council and the absence of a UN standing army.
Syrians Are Paying the Price of NATO Excesses in Libya
The China–Russia veto does not prove the irrelevance of the UN Security Council. Rather, it proves that the politics of the Security Council must be got right before an R2P military intervention; and the political equilibrium should be maintained during the operation.
Edited Collection – The Responsibility to Protect
With contributions from many of the world’s most respected experts, this compendium draws attention to the points of contention highlighted by the Libyan intervention.
Was the International Intervention in Libya a Success?
The UN-mandated intervention in Libya is now officially at an end. Perhaps only time will tell whether Libya turns out to have been a great case of international intervention or something rather less.
Intervention in the Internal Affairs of States
The moral imperative to intervene in a nation’s internal affairs where acts of genocide are threatened is a powerful one. That the UN is eager to push the doctrine of R2P and to re-define sovereignty to permit intervention in a state’s internal affairs is testimony to the fact that the Charter does not provide that legal authority. It should.
Prevention: Core to the Responsibility to Protect
Motivated both by analytical rigor and political expediency, ICISS sandwiched its discussion of international response to atrocities between what it described as a “responsibility to prevent” and a “responsibility to rebuild.” Once introduced, however, the logic of prevention as core to the global atrocity agenda was difficult to deny. Why wait to halt a massacre if early engagement might avert it entirely?
R2P: Seeking Perfection in an Imperfect World
While the development of R2P as a concept has been the preserve of international relations theoreticians (albeit ones with large amounts of practical experience), its implementation rests on the practitioners of the day. And these practitioners deal in the world of realpolitik with all of its inconsistencies, relativities and competing national interests.
