Social Science Research Council

The third and final part of my review of Gareth Evans’ The Responsibility to Protect.
Risk of Perverse Incentives
My qualms about R2P are driven not just by the lesson of Somalia and my discomfort with the conventional script about Rwanda, but also the experience of Darfur. The threat of military intervention in Darfur hung over the [...]

Part 2 of my review of Gareth Evans’ The Responsibility to Protect.
The Risk of Unrealistic Expectations
The subtitle of Evans’ book is: “Ending mass atrocity crimes once and for all.” This is ambitious, perhaps hubristic. The subtitle may of course be a publisher’s conceit—having myself been the victim of poor editorial decisions (most newspaper readers don’t [...]

Recently, Gareth Evans, President of ICG and the architect of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), accosted me and argued that I had misrepresented the doctrine—especially that I had equated it with the older, now-superseded notion of “humanitarian intervention.” He makes a similar point on page 58 of his book The Responsibility to Protect.
This is [...]

The text of my presentation to the BBC’s World Tonight last week is now available online. (With a sentence added to reflect JEM’s attack on Khartoum, which occurred between my recording the piece and the time it was broadcast.) The more substantive article on which this was based was published last year in International Affairs [...]

The World Tonight last night on BBC Radio 4 was a 45 minute special devoted to an examination of the UK’s foreign policy. It was structured around Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s four priorities, viz terrorism, conflict and the responsibility to protect, carbon and the international system, with interviews and clips preceding a section by section [...]