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Copyright of Al-Muntaqa: New Perspectives on Arab Studies is the property of Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The imperative norms of international law represent concepts that have crystallized in long historical periods, with the aim of regulating the conduct of states and other subjects of international law in such a way as to respond to the imperatives of maintaining peace and security throughout the world. It is well known that the ten fundamental principles have binding legal force and are superior to any other sources of international law. The violation of any imperative rule can be reported by any state, regardless of the context or conjuncture, and the only international court vested with the competence to judge such an approach is the International Court of Justice, according to the UN Charter. The question legitimately arises as to how a conflict in the application of such rules should be resolved, precisely because of their importance. The purpose of this study is to identify the principles of international law in correlation with the sovereignty of states and the responsibility to protect, which derives directly from the imperative to respect fundamental human rights and freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The responsibility to protect (R2P) is often referred to as a new concept on the basis that it provides both states and the international community responsibilities, rather than merely rights, to protect populations from mass atrocities. As this article argues, this claim of novelty is overstated. And yet, R2P has comprised an important development in human protection over the past two decades: it has helped to generate a degree of consensus on how to prevent and address atrocity situations. If R2P is not as novel as is often suggested, why has it had such an impact on international discourse? After demonstrating R2P's overstated novelty, this article advances four key factors that help explain its meaningful international impact: the importance of previous and contiguous normative developments, the role played by norm entrepreneurs, the emphasis placed on prevention over intervention, and the concept's constructive mix of clarity and ambiguity. By doing so, it provides a stronger understanding of the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on refugee responsibility-sharing scholars, for the most part, are concerned with persons who, due to serious violations of human rights including severe forms of deprivation. It mentions literature's analysis is heavily informed and constrained by the prevailing doctrine of sovereignty in international law. It also mentions International lawyers focus on the consent-based regime of international refugee law of the U.N. Refugee Convention and its Protocol.

This article examines the legal basis for the concept of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in international law. Accordingly, the article attempts to determine the extent to which various elements of the concept have already been incorporated into existing international instruments as well as in customary international law. It also ascertains the extent to which the concept has been accepted as a binding norm of international law, particularly in view of the burgeoning activities and resolutions concerning its use. The study analyses the existing provisions of major international instruments concerning the responsibility to protect, such as the Genocide Convention and Geneva Conventions, as interpreted by the International Court of Justice in its opinions. Finally, as part of the conclusion, the article evaluates the scope and limitations of the concept of R2P under international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Istanbul Medipol Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Istanbul Medipol University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the concept of responsibility to develop (R2D) in international humanitarian intervention in relation to the responsibility to protect (R2P) and right to development (RTD). Topics discussed include the domestic and international implications of state sovereignty, change effected by R2P on sovereignty in its transition from the issue of foreign intervention to domestic legitimacy, and ability of the R2D concept to reduce opposition to a binding international commitment.

This introduction to the roundtable "The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception" argues that the geostrategic configuration that made the responsibility to protect (RtoP) possible has changed beyond recognition in the twenty years since its inception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the responsibility to protect (R2P) as an organizing concept for preventing, addressing and finding durable solutions to internal displacement in Africa. While the most innovative norms for protecting the forcibly displaced have been conceptualized in Africa, they have not durably addressed displacement, due to limitations in implementation. R2P has similarly faced criticisms emanating from a lack of clarity and distrust. Restated norms underlying frameworks for internally displaced persons (IDPs) and R2P complement each other, and can be operationalized simultaneously through a more credible regional approach, to encourage effective protection of IDPs in Africa. The article explores pillar one, pillar two and the non-coercive elements of pillar three of R2P, and its underlying moral principles, using Kenya as a case study of the process of seeking to secure state responsibility for the protection of displaced civilians victimized by mass atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Essay examines current and emerging threats to peace--social and political threats as well as military and technological. It argues that leading conceptions of State sovereignty cannot sustain a legal order capable of meeting those threats. The Essay proposes that recent efforts by international law scholars to reformulate State sovereignty as responsibility to humanity--what the Essay calls 'R2H' for short--offer a better hope. Under this reformulation, a State's decision-making must take into account the interests of those outside their sovereign territory as well as those of its own people--in particular, the shared interest in subduing dire threats to world peace. The Essay reviews the historical background of sovereignty as control and sovereignty as responsibility, the two leading current conceptions. The latter is a principle underlying the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) doctrine, but this Essay argues that R2P is both too narrow in scope and too focused on military interventions. R2H can be understood as a generalization of R2P. R2H raises distinctive philosophical issues about what "humanity" means, which the Essay addresses. Finally, it confronts the concern that in an age of resurgent nationalism, a strongly internationalist approach such as R2P is anachronistic. In reply, the Essay criticizes current reactionary nationalisms as both morally and practically misguided. An epilogue written during the COVID-19 pandemic offers preliminary thoughts about R2H in connection with the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that sovereignty claims and counterclaims are still very much at work in international and civil conflicts involving state actors. Focusing on the case of the Syrian conflict, the article engages in methodological triangulation using Critical Discourse Analysis and international relations theories. It finds that the sovereignty-first narrative adopted by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, and its external allies such as Russia, has built an 'effective' discourse that has been adopted in a coherent, consistent, and resonant manner, as well as a 'credible' discourse which combined words with actions (i.e. performatives and constatives of sovereignty). The effectiveness and credibility of the sovereignty-first narrative is also judged by the absence of effective and credible contending narratives demonstrated by the tepid application of concepts like the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) by the United States and its European allies. In making these comparisons, the Syrian conflict can be contextualised by relating it to the Arab Spring and geopolitical shifts in international affairs. It is within this contextualisation that the article demonstrates broader claims about the endurance of the 'territorial state' in the Middle East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which successfully challenged the view that sovereignty provided an iron shield behind which states could mistreat their people without outside scrutiny. Topics discussed include institutions such as the International Criminal Court and doctrines such as the "Responsibility to Protect," over which human rights actors have significant influence, Islam and Confucianism represent cultural areas just as large and significant and the Nuremberg Trials and the Genocide Convention that was approved by the United Nations (UN).

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), touted in 2009 as 'the most dramatic normative development of our time', is highly contentious, having generated a scholarly literature far greater than its real-world impact would seem to warrant. This may well be because of its potential to challenge and displace core existing norms, the most widely cited of which is sovereignty. This paper draws on the theory of Cognitive Structures of Cooperation (CSC Theory) to identify the relationship of R2P to existing normative structures, including the Charter of the United Nations, with a view to assessing the depth of the challenge posed and the potential consequences if the emergent norm were to be fully embraced. The analysis concludes that, rather than representing the object and potential victim of the R2P assault, sovereignty is better understood as having represented a decoy in this process of normative contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the intellectual context and conceptual foundations of R2P. Michael Walzer reinitiated debates about humanitarian intervention by grounding sovereignty and non-intervention in individual human rights and communal autonomy (self-determination). Liberal cosmopolitan critics of Walzer highlighted the tension between these two values, and proposed that sovereignty should rather be grounded in individual rights and democratic self-determination. In the post-Cold War era, international lawyers and international relations scholars came to endorse the idea that state sovereignty is qualified by the most basic human rights. High ranking UN officials further proposed that state sovereignty should be redefined as the sovereignty of the people, which, however, was seen as coextensive with the protection of the fundamental individual rights, and as such could be shared by the 'international community'. R2P adopted a similar approach, glossing over the potential tensions between sovereignty, self-determination and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the 21st century, there have been spirited campaigns to revise the concept of classical state sovereignty in favour of the international human rights doctrine. Leading theorists on the revision of the concept are Africans like Francis M. Deng and Kofi Annan. Deng and others developed the theory of sovereignty as responsibility which was adopted by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001. African leaders challenged the theory as they saw the classical adherence to state sovereignty as the last fortress against re-colonization. On the other hand, there has been considerable internal tyranny in Africa. This paper argues that the negation of classical state sovereignty threatens the achievement of full African development in the continent's diverse nature, and that internal tyranny is also a threat as it negates the values of African nationalism and independence, and invites external interference that will further divide African nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of interest in the present work is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). I chose this theme by trying to define the concept and to offer a theoretical and comparative approach, making the correlation with the Humanitarian Intervention, in the framework of Human Security. In this respect, R2P becomes an important milestone in understanding sovereignty, intervention, and human rights. The doctrine addresses the responsibilities an individual state has to protect its populations from genocide, war and crimes against humanity, and also concerns the responsibility the international community has to intervene - even militarily - when a state neglects its duty. My goal is to consider the origins and likely trajectory of R2P, within the Human Security framework, from the narrow view, focusing on issues of human rights and the persecution of civilians during armed conflict, and the broad notion, maintaining the individual's protection during natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the concept of humanity is most often referred to as the moral source of the Responsibility to Protect’s motivational capacity, humanity’s normative status and value has continued to be left assumed and/or unexplored. Consequently, there remains a considerable lack of analysis into humanity’s role in supposedly helping to both locate moral harm and subsequently provide a motivational cause that can drive protection practices in support of the Responsibility to Protect principle. In response to this lacuna, this article puts forward three hypotheses regarding the motivational role of humanity in this process: (a) humanity functioning as a rhetorical tool with no motivational qualities, (b) humanity as a concept that works to redefine sovereignty in support of the Responsibility to Protect and (c) humanity as a motivating principle that ultimately diminishes in influence as the Responsibility to Protect principle is diffused into action. Through this analysis, the article offers a more rigorous and systematic evaluation of humanity’s limitations as a moral motivator for generating collective response to mass atrocity crimes, highlighting the need to further develop understanding of the complex interaction between morality and politics in international decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Responsibility to protect’ (R2P) is an ‘emerging norm’ of international relations, which has been invoked with the intervention in Libya in 2011. Even though this intervention was demanded by several Third World countries and organisations, these have subsequently had second thoughts about the matter and have come to regard R2P as Western neo-imperialism. This article seeks to explain this apparent paradox, with a special focus on India. It also identifies possible compromises by advocating a broader approach to R2P, stressing the responsibility to prevent and to rebuild. It also draws attention to ‘R2P lite’, including the protection of civilians in armed conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The consensus on the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ has replaced ideas of humanitarian intervention with a new vision of the responsibilities that states have to protect their peoples from the most egregious suffering. The contention of this article is that this is a politics of exceptionalism, whereby power is legitimated by reference to its effectiveness in responding to emergency or crisis. By analysing the doctrine in this way, new light is shed on the debate surrounding the responsibility to protect. First, understanding the doctrine in terms of exceptionalism helps explain the paradox of how the doctrine has been assimilated so readily into institutional and state practice without manifesting any greater commitment to international intervention. Second, understanding these new security practices in terms of exceptionalism allows us to move beyond questions of imperialism. Once understood in terms of exceptionalism, it can be shown that the stakes in the debate on the responsibility to protect are restricted not