Phil Orchard – författare

This volume examines the ongoing construction of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, elaborating on areas of both consolidation and contestation.

The book focuses on how the R2P doctrine has been both consolidated and contested along three dimensions, regarding its meaning, status and application. The first focuses on how the R2P should be understood in a theoretical sense, exploring it through the lens of the International Relations constructivist approach and through different toolkits available to conventional and critical constructivists. The second focuses on how the R2P interacts with other normative frameworks, and how this interaction can lead to a range of effects from mutual reinforcement and co-evolution through to unanticipated feedback that can undermine consensus and flexibility. The third focuses on how key state actors – including the United States, China and Russia – understand, use and contest the R2P. Together, the book’s chapters demonstrate that broad aspects of the R2P are consolidated in the sense that they are accepted by states even while other, specific aspects, remain subject to contestation in practice and in policy.

This book will be of much interest to students of the R2P, human rights, peace studies and international relations.

This volume examines the ongoing construction of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, elaborating on areas of both consolidation and contestation.

The book focuses on how the R2P doctrine has been both consolidated and contested along three dimensions, regarding its meaning, status and application. The first focuses on how the R2P should be understood in a theoretical sense, exploring it through the lens of the International Relations constructivist approach and through different toolkits available to conventional and critical constructivists. The second focuses on how the R2P interacts with other normative frameworks, and how this interaction can lead to a range of effects from mutual reinforcement and co-evolution through to unanticipated feedback that can undermine consensus and flexibility. The third focuses on how key state actors – including the United States, China and Russia – understand, use and contest the R2P. Together, the book’s chapters demonstrate that broad aspects of the R2P are consolidated in the sense that they are accepted by states even while other, specific aspects, remain subject to contestation in practice and in policy.

This book will be of much interest to students of the R2P, human rights, peace studies and international relations.

Today, there are over 40 million conflict-induced internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, almost double the number of refugees. Yet, IDPs are protected only by the soft-law Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement at the global level. Instead of a dedicated international organization, IDPs receive protection and assistance only through the UN’s cluster approach.

Orchard argues that while an international IDP protection regime exists, many aspects of it are informal, with IDP issues bound up in a humanitarian regime complex that divides the mandates of key organizations and even the question of IDP status itself. While the Guiding Principles mark an important step forward, implementation of laws and policies based on them at the domestic level remains haphazard. Action at the international level similarly reflects an all-too-often ad hoc approach to IDP issues. Through an in-depth examination of IDP efforts at the international level and across the forty states which have adopted IDP laws and policies, Orchard argues that while progress has been made, new and greater monitoring and accountability mechanisms at both the domestic and international levels are critical.

This work will be valuable to scholars, students, and practitioners of forced migration, international relations theory, and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.