Dehumanizing R2P: Preventing Mass Atrocities without Human Security?

In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the World Summit Outcome Document, including three key paragraphs articulating the international community’s responsibility to protect (R2P) civilians from mass atrocities, including war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Some key controversies and shortcomings of the current R2P principle remain absent from the debate, namely the lack of a human-centered approach from which R2P can be more adequately understood and implemented. I will make three key arguments following from this gap. Firstly, the original articulation of R2P developed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 sought to locate itself largely within the human security discourse to overcome the bureaucratic and “national-interest” obstacles of P5 decision-making on international peace and security as it relates to mass atrocities. Secondly, the state-centric articulation of R2P adopted in the World Summit Outcome Document in 2005, endorsed by the United Nations Security Council in 2006, has reified the inherent problem associated with allowing the UN Security Council the exclusive right to make key global security decisions on egregious crimes perpetrated against civilians. Thirdly, without embedding R2P within the human security discourse, specifically understanding human beings as the referents of security, the principle offers very little significant normative or political progress on the protection of civilians, and will continue to fall short as a galvanizing call to action to prevent mass atrocities, and save civilian lives.