The Responsibility to Protect and the Arab World: An Emerging International Norm?

Abstract

Over the last 15 years, human rights concerns and development issues have been increasingly integrated with security matters on the international agenda. There is a growing understanding that justice, growth in welfare, and sustainable peace are goals that are deeply entwined. This new understanding of development – as encompassing human rights and security concerns to an equal extent – is reflected in the notion of the responsibility to protect. The responsibility to protect (R2P) represents a holistic approach to the challenges of international security, and one that enables human rights violations to be conceived of as a security issue. The arms embargo and humanitarian intervention in Libya and subsequent debate over intervention in Syria brought the issues of R2P into the heart of the Arab world. The Arab world has long been immune to these debates, but the historic changes in Tunisia and Egypt and the humanitarian intervention in Libya have shifted the debate and brought about a paradigm shift.