7.3 Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

Building on U6.5's base: the ICISS 2001 coinage became the 2005 World Summit's accepted doctrine, narrowed to four crimes — genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.The three pillars:1. Pillar one: every state's own duty to protect its population from the four crimes.2. Pillar two: the international community's duty to assist states (capacity-building, early warning).3. Pillar three: the timely and decisive international response — peaceful means first, and force only through the Security Council, where a state manifestly fails to protect.The record: Kenya 2008 (the diplomatic success); Libya 2011 (the mandate's stretch — the "responsibility while protecting" answer); Syria and Myanmar (the veto's paralysis).The critiques:1. Selectivity and power: the weak states' fear — intervention returning by another name, aimed at the weak, never the strong.2. The veto's prison: the Council's structure blocks the timely-decisive response; R2P's machinery fails exactly where it is most needed (the Security Council reform link of International Institutions, LAW5405).3. The prevention deficit: the doctrine's energies flow to pillar three; the cheaper, wiser pillars one and two starve.The future: prevention-focused "R2P-lite" the climate-and-pandemic era's new atrocity-risk faces.The exam's synthesis: R2P redefines sovereignty — from a right to be left alone to a duty to protect. Its acceptance is settled; its machinery is not. That gap is the twenty-first century's standing challenge.