New Book Release: The Responsibility to Protect

Brussels, 12 September 2008: The International Crisis Group is pleased to announce the release of a new book by its president, Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All, published by Brookings Institution Press.

After the Holocaust, the world vowed it would “never again!” permit such atrocities to occur. Yet many mass atrocity crimes have since gone unchecked, from the killing fields of Cambodia to the machetes of Rwanda to the ongoing nightmare in Darfur. In this new book, International Crisis Group President Gareth Evans shows how the emergence of the new Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm has fundamentally changed this landscape and can effectively mean an end once and for all to such large scale suffering.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept was born out of the catastrophes in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s and captures a simple and powerful idea. The primary responsibility for protecting its own people from mass atrocity crimes lies with the state itself. State sovereignty implies responsibility, not a license to kill.

But when a state is unwilling or unable to halt or avert such crimes, the wider international community then has a collective responsibility to take appropriate action, not excluding the use of military force in extreme and exceptional cases.

R2P was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit. But many misunderstandings persist about its scope and limits, compounded by its use and misuse in debates about the appropriate reaction to recent events, for example, in Iraq, Darfur, Myanmar and Georgia. And much remains to be done to solidify political support and to build institutional capacity.

The book examines how big a break R2P represents from the past, and how, with understanding of its scope, and its acceptance in principle and effective application in practice, the promise of “never again!” can at last become a reality.

The Author

Gareth Evans has been President and CEO of the International Crisis Group since 2000, after serving eight years as Australia’s Foreign Minister. Evans co-chaired the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that initiated the Responsibility to Protect concept in 2001, and he was a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel in 2004 that successfully proposed its adoption by the 2005 UN World Summit.

Book launch events with Gareth Evans and special guest speakers:

17 September, New York: with Romeo Dallaire, hosted by the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and the International Peace Institute, 777 United Nations Plaza, 44th Street and 1st Avenue, 12th Floor; 1pm to 3pm

22 September, London: with Lord Patten of Barnes and Lord Hannay of Chiswick; hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, Temple Place, WC2R 3DX;11am to 1230pm

7 October, Brussels: with Eric Chevallier, Joschka Fischer and Emma Bonino; at Residence Palace, Polak Room, Rue de la Loi 155; 11am-1230pm

28 October, Washington, DC: hosted by Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW 20004-3027; 10am to 1130am

If you would like to attend any of these launch events, please send a short email with your name, affiliation and launch city to media@crisisgroup.org

If you would like to obtain the book, at a discounted price, please use the order form below or order online at:

http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/2008/responsibilitytoprotect.aspx

Use code KGE8 to get a 20% discount off the cover price.