Introduction

In the historic final document of the 2005 World Summit (WSO Document), the international community for the first time explicitly accepted responsibility for helping to protect populations from certain categories of mass atrocities, if sovereign states themselves failed to do so. The acceptance marked not the end, but the beginning of a long process of consensus-building, which set out to determine how the notion should be interpreted and implemented. These two aspects are intrinsically related and influence each other: without a clear consensus on the exact contours of the notion (and hence the international community's responsibility regarding populations), efficient and effective operationalisation of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) through intensive cooperation with myriad national, regional and international actors remains but a vague and distant ambition with no real prospect of realisation. It is widely acknowledged that there is an urgent need to implement the RtoP concept, and that the concept needs to be implemented now if we are to prevent more conflicts from escalating into disaster. The implementation of a new notion by a wide array of partners should start with a clear and common understanding of what the notion entails, in the light of related pre-existing notions. The aim of the present contribution is therefore to critically assess the added legal value of the RtoP concept, in the light of the related notion of conflict prevention as developed over the past two decades at both the international and the European level. It will be argued that recent developments in both fields have resulted in a conceptual entanglement that significantly compounds the practical operationalisation of the RtoP concept.

To this end, the first half of this chapter will give a brief overview of the evolution of the RtoP concept in the main documents at the international level. This section will show that the RtoP notion endorsed by the 2005 WSO Document has been stripped of the key innovative legal features that were proposed four years earlier. What remains is a largely political notion that is primarily dedicated to the prevention of four narrowly circumscribed categories of international crimes.

If a newly introduced concept that is related to other pre-existing notions is deprived of its distinguishing characteristics, we should assess whether the new notion really adds anything to the discussion, particularly if the resulting conceptual confusion hampers its implementation.