only to relations between states, but also to relations within them: principles of representative government are to be substituted with paternalist and authoritarian visions of state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an attempt to redefine the meaning of sovereignty in international legal discourse in the post-Cold War era. This attempt was essentially necessitated by a series of high-profile instances (including Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur) in which the United Nations/international community was seen as doing too little or (occasionally) too much when faced with grave humanitarian emergencies. Accordingly, sovereignty, one of the foundational principles of international law, came to be interpreted as a two-way street conferring rights on States, while at the same time imposing a set of duties on them. This idea is couched in the doctrine of "Responsibility to Protect" (or as it has come to be known--R2P) which was formally endorsed at the UN World Summit 2005. The UN Security Council has invoked this doctrine numerous times in its resolutions over the years. Against this background, the central aim of this article is to examine the legal status of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect under international law. While claiming that R2P is a new face of the old liberal doctrine of humanitarian intervention, the article will argue that R2P is neither a law nor a legally binding framework and that there are grave ambiguities in terms of its specific normative contents. It will demonstrate that R2P (at the very least its military aspects) does not enjoy consensus either in principle or in practice, and that its international legal implications are not immediately clear. From this analysis the article would conclude that R2P is yet to find its legal feet in the practice of States, particularly the Asian-African States and that if the international community is to take human suffering seriously and address it with timely and effective collective action, democratization of the Security Council should take place as a matter of urgent priority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India, though a working democracy, has adopted an ambivalent stance toward the genesis and evolution of the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. This article traces India’s views toward the earlier principle of humanitarian intervention, outlines its reactions toward the advent of the norm, and discusses India’s positions on the attempts to apply it to recent international crises. It then argues that India’s cautious support for the principle stems in part from concerns about its potential abuse in the hands of the great powers, post-colonial concerns about the diminution of the norm of state sovereignty, and finally, its own domestic vulnerabilities in the protection of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying sovereignty in an absolute form in modern international relations has resulted in states are estranged of legitimacy. Sovereignty supposed to guarantee welfare and security of individuals has become a threat for them. Perception of self-legitimated state sovereignty has turned into an unbounded authority. Therefore resorting to force has being legitimated to protect human rights against state. For this reason, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), being a post-modern concept, has been created on the basis of historical experiments in order not to repeat mistakes to eliminate deficiencies of the past. R2P has claimed that international society has a responsibility to stop human rights violations and mass murders performed by states. This papers aims to explain evolution of state sovereignty in terms of human rights and international society undertaking to protect human rights. In the first chapter, it has been emphasized that state sovereignty is an absolute responsibility instead uncontrolled power and touched upon contents of sovereignty in the context of human rights. The second chapter focuses on responsibilities of international society in mass murder resulted from violating human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the post-intervention crisis in Libya, this article revisits critically the vision of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) offered in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) – frequently taken as the conceptual bedrock for R2P doctrine. It is argued that the perverse effect of ICISS doctrine is to replace political responsibility with paternalism. The demand that states be made accountable to the international community ends by making states accountable for their people rather than to their people. The argument is developed across five critical theses. These include claims that R2P changes the burden of justification for intervention, that it usurps popular sovereignty in favour of state power, and that it diffuses post-conflict responsibilities. The article concludes that pre-emptive ‘human protection’ efforts risk crowding out questions of systemic transformation, i.e. what kind of an international order we want to live in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia’s predominantly suspicious and even negative attitudes toward R2P are closely related to its traditional attachment to the notion of sovereignty, but its reluctance to ‘bless’ the use of force with R2P also serves as a pretext to cover various instrumental goals. Russia’s more assertive foreign policy has exacerbated this trend. Disagreements stem from differences between Russia and the West both in their conceptual approaches to security and in their assessments of specific cases. In particular, Russia has an existential concern over possible application of R2P by extra-regional actors in its immediate post-Soviet vicinity. However, in the conflicts around South Ossetia (2008) and Crimea / Southeastern Ukraine (2014-), there was a