What if R2P Was—Truly—Everyone’s Business? Exploring the Individual Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

Echoing the call recently made by Ed and Dana Luck and building on a research project triggered several years ago by Siba Grovogui’s postcolonial critique of the concept of responsibility to protect (R2P), this article explores the significance of what may be labeled individual R2P. It argues that acknowledging individual R2P as part of the doctrine not only highlights the role that a heretofore underappreciated layer of actors can and does play to protect individuals from some of the worst crimes. At the theoretical level, it also has the potential to mitigate some of the R2P doctrine’s main ambiguities, while in real life, acknowledging individual R2P does, without exonerating institutional actors from their obvious responsibilities, recognize at the very least the right of people of conscience, worldwide, to take matters in their own hands even in the worst cases of international paralysis.

Role of Process Legality in Norm Contestation: Rise and Fall of Human Protection

“…Although today R2P is an institutionalized and entrenched concept assessed in annual reports of the Secretary-General and as part of the formal agenda of the General Assembly, the emphasis on atrocity prevention does not expand to discussions on intervention. Amidst scholarly solutions such as invoking the individual responsibility and accountability (Pison Hindawi, 2016) for reviving R2P as an effective protection instrument, R2P has lost its initial ethos on human protection even if it is not completely dead as a preventive framework. Since Libya, even the advocates and students of R2P are silent about any occasional necessity for the use of force, “evincing embarrassment that the principle ever called for the use of force” (Bellamy, 2022, p. 278).…”

Responsibility to Protect: Protecting Humans in a World of States

“…Glanville (2015) de normların uluslararası ilişkilerde devlet davranışını belirlemede kilit öneme sahip olduğunu ve koruma sorumluluğunun bu bağlamda bir norm olarak yerleştiğini iddia etmektedir. Hatta devletlerin ve uluslararası toplumun yanı sıra, bireylerin koruma sorumluluğunun da tartışmaya açılması ve bu sorumluluğun benimsenmesi halinde yaşanan mezalimlerin bir kısmının azaltılacağı da öne sürülen bir görüştür (Hindawi, 2016).…”