Responsibility to Protect

Ramesh Thakur is Professor of International Relations in the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University and Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He was a Commissioner for the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), and one of the principal authors of their report The Responsibility to Protect (2001). He was also Senior Advisor on Reforms and Principal Writer of the United Nations Secretary-General’s second reform report (2002). He is author or editor of over thirty books and 300 articles and book chapters.

'Over the last decade, Ramesh Thakur has been the most thoughtful scholarly and policy voice on the pluses and minuses of military intervention for human protection purposes. In these penetrating essays, he lays out not only the dilemmas but also the ways that the emerging norm of the responsibility to protect permits critics—be they from the global South or North—to pursue their pragmatic and principled impulses to come to the rescue.'Thomas G. Weiss, The City University of New YorkRamesh Thakur is widely acknowledged as one of the fathers of R2P, next only to Gareth Evans, his close colleague in that critical enterprise. In this powerful collection of essays spanning two decades of his writings, he demonstrates a deep and abiding commitment to protecting victims of atrocity crimes while navigating through the often competing pulls of North-South and scholar-practitioner perspectives.’ Martti Ahtisaari'Ramesh Thakur’s essays comprehensively track the evolution and impact of the doctrine that has begun to fundamentally change the way the world thinks about mass atrocity crimes. This book will intrigue, and be of real value to, both practical policymakers and those whose interests lie more generally in normative and conceptual issues at the intersection of scholarship and policy.' Gareth Evans, Co-Chair, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

• 1. Introduction: Norms and Laws in International Relations  2. Non-Intervention in International Relations: A Case Study  3. Kosovo, Humanitarian Intervention and the Challenge of World Order (with Albrecht Schnabel)  4. Global Norms and International Humanitarian Law: An Asian Perspective  5. Intervention, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: Experiences from ICISS  6. In Defence of The Responsibility to Protect  7. Collective Security and the Use of Force: Reflections on the Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change  8. The Responsibility to Protect and Prosecute: The Parallel Erosion of Sovereignty and Impunity (with Vesselin Popovski)  9. R2P: From Idea to Norm – and Action? (with Thomas G. Weiss)  10. The Responsibility to Protect and the North-South Divide  11. R2P and the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict  12. Conclusion: Normative Incoherence, Inconsistency and Contestation