The “responsibility to protect” our answer to “never again”? Libya, Syria and a critical analysis of R2P

Abstract

Debates over the use of force for humanitarian purposes have been some of the most profound and fascinating of the international society in the post-Cold War period. A surge of intrastate violence in the 1990s and the lack of appropriate response by the international community led UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his counterparts to vow “never again” and to call for a reinterpretation of how we think about humanitarian intervention. The response was a report issued by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 entitled, “The Responsibility to Protect” (often referred to as R2P or RtoP) which set about to reconceptualize the seemingly contradictory notions of state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. Adopted by the UN in 2005, much has been critically written about the norm on all sides. However, not until the Libyan civil conflict in 2011 did we see an actual case in which R2P was specifically invoked to justify military intervention, and thus one where we could test its merits. Many argue Libya shows successful application of R2P, while some say its mandate was overextended. Nonetheless, it has prompted comparisons and contrasts to the situation in Syria, where over 100,000 people have died but where military intervention has not been pursued. This paper analyzes the decisions in both of these instances and the resulting deficiencies of R2P that were highlighted by Libya and Syria: first, the continued subservience of humanitarian norms to political concerns, and second, the lack of conceptual clarity surrounding operational aspects of military intervention. Libya and Syria have both wounded the credibility of the norm.