Thank you.
In a sense you could say that the responsibility to protect is the result of the evolution of the notion of sovereignty as responsibility. Some studies have documented the link between what we try to do at Brookings and the responsibility to protect.
Close to three years ago, when I first came to New York, my colleague, the adviser on issues related to the responsibility to protect, Edward Luck, and I were talking to permanent representatives and mission members in New York. The overwhelming response from these particularly third world country representatives was almost a denial of the fact that the responsibility to protect had been accepted as a concept. People would say that what we had agreed upon was a framework for further discussions and that it had not been accepted.
The reason was that when we speak of these three pillars, the last pillar, which calls for military involvement--and even then, after other measures have been attempted--was taken to be the essence of the responsibility to protect. So our task was to really disabuse people of that kind of misinterpretation of the concept by emphasizing the responsibility of the state, support for the state to build its capacity, and only when the state is manifestly failing, with disastrous consequences for the civilian population, would the international community consider several phases of getting involved, including, as a last resort, the military response.
The Secretary-General had a report this year, which was debated by the General Assembly. I think we have seen a tremendous shift from this initial reluctance to go ahead with R2P--the responsibility to protect--to accepting it with concerns. The question is how to address the concerns of countries that feel this could be abused as a tool by more powerful states of the global north to intervene in the global south. Those kinds of concerns have been significantly ameliorated by our emphasizing the first two pillars. But they still need to be addressed.
I think this is connected with your second question, the will to intervene. It is true that if you have a Rwanda or you have genocidal situations that history tells us all after the fact, if we relive those situations, I doubt that there will be many who would say we should not develop the will to intervene. That last resort, when all fails, I think is to be borne in mind. But my emphasis is on early prevention and on cooperating with the governments concerned as a national responsibility in the first place.