The Responsibility to Protect and Africa’s international relations

The Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, today finds itself invoked widely among international policy makers as well as academics, ¹ and Africa is the region with which it has been most closely identified. Edward Luck, special adviser to the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, has declared that ‘the responsibility to protect really came from Africa and the African experience’, ² and ‘emerged, quite literally, from the soil and soul of Africa’. ³ Three-quarters of the ‘crises’ listed on the website of the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect are in Africa, ⁴ analysts have located an incipient R2P in Article 4 of the African Union’s Constitutive Act, ⁵ and R2P has been represented as fulfilling the promise of ‘never again’ coming out of the failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide.