Rise of the Responsibility While Protecting (RWP)

Abstract

The outbreak of a wave of people power revolts, starting in Tunisia in December 2010 and spreading quickly throughout the Middle East and North Africa, caused unprecedented instability in a politically sensitive region. Like a sudden volcanic eruption, the conflagration was as stunning as it was surprising, triggering major societal upheavals from Libya and Egypt to Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, apart from leading to political changes in other regional states such as Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon and Oman. The revolts or the Arab Spring, as they are popularly referred to in the media, are in effect the Arab Revolution and one of modern history’s unexpected political phenomena. They also put to severe test the United Nations’ experiment in the fledgling international relations doctrine known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), adopted by the world body just 5 years earlier in 2005. R2P was designed to bridge the gulf between naked unilateral international intervention as in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the one hand, and international helplessness in the face of mass atrocity crimes within the borders of sovereign states, on the other. R2P would permit and justify international intervention only as a last resort—when states fail, are unwilling, or are even breaching their responsibility to protect their own people through state-induced mass atrocity crimes. R2P was invoked for the first time by the UN during the Arab Uprisings, but quickly became controversial for leading to regime change in Libya. The subsequent backlash against R2P saw many countries opposed to its application in Syria and is widely seen as the key cause of the current political stalemate in the UN. Attempts to unblock the diplomatic logjam at the UN has given rise to a new initiative known as ‘responsibility while protecting’ (RWP). But is RWP a counter-response to roll back R2P, or is it a move to better implement R2P as the new doctrine to resolve the international community’s dilemma over human suffering?