A Brief History of R2P

In 1994, around 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan genocide. In response, the UN decided that if a country couldn’t provide physical and economic security to its citizens, other countries (with some checks and balances) could intervene to restore order, writes Richard Haass in his book, The World.

 

This came to be called the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. Since it was such a grey area (how much disorder justifies external intervention?), it was never put into practice. Until the US and its NATO allies invoked R2P in Libya in 2011. The rest of the world soon came to see it as just a thinly veiled attempt to overthrow the government of Gaddafi. Even worse, it led to anarchy, the very thing they claimed they were trying to prevent/fix.

 

With the Libya episode, R2P is dead. Russia and China were now set against R2P, viewing it as a “cover for imposing political outcomes”. The West too realized that no outcome could be guaranteed; it could make a bad situation worse; created refugee crisis; and there was no clarity on who was supposed to foot the bill.

 

On the other hand, as Gary Bass wrote in The Blood Telegram, “one of the most successful cases of humanitarian intervention against genocide” was when India went into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Or as Bass wrote:

“India in effect applied what we would now call the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle, and applied it well.”

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