Responsibility to Protect and Prevent: Principles, Promises and Practicalities (Anthem Studies in Peace, Conflict and Development) - Hardcover

Janzekovic, John; Silander, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857280597 ISBN 13: 9780857280596

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

‘Responsibility to Protect and Prevent: Principles, Promises and Practicalities’ explores the evolution of responsibility to protect (R2P), a principle which – according to its supporters – has evolved into a new type of responsive norm for how the international community should react to serious and deliberate human rights violations. Arguing that the R2P ethos has been misunderstood and used ineffectively, this work defends the validity of R2P and urges for a more practical understanding that moves beyond theory.

The progression of R2P from an initial concept to formal ratification has been a very difficult one, with a great deal of disagreement over its validity as a substantive norm in international affairs. The key disagreement is not that protection or prevention are unimportant, but rather how the fine-sounding R2P principles are supposed to work in practice. This volume presents a number of important arguments that are directly related to the state vs. human security debate, with a critical analysis of the nexus between the protection verses prevention theses. Through the case study of the Libyan Crisis, Janzekovic and Silander offer an example of the R2P thesis in action, and support the claim that prevention should be more than an adjunct to protection.

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By John Janzekovic and Daniel Silander

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Responsibility to Protect and Prevent

Principles, Promises and Practicalities

By John Janzekovic, Daniel Silander

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 John Janzekovic and Daniel Silander
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85728-059-6

Contents

List of Maps, vii, 
List of Abbreviations, ix, 
Chapter 1 Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 2 State versus Human Security: The Great Debate, 11, 
Chapter 3 Responsibility: Protection and Prevention, 45, 
Chapter 4 State Responsibility, Human Security and International Law, 75, 
Chapter 5 Promoting Democratic Norms for Protection and Prevention, 89, 
Chapter 6 Case Study Libya: Moving Principle into Action?, 103, 
Chapter 7 Conclusion, 123, 
Notes, 149, 
Bibliography, 167, 
Index, 185, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The 2005 UN World Summit was a pivotal event in the formal progression of the responsibility to protect (R2P) principles. Paragraphs 138–9 of the summit's outcome document articulated the fundamental responsibilities of states and the wider international community. The R2P approach was directly applied for the first time by the Security Council to the genocide in Darfur and most recently to the international response in Libya during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 and 2012. Since the late 1990s, the concept of R2P has evolved into what supporters now claim is a new type of responsive norm regarding how the international community should react to serious and deliberate human rights violations. The 2001 UN International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty co-chaired by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun articulated in detail the principles of R2P. These principles were then formally endorsed by the majority of states at the 2005 UN General Assembly World Summit in New York.

At the 2005 summit, the international community almost unanimously endorsed the idea that states have a fundamental responsibility to protect their own citizens, and in most cases the citizens from other states, from gross human rights violations and other mass atrocities. However, the progression of R2P from concept to principle to formal ratification in 2005 has been a very difficult one with a great deal of disagreement over the validity of R2P as a substantive or even a developing norm in international affairs. The disagreement is not that protection or prevention are unimportant, nor is it that the international community does not have at least some responsibility to try to stop extreme human rights violations. The disagreement is primarily about how the protection and prevention principles that underpin the R2P ethos, while theoretically acceptable, are supposed to work in practice. Fundamentally, of what possible use are such principles when governments and policy makers continue to ignore the basic premise of protection?

Some of the major rising powers such as China, India and Russia refuted the overarching concept of R2P primarily because this notion violates the essential principle of state sovereignty. That is, the security of the state must come first and any move towards prioritizing human security over state security threatens the underlying sanctity of statehood itself. Despite such challenges there has been an intensified debate on the practical need to address conflicts that deliberately and repeatedly demonstrate unacceptable state behaviour towards humans.

This is not only a debate about idealizing human rights or substantiating the functions of the state apparatus. This is a debate about the fundamental obligations of a civil and moral society, and how the international community should or even can protect people who are at extreme risk of deliberate violence. The need to prevent violence and to protect people from the excesses of their governments has been preached and argued by many, but the serious application of operational and structural strategies that effectively address the most basic human needs of citizens, particularly in weak states, are significantly more theory than practice. The notion of protection that is enshrined in the R2P ethos attempts to provide some sort of formal structure for how we should ameliorate the effects of mass violence and deprivation.

R2P refers to third-party initiatives aimed at pre-empting the escalation of violence. Such initiatives may be of various kinds, but they are mostly political ventures to prevent violent conflicts rooted in complex networks of religion, ethnicity, identity and culture and in the struggle for power. The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, in its final 1999 report Preventing Deadly Conflict, identified three broad aims of preventative action: prevent the emergence of violent conflict, prevent ongoing conflicts from spreading and prevent the re-emergence of violence. The commission proposed three fundamental principles underpinning effective prevention strategies; early reaction to signs of trouble, a comprehensive, balanced approach to alleviate the pressures or risk factors that trigger violent conflict and an extended effort to resolve the underlying root causes of violence. However, neither the commission generally nor the report articulated how this was to be done except to propose that prevention may be operational or structural in nature. Operational prevention is focused on addressing and responding to the immediacy of conflict, while structural prevention is aimed at identifying and responding to the underlying causes of conflict. Bellamy and Williams point out that structural and operational preventative initiatives currently exist more in theory than in practice. A further significant challenge is that the nexus between protection and prevention is unclear. Are they the same? Is one dependent on the other? Should one have priority over the other? We aim to address these very difficult questions and posit that desperate efforts at protection (where it occurs at all) can only ever be a final response to deliberate and extreme human rights violations. Prevention and the need for prevention before protection in these cases has either been too little, too late, or non-existent in the first place.

Protection and Prevention

One important reason that strategic prevention is more theory than practice or actuality is because of the very complex nature and difficulty in identifying appropriate and effective preventative responses to potential conflict situations. Where preventative responses are not identified, or if they are identified but not effective, then direct intervention must remain as the final protection option to alleviate the immediate suffering of the victims of extreme violence. Humanitarian intervention may end up as a secondary prevention option to stop the violence from escalating further and wider out of control.

Until very recently, the prevention, reaction and rebuilding dimensions were considered primarily to be the responsibility of the sovereign state. Not only has this resulted in great harm to citizens by governments or regimes who deliberately brutalize their own people, but this approach has provided many in the international community a reason, if not an outright excuse, not to become involved in the affairs of another state regardless of even the most desperate humanitarian need to do so.

State sovereignty is intimately associated with human security in the sense that sovereignty is ultimately morally derived from the people. This means that, in the end, state security is dependent on human security. When states fail to provide human security this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0857280597
• ISBN 13: 9780857280596
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland