Search for Legitimacy: Interventions Under the Responsibility to Protect.

摘要

Following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the United Nations Secretary- General called upon the international community to prevent similar atrocities in the future. To this end, Gareth Evans and Mahmoud Sahnoun led an international effort to examine the responsibility of both a sovereign state and the international community to protect people from mass atrocities regardless of their geographic location. In so doing, Evans and Sahnoun reframed the basic notion of sovereignty, to wit: if a state fails in its responsibility to protect those people within its borders from mass atrocities, the state may not use sovereignty as a shield to prevent the international community from taking appropriate action. The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect outlines, inter alia, the means by which the international community may legitimize coercive intervention otherwise deemed a violation of sovereignty. In its current, immature stage, the doctrine articulates some initial means by which the United Nations may legitimize coercive action; however, the United States should lead the international community to develop secondary means of legitimacy to fulfill the obligation to protect endangered people when the United Nations Security Council fails to authorize coercive intervention.