noticeable trend to refocus R2P-related arguments in support of Russia’s own actions. By and large, R2P continues to be perceived as a Western attempt to establish certain rules of behaviour which require caution and prudence. Nevertheless, more positive attitudes do not seem impossible. To play a prominent role in the evolving international system, Russia will have to make the R2P segment of its foreign policy more salient and overcome the lag in promoting this concept as a working tool indispensable for cooperative and responsible leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from having faded away, ten years after its formal adoption, the responsibility to protect (R2P), is arguably more relevant than ever. In the current overall context of protection crises, heightened in severity by the emergence of violent extremists, R2P has changed the way in which the international community characterises situations that involve protection failures, and has raised expectations about what should occur when atrocity crimes have been committed or are imminent. UN member states now agree that prevention is at the core of R2P, that international action should employ the full range of diplomatic, political and humanitarian measures, and that military force should only be considered as a measure of last resort. While there is continued contestation about particular aspects of R2P – as there is over much older normative advancements, such as human rights – R2P has helped to forge political consensus and build new institutional capacity to prevent and respond to atrocity crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article bridges Responsibility to Protect (R2P) with work on Global Governance (GG). Both are products of a normative shift away from state-centric conceptualizations of authority and towards collective efforts to address transnational problems where traditional (State) governance mechanisms are absent or have failed. By assessing the governance architecture of R2P and of refugee protection in the case of Syria, the article sheds light on how global structures of authority interact with national and local systems. The constraints on agents operating at multiple levels of authority and the inequalities inherent in these structures have important implications for the effectiveness of R2P outcomes. Given the power asymmetries associated with the governance architecture of R2P and the proxy war in Syria, the article argues that the use of coercive intervention under R2P's Pillar Three risks further de-legitimization of the concept itself. As an alternative, the article calls for greater emphasis on R2P as refugee protection, particularly in light of the largest refugee crisis in the post-World War II era. The international community can take immediate and important steps towards fulfilling R2P by responding to the millions displaced by mass atrocity crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is without a doubt an iconic representation of the international system's effort to reinterpret the traditional understanding of state sovereignty within a growing trend towards human rights considerations. This article presents the scepticism surrounding the R2P's journey within a conservative and state-centric status quo of international relations, framed on a basic set of 1648 Westphalia treaty ideals. The article analyses the limitations in the conceptualization and actual practice of the R2P, with an incisive examination of its tendency towards becoming the norm. An African introspection based on the application of the R2P also offers an insightful critique of the principle in the changing global order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is an inherent tension, not yet fully resolved in international law or the practice of states, between protecting state sovereignty and the idea of intervention across a state's borders to respond to abuses of fundamental human rights within those borders. This article reviews how this tension has presented itself and been addressed in the different frames of legal and moral discourse, then turns specifically to the concept of sovereignty itself, examining the pre-modern conception of sovereignty as responsibility for the common good as offering a suggestive model for rethinking the concept of sovereignty toward final resolution of the tension between sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Estudios de Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Instituto de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The notion of humanitarian intervention has been central to the discipline of international relations, irrespective of whether one wants to defend or critique the idea. The votaries of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) rejoice it as an essential shift of onus from sovereignty of state to sovereignty of individuals and a prioritization of rights over states sovereignty, and a step towards pluralization of sovereignty. On the other hand, the developing world has always remained skeptical of humanitarian interventions being rather nervous of the state losing its economic and political control. The present paper seeks to explore the trajectory of sovereignty from the Treaty of Westphalia to the present context which is witness not only to a dilution of sovereignty due to economic and cultural imperialism but also in the context of intervention on grounds of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the reaction of Brazil to Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and its proposal of "Responsibility while Protecting." Topics include the position of the country regarding the doctrine, the concept of doctrine through United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 60/1 and Brazil's concerns on the emerging notion of R2P, and the foreign policy of the country relies on the principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention.

