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141 Peacekeeping in the Age of R2P Introduction As its subtitle indicates, this book addresses two major issues: media coverage of the Congo wars (dealt with in chapters 3 through 6 and to be addressed further in the Conclusion) and the UN response to these conflicts (reviewed in chapter 2). In this chapter we will expand on this second point to determine directions for the future of UN peacekeeping . As a number of commentators have noted, there is no shortage of humanitarian crises to which the international community will be called upon to respond in the coming years. In the pages that follow we will offer our analysis of what we see to be the cutting-edge issues that have emerged for peacekeeping/peace enforcement in the twenty-first century. Context: The ICISS Report With the publication of the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in September 2001, the debate over when international humanitarian intervention is permissible in an international system that is firmly based on the principle of state sovereignty entered a new phase. The commission’s report, which was first endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 2005 and later by the Security Council in 2006, in effect reframed the issue from a focus on “the right of humanitarian intervention” to one which emphasized the 7 Africa’s Deadliest Conflict 142 “responsibility to protect” (R2P) individuals who fell into harm’s way within the borders of their own states. The commission’s co-chairs explained that the key issue of state sovereignty could be diffused if states were considered to have primary responsibility to protect their citizens from serious harm, but if they were unable or unwilling to provide such protection, that responsibility would then pass into the hands of the international community (Evans and Sahnoun, 2002: 101–2). As commission member Ramesh Thakur has expressed it, R2P “encapsulates the element of international solidarity, [refocusing] the international searchlight back onto the duty to protect the villager from murder, the woman from rape and the child from starvation and being orphaned” (Thakur, 2010: 12). In elaborating the concept, the report identified three distinct elements as falling under the general rubric of R2P: A. The responsibility to prevent: to address both the root causes and direct causes of international conflict and other man-made crises putting populations at risk. B. The responsibility to react: to respond to situations of compelling human need with appropriate actions, which might include coercive measures like sanctions and international prosecutions, and in extreme cases military intervention. C. The responsibility to rebuild: to provide, particularly after a military intervention, full assistance with recovery, reconstruction, and reconciliation , addressing the causes of the harm the intervention was designed to halt or avert. (ICISS, 2001, XI; emphasis in original) Appearing in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic events of 9/11, and not receiving UN endorsement until four years later, R2P was a standard which existed for only part of the Congo wars. In addition, as chapters 4, 5, and 6 reveal, “Responsibility to Protect” language was not prominent in the limited media calls for international involvement in the Congo, even after the R2P report had been given official approval. It will be recalled that this was also the case with respect to the concurrent crisis in Darfur (Sidahmed, Soderlund, and Briggs, 2010: 102). Some of the sentiments expressed by reporters and op-ed and editorial writers, however, were consistent with R2P principles, even if these were not specifically mentioned. It must be recognized as well that R2P was never without its critics (see for example Rieff, 2002; Belloni, 2007; de Wall, 2007; Janssen, 2008; MacArthur, 2008), or those who simply seemed unsure what to make of it. Media, on the whole, appear largely to have fallen into the second category. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the [182.50.135.77] Project MUSE (2024-06-25 21:23 GMT) Peacekeeping in the Age of R2P 143 ICISS report changed the norms of humanitarian intervention. At the very least, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, and other such documents before it, it provides an internationally approved standard by which efforts (or the lack thereof) to protect ordinary people from atrocities can be judged. Roughly a decade into the Congo’s existence as an independent state, Jean-Claude Willame described its political system as based on patrimonialism , which he defined as “a system of rule incorporating three fundamental and related elements...

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