R2P and Humanitarian Action
In: Global Responsibility to ProtectSearch for other papers by Edmund Cairns in
Current site
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The responsibility to protect was not the only concept that grew out of the world’s failure to tackle the mass atrocities of the 1990s in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere. So too did a new approach to humanitarian action which placed a higher priority on protecting civilians, and on advocacy to do so, than had hitherto been common. Oxfam’s role in the campaign to persuade the 2005 World Summit to adopt the responsibility to protect was one prominent example, but, to different degrees, this broad approach has become widely shared among many international humanitarian agencies. Since 2005, however, even Oxfam has made little use of the responsibility to protect to frame its own work to help protect civilians, or to advocate to prevent mass atrocities in specific crises. This is partly because of the fear that R2P can be misapplied to justify military intervention where the benefits do not clearly outweigh the risks. But it is also because of the continuing suspicion around R2P among many governments. This seems to reflect the wider limits of what largely Western-based humanitarian agencies and governments can do to develop new international norms and put them into effect. When R2P was first developed, humanitarian agencies played a part in broadly similar alliances to ban landmines, establish the icc and so on. Some of these have already had a substantial effect, while it may be a generation before the value of R2P and others can be fairly evaluated. Looking ahead, humanitarian agencies will have to put an increasing emphasis on influencing emerging powers and other Southern governments, while alliances between governments and ngos, to be effective, will have to be genuinely global.
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1
Anne Mackintosh, ‘International aid and the media’, Contemporary Politics, 2/1 (1996), p. 39.
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3
Guy Vassall-Adams, Rwanda: an Agenda for International Action (Oxford: Oxfam Publications, 1994), p. 2.
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4
Richard Dowden, ‘Leaving them dead but fed’, The Independent, 15 December 1994, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/leaving-them-dead-but-fed-1387562.html, accessed 22 October 2013.
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10
Oxfam International, Oxfam International Annual Report 2005, p. 8, http://cid.bcrp.gob.pe/biblio/Papers/Oxfam/annual_report_2005.pdf, accessed 22 October 2013.
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12
Ibid, p. 8.
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16
The Sphere Project, The Sphere Handbook: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response (Geneva: Sphere Project, 2011), http://www.sphereproject.org/handbook/, accessed 23 October 2013.
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28
Debbie Hillier and Brian Wood, Shattered Lives: the case for tough international arms control (London and Oxford: Amnesty International and Oxfam International, 2003), http://controlarms.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Shattered-lives-the-case-for-tough-international-arms-control.pdf, accessed 24 October 2013.
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R2P and Humanitarian Action
In: Global Responsibility to ProtectSearch for other papers by Edmund Cairns in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
The responsibility to protect was not the only concept that grew out of the world’s failure to tackle the mass atrocities of the 1990s in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere. So too did a new approach to humanitarian action which placed a higher priority on protecting civilians, and on advocacy to do so, than had hitherto been common. Oxfam’s role in the campaign to persuade the 2005 World Summit to adopt the responsibility to protect was one prominent example, but, to different degrees, this broad approach has become widely shared among many international humanitarian agencies. Since 2005, however, even Oxfam has made little use of the responsibility to protect to frame its own work to help protect civilians, or to advocate to prevent mass atrocities in specific crises. This is partly because of the fear that R2P can be misapplied to justify military intervention where the benefits do not clearly outweigh the risks. But it is also because of the continuing suspicion around R2P among many governments. This seems to reflect the wider limits of what largely Western-based humanitarian agencies and governments can do to develop new international norms and put them into effect. When R2P was first developed, humanitarian agencies played a part in broadly similar alliances to ban landmines, establish the icc and so on. Some of these have already had a substantial effect, while it may be a generation before the value of R2P and others can be fairly evaluated. Looking ahead, humanitarian agencies will have to put an increasing emphasis on influencing emerging powers and other Southern governments, while alliances between governments and ngos, to be effective, will have to be genuinely global.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1118 | 311 | 19 |
| Full Text Views | 564 | 39 | 3 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 625 | 106 | 7 |
