ABSTRACT
The question of whether economic development and democratization have a legitimate place within the RtoP framework has proven controversial. The ICISS took a broad brush to this issue. It argued that ‘root cause’ prevention, an integral part of the ‘responsibility to prevent’, ‘may also mean tackling economic deprivation and the lack of economic opportunities’ and suggested that this might involve development assistance to address economic inequalities, the promotion of economic growth, better terms of trade, and the encouragement of economic reform.1 In his subsequent book, Gareth Evans included a similarly broad range of economic measures in his ‘preventive toolbox’ for RtoP.2 Since then, however, Western advocates of RtoP have tended to express caution about or outright reject the inclusion of economic development, broad based capacity building and democratization under the rubric of RtoP. As I noted in Chapter 3, the International Coalition of NGOs described calls by some states to include measures to address the root causes of conflict (which they defined as poverty and inequality) under the rubric of RtoP as ‘unhelpful’, claiming that such arguments ‘subordinate RtoP to decades-old political disagreements’ about the place of development in the UN’s agenda. The Coalition expressed its preference for Japan’s view that RtoP should address only the direct and imminent causes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.3 In late 2009, Evans expressed a similar view, arguing that RtoP’s preventive component be limited to addressing the immediate threat of the four crimes.4 These sentiments are based on an understandable eagerness to defend RtoP’s putative capacity to serve as a catalyst for timely and decisive international responses to mass atrocities against perceived attempts to broaden the principle to such an extent that it loses this mobilizing capacity. For some proponents of this view, there is no legitimate reason to include economic development and democratization within the RtoP framework because they simply deal with different problems. Others, including the International Coalition, worry that RtoP sceptics might argue for the sequencing of economic development and RtoP, with the implication that RtoP would only be implemented once global poverty was eradicated.5
