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CIAO Focus for July: Responsibility to Protect

Image: Eric Bridiers, via Flickr

CIAO Focus highlights a particular topic in the realm of international affairs. This month the focus is on responsibility to protect.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a global norm that seeks to ensure that the international community has the will and capacity to halt crimes against humanity, crimes of genocide, and war crimes. R2P was adopted at the UN World Summit in 2005 and has since been invoked in more than eighty UN Security Council resolutions. To learn more about the basics of R2P, the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect is a valuable resource.

The interpretation, implementation, and effectiveness of R2P is actively contested. For Alex Bellamy, the international community has "repeatedly failed at the most basic task—the protection of populations from atrocity crimes. This much is obvious and the cases are ones we all know about." On the other hand, Gareth Evans argues that R2P is "an idea whose time has come, that it is here to stay, and that it really will make a difference in the years and decades to come."

There are numerous resources for students and scholars who want to study R2P, including the Global Responsibility to Protect journal, research from European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, interviews with the UN Special Adviser on R2P, and of course, CIAO.

• The United States at a Crossroads - Published by the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
• Is the Responsibility to Protect Dead? The View From Libya - Published by Political Violence @ A Glance
• State Building Interventions in Post Cold War Period - Published in the Review of Human Rights
• The UN’s Response to the Human Rights Crisis After the Coup in Myanmar - Published by the International Peace Institute
• Normative Resistance to Responsibility to Protect in Times of Emerging Multipolarity - Published in Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional

All the resources available on CIAO can be accessed by the JCU community with the JCU NetID authentication.

For questions about how to use CIAO and other databases, you can contact referenceservices@johncabot.edu.