ABSTRACT
The "responsibility to protect" (R2P) has emerged from the soil, spirit, experience and institutions of Africa. Ed Luck, former Secretary-General's Special Advisor on R2P, have suggested, this new politics is indeed rooted in Africa. Anne Orford agrees with other observers that much of the significance of R2P lies in its justification of the expansion of international authority in situations where states have failed to protect their populations from gross human rights abuses. Many critics of R2P have argued that the principle constitutes an "intervener's charter" that will pave the way toward ever more frequent violations of sovereignty in the global south. Dominant culture shaped the intervention in ways that effectively precluded preventative action at the grassroots level, which, she notes, doomed international efforts to bring peace to the Congo. Contributors to the volume speak with one voice on one central matter: the significance of the human suffering witnessed on a massive scale in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
