Whose responsibility to protect whom?: the notion of "responsibility to protect" in international politics

Abstract

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we will try to show how the idea of the "responsibility to protect" gained terrain in the circles of international lawyers and theorists during the last ten years, as well as the very debatable issues raised by it. Secondly -and this constitutes the stake of our approach- we will address the broader discussion of the link between R2P and the problem of state sovereignty, by arguing that the emergence of this new international obligation is merely a hypostasis of a general malaise of the traditional state sovereignty. We will then conclude by assessing the impact of the new norm of R2P to the recent political developments in the Middle East, in order to grasp the direction into which the practice is evolving in this field.