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1. The Responsibility to Protect at 15: A Promise Unfulfilled

Author:
Alex Bellamy
Publication Date:
09-2020
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
The Responsibility to Protect was adopted unanimously and without equivocation by the UN General Assembly in 2005. States accepted that each of them had a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity – hitherto referred to as ‘atrocity crimes.’ They acknowledged their responsibility to assist one another to fulfil this primary responsibility. They declared they had a collective responsibility to protect populations in other countries using diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, and they promised to work through the UN Security Council to protect populations when national authorities were failing and peaceful means inadequate.
Topic:
Human Rights, International Law, United Nations, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and Atrocities
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. "Correspondence: Reconsidering the Cases of Humanitarian Intervention"

Author:
Alex Bellamy and Robert Pape
Publication Date:
12-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Security
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
In a recently published piece, Robert Pape makes some misleading and erroneous comments on my published work. First, Pape writes, "Alex Bellamy, a staunch advocate of R2P [the responsibility to protect initiative], catalogues episodes of mass atrocities to clarify 'R2P's preventive agenda,' with a total of twenty-one qualifying for intervention from 1990 to 2010". Pape provides no reference to support this statement. In truth, I have never produced a list of "cases" that "qualified" for intervention. The datasets that I have produced relate to cases where the lowest casualty estimates suggest that at least 5,000 noncombatants were intentionally killed. Nowhere have I suggested that this "qualifies" these cases for intervention. Actually, I have been generally critical of abstract talk about criteria and thresholds for armed intervention, as well as the pervasive and erroneous tendency to treat R2P as synonymous with humanitarian intervention, both of which I believe to be disconnected from political realities. Since I began working on R2P a decade ago, I have repeatedly expressed caution about the use of force for protection purposes for reasons similar to those aired by Pape last year. In my first book on R2P, I concluded that "non-consensual force is a highly unreliable form of protection."