Title: Review Essay: Transforming R2P from Rhetoric to Reality
Abstract: by the UN General Assembly as part of the UN World Summit's Outcome Document, the ''Responsibility to Protect'' (R2P) principle has gained demonstrable traction during the first decade of the new millennium.It was first used and defined as the title for the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS).R2P was also featured in the report of the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (2004).Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also embraced R2P in his own report, In Larger Freedom: Toward Development, Security and Human Rights for All (2005), and in 2006 the UN Security Council reaffirmed R2P in Resolution 1674.The international community's widespread recognition of Responsibility to Protect poses serious practical challenges to state makers holding the view that sovereignty is, or at least ought to be, inviolable.At the same time, R2P also poses theoretical and conceptual challenges to those practitioners of disciplinary international relations trying to analyze and make sense of the contemporary world affairs unfolding around them.The source of these challenges lie in three interrelated presumptions underpinning R2P: first, that the state bears primary responsibility for protecting its own population from mass crime and conscience-shocking atrocity; second, that the international community is responsible for assisting states to meet these duties; and third, that UN member states are also responsible for protecting at-risk populations when the host state fails to provide the necessary protection.In addition to recognizing the international community's responsibility to react to atrocity crimeswhich include, genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity-R2P recognizes the international community's responsibility to help prevent those atrocities from occurring in the first place as well as its responsibility to help rebuild governments, economies, and societies in the aftermath of mass crime.The