Western-centric analyses also fail to recognize that, although heralded as
13 Bellamy, Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect. From Words to deeds, p. 43.
14 Ignatieff, “How Syria Divided the World.”
a new paradigm in international response to serious humanitarian catastro-phes, elements of what is now known as R2P were already institutionalized in Africa, particularly within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region.15 While many policy analysts around the world still confuse R2P as being exclusively about humanitarian intervention,
“ECOWAS has already developed and commenced the operationalization of its mechanisms on conflict prevention; management and resolution with an appreciable success,” Sampson points out.16
This can be explained by the profound changes in African security ar-rangements after the end of the Cold War. As conflicts on the African con-tinent were no longer seen in the context of the ideological battle of the West versus the Soviet Union, the continent lost its strategic significance, and outside powers closed their military bases. It thus fell to regional or-ganizations such as ECOWAS to deal with conflicts. When it became clear that Western rhetoric about the universality of human rights meant little in times of crisis (such as Rwanda in 1994), a consensus emerged in Africa that “African solutions were needed to solve African problems.”
African scholars’ and policy makers’ strong focus on prevention also stems from necessity: African armies are simply not capable of engaging in a complex intervention, such as the one seen in Libya in 2011. The results are of great interest. For example, the ECOWAS Protocol relating to the Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management, Resolution, Peacekeep-ing and Security, enacted in 1999, established the creation of a web of institutions and support bodies, such as the Sub-Regional Peace and Secu-rity Observation System, otherwise known as the Early Warning System (EWS), which focuses on conflict prevention. All these mechanisms are designed to cooperate with the AU and the UN when necessary ‒ as was the case in the Ivorian post-election crisis.
15 Isaac Terwase Sampson, “The Responsibility to Protect and ECOWAS Mechanisms on Peace and Secu-rity: Assessing their Convergence and Divergence on Intervention,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law 16 (3), 2011, pp. 507-540 (accessed 8 July 2013), doi: 10.1093/jcsl/krr022 540
16 Sampson, “The Responsibility to Protect and ECOWAS Mechanisms on Peace and Security.”
The ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework (ECPF), a “compre-hensive operational conflict prevention and peace-building strategy,”17 has several similarities with R2P ‒ emphasizing prevention and peace-building, including the strengthening of sustainable development, the promotion of a region-wide humanitarian crisis prevention and preparedness strategy, and the culture of democracy. It gives ECOWAS the legitimacy to inter-vene with:
(a) the responsibility to prevent ‒ actions taken to address the direct and root causes of intra- and inter-state conflicts that put populations at risk
(b) the responsibility to react ‒ actions taken in response to grave and compelling humanitarian disasters; and
(c) the responsibility to rebuild ‒ actions taken to ensure recovery, reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation in the aftermath of violent conflicts, humanitarian or natural disasters.
This sounds, in several aspects, very similar to R2P, suggesting that Afri-can thinking about sovereignty and intervention had evolved already prior to the birth of R2P. This is because ECPF was specifically designed to pro-vide a strategic focus on the implementation of the principles contained in the Mechanism of 199918 and the EPDGG (ECOWAS Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance) of 2001.19 The African commitment to ending non-intervention and the subsequent development of legal and institutional mechanisms to concretize this aspiration on the continent also predates the ICISS report in 200120 and the World Summit Outcome
Doc-17 ECOWAS Mediation and Security Council, Regulation MSC/REG.1/01/08 - The ECOWAS Conflict Pre-vention Framework, 16 January 2008.
18 Enacted on 10 December 1999, in Lome, Togo, by the Heads of States and government, the Mechanism established three institutions, namely: the Authority, the Mediation and Security Council (MSC) and the Ex-ecutive Secretariat (ES); and three support organs of the institutions of the mechanism, namely: the Defence and Security Commission (DSC), the Council of Elders (COE) and ECOWAS Cease-fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG).
19 Adopted by the Heads of States and Government on 21 December 2001, the protocol is meant to com-plement the Mechanism, by strengthening the internal mechanisms that would prevent crisis eruption.
20 ECOWAS Mediation and Security Council, Regulation MSC/REG.1/01/08.
ument (WSOD)21 in 2005. (These two are generally seen as the key mo-ments in the history of the R2P concept.) Isaac Terwase Sampson rightly argues that the quadruple crimes and three pillars of R2P22 are based on existing obligations under domestic law, with binding legal effect ‒ thus countering those who claim that the WSOD’s treatment of R2P is mean-ingless as it is not legally binding. As a consequence, all participating gov-ernments supported WSOD in 2005.23
ECOWAS can, therefore, be said to be something like a global R2P leader: its interventions in Liberia (1990) and Sierra Leone (1997), and its missions in Côte d’Ivoire (ECOMICI) in 2002 and Liberia (ECOMIL) in 2003, were classic demonstrations of regional security enforcement. They took place for ‒ and on behalf of ‒ the international community, while one must concede that some of these operations were carried out prior to UN authorization and seen by some as a Nigerian military adventure. Sampson also points to a certain incongruity between R2P norms and ECOWAS in-struments, with the latter setting the bar for intervention somewhat lower.
