Preliminary Proposal

This was the preliminary thesis proposal I submitted.


In October of 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) was formed as an independent research group with sponsorship from the Canadian government. Its task was to build a set of strong foundational principles for responding to mass scale humanitarian disasters. The commissions formation followed acute failures to prevent or stop mass killings during the 1990’s in Rwanda, The Balkans, and East Timor (Thakur, Crisis and Response, 2008). It was a response to the call from the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that, “the world cannot stand aside when gross and systematic violations of human rights are taking place…intervention must be based on legitimate and universal principles if it is to enjoy the sustained support of the world's peoples. (UN, 1999)”

Its report, “The Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) established the first modern, cohesive foundation concerned with the response to humanitarian disaster. The ICISS included diplomats and leaders from around the world, representing evenly ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ interests. Nowhere during the deliberations, “did a substantial number of people argue that intervention to sustain humanitarian objectives was never justifiable. (Weiss, 2007)”

The R2P achieved a significant amount of recognition after its publication, including a slightly modified version being adopted by a unanimous vote in the UN 2005 World Summit, and the usage of ‘R2P’ terminology by the Security Council for the first time in 2006 (UN , 2005) (UN, 2006). The agreed upon version of the R2P in the World Summit, contained the essentials of R2P, including the usage of force as a last resort. The adopted text did slightly weaken the international just cause threshold for intervention from the original, in that it “was raised from the point at which the host state proved itself ‘unable and unwilling’ to protect its own citizens to that at which the state was ‘manifestly failing’ in its responsibility to do so. (Bellamy, 2008)”, but still maintained the essential character of state sovereignty as contingent upon the security of its citizens.

The 2005 adoption, and subsequent support from a range of organizations and individuals ranging from the former and present UN Secretary Generals however have not been sufficient to spur action. In some cases its name has been blatantly appropriated as justification for clearly non-humanitarian related motives, and its further implementation as a catalyst for UN reform has been met with increasing resistance. (Thakur, 2006)

Darfur

The crisis of Darfur has emerged as the latest humanitarian disaster in which the missed opportunities for action demonstrates both the gap between theory and practice, and the business-as-usual approach in handling unfolding humanitarian disasters despite the UN recognition of the R2P. . The international responses to the U.S-described genocide in Darfur by the African Union, and later the UN Security Council, have been uncoordinated, insufficient, and late (Waal, 2007). Notable is that the worst of the crisis in Darfur erupted in 2003, and the R2P adoption in the General Assembly wasn’t until 2005 with Security Council recognition in 2006, yet the uncommitted response to the genocide continues up to this day, and has resulted in up to 400,000 dead and over 2 million displaced from their homes (Central Intelligence Agecny, 2009).

With the Sudanese government aware of what appears to be the approaching international recognition for Kosovo sovereignty following the NATO intervention in 1999, and fearing it might be forced to grant similar concessions, as well as suspicion of ulterior U.S motives, its attitude has remained one of defiance, agreeing to resolutions only occasionally, and generally impeding peace progress following its correct observation that the resulting consequences of noncooperation will be minimal to nonexistent. (Lake, Rice, & Payne, 2006)
The response framework of the R2P would have illustrated a clear course of action in Darfur. Three levels of responsibility to humanitarian crises are provided by the R2P. Prevention by “addressing both the root causes and the direct causes of internal conflict”, reaction by “responding to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures which may include coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme cases military intervention”, and restoration, by providing “full assistance with recovery, reconstruction, and reconciliation, addressing the causes of the harm in intervention was designed to halt or avert. (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001)”

The threshold for military intervention in cases that prevention has failed, and diplomacy broken down is established by the R2P as “large-scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation; or large-scale ‘ethnic cleansing’ actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape. (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001)” Darfur continues to meet these conditions today. (Nebehay, 2009) Four additional elements make up the composition of an intervention, including right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects, a further examination of which shall be addressed in the thesis.

Implementation

Since the World Summit vote, resistance to international recognition of the R2P as an emerging norm has been growing. The fact that the report won the support of the General Assembly just a few years following the launch of the Iraq war, and the debacle of Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan, was a most unlikely feat. As one of the co-chairs of the ICISS pointed out, “It was really a bit of a miracle that we managed to stagger to the finish line in 2005 with the R2P concept still intact…I can not tell you the amount of damage that (the Iraq invasion) did. (Evans, 2008)”

Recently an even larger challenge for the international support for the R2P has emerged. During a meeting of the General Assembly on the 4th of March in 2008, diplomatic leaders from Cuba, Egypt, Morocco, Bangladesh, and other countries in South America and Arabia flipped the official positions of their countries, expressing the view that no consensus had been reached regarding the R2P during the World Summit in 2005 (UN, 2008); a claim lacking entirely a foundation in reality. In order for the R2P to continue transcending the polarizing debate over ‘humanitarian intervention’, its invocation must be reserved for only the most extreme cases of abuse. This growing change of attitude against the R2P stems from the continued exercise in hegemonic governance by the West, who find themselves “already overstretched militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, and increasingly despised around the world for belligerent machismo as their default mode of engagement with regimes that don’t kowtow to them… (and) damage their own political credibility and that of R2P by invoking it ineffectually. (Thakur, Crisis and Response, 2008)”

This erosion of support represents a serious obstacle for Annan’s call for unification and foundation building. The R2P design is such that it military action is placed in a very separate category from other possible responses, and it recognizes that the exercise of power can easily cause more problems than it solves. And while the logistical challenges in the adoption of the R2P as a new norm are many, including the question of legal authority, and the appropriation of the humanitarian moniker for what Chomsky might call empire building, the R2P still embodies the most coherent and concerted effort to date for a unified approach for the protection of victims caught in the crosshairs of conflict. Its implementation would assure that emerging conflict is met with the deliberation and response that it deserves. As long as its adoption in forums of international justice and security is delayed, we can continue to expect more of the same international dithering as a response to the inevitable Darfurs of tomorrow.

In conclusion, my proposal is to examine further the R2P doctrine and its current importance and necessity in light of the military interventions of the 1990’s. I will conduct a case study on the US described genocide in Darfur, and the response that would have been expected under the R2P. And finally I will examine the current barriers to the adoption of the R2P including the abuse of humanitarianism in the Iraq war, and the reverberations still encountered from the Bush Doctrine and concepts of pre-emptive defense. I shall argue in the thesis as I have done here, that the R2P is a crucial element in preventing mass-scale conscience-shocking humanitarian disaster, and that it contains in its implementation, the best chance of re-introducing meaning to the phrase “never again”.

Instant Publication

I shall attempt to motivate my daily thesis progress by posting new completed content here. Good luck to me. Feedback welcomed.