Responsibility to Protect

The United States has a long tradition of bringing attention and demanding responses to some of the world’s worst atrocities. In September 2005, the United Nations hosted the World Summit, the largest gathering in history of world leaders, at which 150 heads of state, including the U.S. officially endorsed the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). R2P establishes that all states have a responsibility to protect their populations from crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. When a nation cannot or will not offer this protection, the international community, working through the United Nations, has the responsibility to do so.

The Responsibility to Protect is defined by three distinct responsibilities:

• the responsibility to prevent by addressing the causes of conflict;
• the responsibility to react by responding to crises with the proper and adequate response, whether through sanctions and diplomacy or through military intervention as a last resort; and
• the responsibility to rebuild by supporting recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation efforts in the event that preventive measures should somehow fail.

While many states agree with and strongly support the responsibility to protect as the right and decent thing to do, there exists great uncertainty regarding the necessary methods to put this theory into action.