Still, it becomes clear that ECOWAS’ contribution to R2P is far greater than many analyses suggest, particularly in the area of less expensive pre-ventive and peace-seeking measures that would creatively transform con-flict on the continent, in view of the region’s reduced financial and insti-tutional capacity. Considering where populations are most vulnerable to genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes, West
21 UN General Assembly, 60th session, “2005 World Summit Outcome,” A/60/L.1, 15 September 2005.
22 Pillar One stresses that states have the primary responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Pillar Two addresses the commitment of the in-ternational community to provide assistance to states in building capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out. Pillar Three focuses on the responsibility of the international community to take timely and decisive action to prevent and halt genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity when a state is manifestly failing to protect its populations. “An Introduction to the Responsibility to Protect,” International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect, http://www.responsibilityto-protect.org/index.php/about-rtop (accessed 17 October 2013).
23 Sampson, “The Responsibility to Protect and ECOWAS Mechanisms on Peace and Security,” Journal of Conflict and Security Law, Oxford Journals, 2012, available at: http://jcsl.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/3/507.
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Africa’s intellectual contribution to the future global debate about R2P will be crucial.
Yet, despite the intellectual foundations of the principle being attributed to several non-Western thinkers and to the African norm of “non-indif-ference” which indirectly led to R2P,24 the vast majority of thinkers who contribute to the debate hail from rich developed countries in the Global North.25 In addition, in particular after 2005, emerging powers have often criticized R2P and have, in some instances, sought to undermine its devel-opment into a global norm.26 In particular, hostile governments – though not the BRICS – have challenged the norm for using arguments of cultural specificity, arguing that the West was seeking to impose “certain ideological conceptions of human rights” on the poor.27 As a consequence, comments like the one made by Chris Keeler, arguing that “the BRIC/IBSA countries are beginning to unite around skepticism (of R2P), countering western enthusiasm,”28 have been common since R2P’s inception.
There are additional reasons why the West seems to “own” R2P. First of all, the academic debate about it is fundamentally a Western one, and scholars like Francis Deng and Rames Thakur are exceptions. The major-ity of leading thinkers on the topic ‒ Gareth Evans, Alex Bellamy, Jennifer Welsh, Edward Luck, Michael Ignatieff, and so on ‒ are all from the so-called “Global North” (although this phenomenon is not limited to R2P, but to International Relations more generally).
24 Mohamed Sahnoun has argued that R2P is a distinctly African contribution to human rights. In Mo-hamed Sahnoun, “Africa: Uphold Continent’s Contribution to Human Rights, Urges Top Diplomat,”All Af-rica, July 21, 2009, http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200907210549.html (accessed 18 February 2013).
In addition, see: the African Union Constitutive Act of 2000, article 4, especially point h.
25 Serena K. Sharma, “RtoP at Ten Years,” Global Responsibility to Protect, 3, 2011, pp. 383–386.
26 Weiss and Mani, “R2P’s Missing Link, Culture,” p. 453.
27 UN Commission on Human Rights, Responses of Government and Agencies to the Report of the UN Special Representative for Internally Displaced Persons, E/CN.4/1993/SR.40, 1993.
28 Chris Keeler‚ “The End of the Responsibility to Protect?,” Foreign Policy Journal, October 12, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/10/12/the-end-of-the-responsibility-to-protect/ (accessed 18 February 2013).
Thomas Weiss and Rama Mani state that:
Western scholars have produced most of the seminal work that has influenced the development of R2P – in conflict prevention, crisis management, peace-building, human rights, and interna-tional humanitarian law. In parallel, the voluminous reflections and publications by scholars across the global South are unavail-able even in world-class, research-university libraries in North America and Europe; they are inaccessible to policy makers in the North and in the South.29
This has partly to do with quality issues of publications in the Global South, but also with a slight Western-centric bias and English as the domi-nant language in international academia.
When Brazil seemed to make an intellectual contribution to the debate in the form of the RwP concept, analysts sensed an opportunity to “glo-balize” the debate on the subject and quickly rushed to Brazil ‒ a sign of how easy it would be for a non-established power to assume leadership in this field.
A second consideration is that R2P is often misunderstood as being all about humanitarian intervention (as seen in Libya), an area clearly domi-nated by the West. Yet, of the concept’s three pillars, only the third is par-tially about intervention, while the rest are about the far more important aspect of prevention. Prevention gets far less media coverage than inter-vention, so India’s, Nigeria’s, China’s and Brazil’s (significant) peacekeeping efforts over the past years ‒ fully aligned with R2P ‒ have probably gener-ated fewer media reports than NATO›s military intervention in Libya. As a consequence, the BRICS are often wrongly seen as unsupportive of R2P.
Finally, emerging powers may prefer to depict R2P as a foreign concept
29 Weiss and Mani, “R2P’s Missing Link, Culture.”
they reluctantly agreed to, as this may increase their room for political ma-noeuvre to occasionally distance themselves from the idea if they believe it has been misinterpreted, as was the case in 2011 in Libya. This is par-ticularly important, since the operational capacity to actually intervene if necessary is distributed unevenly. Even if emerging powers fully support an intervention, implementation will inevitably lie with the United States and its close allies, making it impossible for emerging powers to affect the details of the operation.