Copyright of Mural Internacional is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Within the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle, there is an assumption that is rarely questioned. Beneath the statement that states and the international community are charged with the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, lies the implication that vulnerable populations cannot protect themselves. In periods of crisis, when the international community might consider mobilising a response under pillar three, this is often the case. Yet outside of such crises, when pillar one - the enduring responsibility of the state to protect its own populations - and pillar two - assistance from the international community to meet this responsibility - might be invoked in a preventive capacity, vulnerable populations may not be wholly reliant upon protection from external actors. In these circumstances, persecuted groups may actively seek to protect themselves, and may be successfully able to do so. In this paper, I challenge the current understanding of prevention within R2P as an externally imposed process, by considering how persecuted groups have themselves acted in ways that mitigate their vulnerability to mass atrocities. The paper considers a number of historical case studies in which targeted groups were able to leverage their own agency, often with assistance from others, to reduce this vulnerability. These include cases that culminated in genocide, namely the experiences of German and Austrian Jews under Nazi rule, and negative cases studies in which a demonstrable risk of mass atrocities was not realised, such as the experiences of Yemenite Jews in the first half of the twentieth century and those of the Baha'i community in Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution. These cases suggest that assisting persecuted populations to empower themselves can be an effective way to promote resilience to mass atrocities. In the final section of the paper, I explore why this approach is often overlooked, despite its capacity for some success. I consider the potential benefits and costs of a greater focus on utilising the agency of vulnerable groups in endeavours to prevent mass atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Araucaria is the property of Araucaria-Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofia, Politica y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A more powerful China under the seemingly confident leadership of President Xi Jinping has committed to a more activist global policy. In particular, this commitment has influenced Beijing's policy towards UN peacekeeping operations, with a long-awaited decision to add combat forces to the engineering troops and police and medical units that have been features of its past contribution. In addition, Beijing has doubled the size of its contribution to the UN peace operations budget. This article explains why the UN is a key venue for China to demonstrate its 'responsible Great Power' status and expressed willingness to provide global public goods. The main explanatory factors relate to the UN's institutional design, which accords special status to China even as it represents a global order that promotes the sovereign equality of states. Moreover, there are complementarities between dominant Chinese beliefs and interests, and those contained within the UN system. Especially important in this latter regard are the links that China has tried to establish between peacebuilding and development assistance with the aim of strengthening the capacity of states. China projects development support as a contribution both to humanitarian need and to the harmonization of conflict-ridden societies. The Chinese leadership has also spoken of its willingness to contribute to peacemaking through stepping up its efforts at mediation. However, such a move will require much deeper commitment than China has demonstrated in the past and runs the risk of taking China into controversial areas of policy it has hitherto worked to avoid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past several decades, international debates over intervention have usually focused on the primacy of state sovereignty or the protection of human rights. The emergence of the responsibility to protect (R2P) stimulates more profound debates by providing different perspectives and terminologies. In this vein, an important voice of dissent, or at least scepticism, comes from China. This article pays special attention to the domestic debates concerning the R2P concept in China. Based on a review of most of the academic studies on R2P in China, together with indepth interviews with senior diplomats and practitioners, this article illustrates the different views of Chinese officials and scholars on the concept of R2P, offering insight into how to construct the new norm of R2P in order to shape the concept into an international norm that is more acceptable, legitimate and operational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

\With an ostensible commitment to sovereignty and non-intervention and a long standing involvement in United Nations peacekeeping operations, India's position on R2P seems puzzling. Still, despite the rhetoric about India being an 'emerging power', it often abstains from diplomatic engagement beyond its region, including in R2P situations. What explains its sceptical interpretation, cautious attitude and limited practice? The paper shows that India's position has evolved in three phases since 2005, from scepticism via calibrated engagement to renewed suspicions after the fallout of the Libya intervention. The paper argues that mainly domestic factors can account for these changes in India's R2P policy. Despite these changes, however, India's main concerns with R2P display remarkable consistency: an insistence on the consent of the state; a narrow definition of its scope involving a high threshold of violence; the exclusive authority of the UN Security Council; and a deeply ingrained scepticism towards the utility of the use of force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate about a responsibility to protect (R2P) people from mass atrocities goes to the heart of current changes in the world. Coinciding with the shift of power and influence away from the West, its nascent and contested evolution as a norm has become a crucial arena in which fundamental conflicts about the future