Alex Bellamy, one of the most competent students and advocates of the 'responsibility to protect' (often abbreviated as 'R2P'), provides a very timely and useful account of the origins of this notion, of its evolution, and of its successes and failures between 2005 (when it was endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations) and 2010. His overall approach is one that would be called 'strict constructionism' if applied to the debates over the US constitution: one of the recurrent themes of his work is the distinction between, on the one hand, the resolutions adopted by the United Nations and, on the other, the vision many have for what 'R2P ought to be, and even the priorities of the original proposal by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001.
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