ABSTRACT
The responsibility to protect (R2P) has become an accepted and useful norm of international law. This chapter explores the rise, the fall, and now the possible rise again, of R2P. It argues that while R2P has its direct origins in attempts to reclassify the notion of sovereignty and to shift it away solely as a right so to also include responsibilities, its real source is the Hague Convention of 1899 and its Martens Clause. The source of R2P is linked to the 1948 Genocide Convention as well as other human rights instruments. The chapter explores what R2P means and why even those who believe in it have used different language to describe it variably as a concept, a norm or a principle, and what the implications of this have been for R2P. However, until the Libya intervention in 2011, it is more accurate to say that from 2005 R2P as an available concept to be used on the international stage.
