ABSTRACT
The article aims to contribute to ongoing debates on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and demonstrate how it became a powerful global assemblage. It challenges the existing perspectives that R2P constituted a robust international norm. In contrast to the (critical) social constructivist reading of R2P, I argue that R2P was assembled, stabilized, and revitalized through specific practices conducted within complex advocacy-knowledge-diplomacy networks. On the theoretical level, the article demonstrates that assemblage thinking provides a useful framework to trace the dynamic R2P’s existence constructed by heterogeneous entities and their relations. On the empirical level, it analyses how R2P emanated from the 2001 original report, how it gained relevance in the UN debates and how it endured the spectacular failures in Libya, Syria, and Myanmar. The resilience of R2P is not an inherent quality of the concept, it needs to be understood as a practical arrangement of its proponents.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
28 Including UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on Genocide; or the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility was published in December 2004. See Evans (Citation2020).
30 Cornelio Sommaruga was the President of the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining and also served as the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) between 1987 and 1999. Eduardo Stein Barillas served as the Head of the Organization of American States (OAS) Observer Mission to Peru’s May 2000 general elections. Former president of the Philippines, Fidel V. Ramos, was Chair of the Ramos Peace and Development Foundation. Michael Ignatieff was a member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. Finally, Ramesh Thakur was engaged in the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference, or in the drafting of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
37 Based on personal interviews with the staff of GCR2P conducted in October–November 2021.
41 The engagement of GCR2P in the Group of Friends of R2P as well as its involvement in the integration of R2P agenda into UN documents was confirmed by several staff members of the GCR2P during personal interviews conducted in New York in November 2021 and via zoom calls.
43 Based on personal interviews with the staff of GCR2P conducted in October–November 2021.
55 See Webinar Responsibility to Protect + 15 organized by The UN Associations of Denmark, Norway and Sweden in September 2020, or academic publications by leading R2P advocate at the University of Southern Denmark Martin Mennecke, who is also political advisor in R2P matters at the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Mennecke Citation2017, Citation2019).
61 See Volume 13, Issue 2–3 (Jun 2021): Special Issue: Myanmar and (the Failure of) Atrocity Prevention, by Martin Mennecke and Ellen E. Stensrud, Global Responsibility to Protect.
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Funding
This project was funded by the Czech Science Foundation [grant number GA20-07805S].
Notes on contributors
Sarka Kolmasova
Sarka Kolmasova, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations and European Studies of the Metropolitan University Prague and a research fellow at the Center for Security Studies (C4SS). In her research, she focuses on military interventions, Responsibility to Protect, and the dynamic of norms in international order. She published in journals including Politics & Gender, Cambridge Review of International Affairs and Europe-Asia Studies. She is the author of Metamorphoses of Humanitarian Intervention: From Rwanda to Libya and several chapters in edited monographs.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2304-5995
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