Author Archive

Ruben Reike

Dr Ruben Reike is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the European University Institute, where he is part of the ERC-funded project: “The Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Morality, Law, and Politics of Armed Conflict”. He holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford.

At the 2005 UN World Summit, more than 170 Heads of State and Government accepted three interlinked responsibilities, which together constitute the principle of ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). First, States accepted the responsibility to protect their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Second, States promised to assist each other in fulfilling their domestic protection responsibilities. And third, the international community took on a collective responsibility to react, in a timely and decisive manner, if particular States are manifestly failing to protect their populations from the abovementioned mass atrocity crimes. Despite a quite remarkable normative development (see for example the frequent invocation of R2P in relation to the recent Libya crisis), this R2P principle is …