global order play out-far beyond simplistic dichotomies between 'North' and 'South' or 'West' and 'Rest'. This special issue analyses how seven major powers engaged with these struggles over sovereignty and responsibility, universalism and exceptionalism, hypocrisy and selectivity. Emerging from a globally collaborative research group on 'Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect', the papers pursue three goals: to study major powers' normative foreign policies in their historical, institutional and cultural background, to bring the role of major powers back into the analysis of norm development and to expand on the standard narrative about the evolution of 'R2P' by embedding it in a more global, less Western-centric context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-colonial Africa has experienced relatively few contested states, defined as entities whose purported statehood is widely challenged by existing states. During the 1960s and 1970s the self-proclaimed states of Katanga, Biafra and Rhodesia encountered serious deficits in international recognition. The same fate befell the independent Bantustans created by South Africa. Today only the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and Somaliland fall in this category. The pair's remarkable longevity shows that they cannot be wished away. Nor can Africa ignore the conflict potential attached to the very existence of the two disputed states. The African Union's endorsement of the notion of sovereignty as responsibility provides moral obligations, pragmatic incentives and R2P-associated tools for dealing with the challenges posed by current and future contested states. The African Union could, however, consider two adaptations to R2P procedures. The first is the designation of established contested states as 'territories of concern' to highlight the necessity of collective R2P-type initiatives to resolve these situations. The second calls for the introduction of a 'secessionism alert' as part of the AU's early-warning system to try to prevent violent secession and the likely birth of contested states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The doctrine of the responsibility to protect, since its inception in the ICISS report of 2001, has been the subject of considerable discussion. Arguably its most publicised component is the principle that the international community has the responsibility to protect civilian populations against severe suffering where the relevant national authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. Consequently, the main focus of discourse upon the responsibility to protect has centred on its impact upon the approach of the international community to intervention in respect of situations posing considerable humanitarian crises. The events of the Arab Spring, in which full blown conflict in some states gave rise to serious human suffering, provided a real opportunity for the international community to evaluate the role of the responsibility to protect in decision-making over responding to such instances, and potentially to develop it into a practical and meaningfully implementable concept. However, due to political flaws inherent in the doctrine, and its arguably overstated significance, the doctrine at best played a minimal role in guiding the international response to developments in the Arab World. Nonetheless, responses to the Arab Spring do allow certain conclusions to be drawn in respect of the future relevance of the doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the challenges facing the concept of sovereignty in the globalized world order of the early 21st century. The author criticizes the foreign policy, military policy, and power of the U.S. government and its allies, examines the concept of Westphalian sovereignty, and discusses the relationship between sovereignty and human security, particularly the international law concept of the responsibility to protect. The article also discusses the role of non-governmental organizations such as the United Nations (UN) in international relations.

The article offers information on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm to fight against humanitarian crises in the world. Topics discussed include endorsement of R2P by the 2005 United Nations World Summit Outcome and United Nations General Assembly and Security Council, human rights considered an international matter rather than a national matter by R2P and R2P's concept of avoiding direct military intervention in the state and maintaining its sovereignty.

East Asia has a long history of genocide and mass atrocities. For much of the Cold War, East Asia was one of the world's most violent regions, experiencing multiple outbursts of mass killing. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the region has been transformed thanks to another Asian miracle. There are now fewer cases of genocide and mass atrocities in East Asia today than at any point in history for which we have reliable records. This article demonstrates and then tries to account for the dramatic decline of mass atrocities in East Asia. It argues that the decline was enabled by a combination of three major structural changes: reduction in the selection of mass atrocities as a weapon of war, increase in incomes, and progress towards democratization combined with the emergence of new ideas about sovereignty and their accommodation with existing principles of non-interference. Together, these structural and ideational changes created a changed regional context of increased costs and reduced payoffs for the commission of mass atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the historical evolution of norms of sovereignty, non-intervention, territorial integrity, and self-determination in international relations. It shows the degree to which their meanings and weight have varied and considers the bumpy historical relationship between international norms and practice. The twentieth century witnessed increasing tension between the hardening of sovereignty and non-intervention norms and the development of international human rights norms. The article then discusses normative inconsistencies and the variability of application of norms in practice in the post-Cold War era. It concludes by suggesting ways in which international society might mitigate these inconsistencies and the confusion that attends them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]