Beyond the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Kurt Mills and David Jason Karp, eds. (2015). Human Rights Protection in Global Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 336 pp., $100 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1-137-46316-6). This volume, edited by Kurt Mills and David Jason Karp, explores the responsibilities that states and non-state actors have for the protection of human rights in global politics. The volume offers a broad, multidisciplinary investigation of the subject, with contributions from scholars and practitioners from a number of fields, including political science, International Relations, law, philosophy, sociology, history, and English. The book explores a number of questions: 1. Who is responsible for human rights protection in global politics? 2. How should responsibility for human rights protection be conceptualized? 3. What rights and categories of rights are covered by the responsibilities for human rights protection in global politics? 4. Are existing legal and institutional mechanisms effective in promoting the human rights protective responsibilities of various global actors? The international legal doctrine Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which asserts that the international community has a responsibility to prevent mass atrocities, provides a normative and conceptual framework through which the book’s chapters investigate these questions. The R2P doctrine, advanced at the 2005 World Summit, represents a prevailing conception of responsibility for human rights protection in global politics. Specifically, the World Summit Outcomes Document, endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2005, asserts that individual states have the responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (paragraph 138), and that UN institutions also have a responsibility to protect that may be fulfilled via diplomatic, humanitarian, or other peaceful means (paragraph 139). Under R2P, any decision to authorize a military response to mass atrocities would be made in the UN Security Council in accordance with the provisions of the UN Charter, including chapter 7. In this regard, the operational and political constraints that limit the extent to which the international … debra.delaet{at}drake.edu