R2P and the Darfur Genocide: Strengths and Limitations

Introduction

After hundreds of thousands of deaths and years of bloody conflict, the international community watched the final dust settle on the conflict in Darfur by the mid-2000s, but many of the important questions raised by this humanitarian disaster remain unanswered today. The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of selected resources concerning the genocidal conflict in Darfur in order to evaluate the international community's response from 2003 onward from a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) perspective. In addition, the paper discusses whether there are reforms to R2P that could ameliorate specific weaknesses or problems in the international response to the violence in Darfur, followed by a summary of findings in the conclusion.

The International Community's Response to Violence in Darfur

In many ways, the situation in Darfur resembles that in many other fragile African states where decades of corruption, poverty, and civil conflict have exacted an enormous human and economic toll, leaving the majority of the population vulnerable to disease and displacement. Since the hostilities essentially peaked in 2004, the local governance situation in Darfur had disintegrated to the point where international intervention was desperately needed (De Waal, 2007). For instance, Henir and Murray (2017) advise that "as the war raged in 2003–2004, the U.S. public discourse on Darfur was conducted in an informational near vacuum [but] the American movement for Darfur took off in mid-2004" (p. 306). This point is also made by Mamdani (2009), who cites the grassroots initiatives that took place in the United States during the mid-2000s, with the "Save Darfur" campaign characterizing the situation as a "continuing genocide" and "the worst humanitarian disaster in the world" (p. 48).

Although this dire eventuality was predictable enough — the multiple antecedents to the violence were well documented and the genocide was played out in real time in the mainstream media — the international community was unwilling or unable to intervene before hundreds of thousands of people were murdered or displaced. In this regard, De Waal (2007) emphasizes that:

"The basic pattern of grievances is shared by all the marginalized peoples: they were denied their share in political power and national wealth, and the government used divide-and-rule tactics to allow local militias to run amok and destroy their modest livelihoods. In retrospect, the mystery is not why the war in Darfur broke out, but why it took so long to do so" (p. 1040).

According to the analysis of the international community's response to the humanitarian crisis in Darfur provided by Henir and Murray (2017), there were pragmatic constraints and challenges that tilted the balance toward "unable" rather than "unwilling." Based on lessons learned from humanitarian crises elsewhere in Africa, Henir and Murray (2017) maintain that the situation on the ground in Darfur was sufficiently hazardous due to the dynamics between rival forces, combined with a dearth of real-time intelligence, which made the provision of humanitarian assistance especially complicated. In this regard, they point out that "the operational humanitarians' silence also reflected their awareness of the moral complexities of Darfur [and whether] the best way of resolving Sudan's recurrent man-made famines is a political challenge to the government that has been responsible for them" (p. 307). These experiences provided a number of hard-earned and costly lessons that are discussed below.

Strengths and Limitations of the R2P Doctrine

The doctrine of R2P is relatively new and remains a work in progress. The experiences of the international community during the 1990s reinforced the need to identify an appropriate approach that avoided interventions that were either "too little, too late" or "too much, too early" (Weiss, 2016). These expensive lessons shaped the response to the genocide taking place in Darfur, but the R2P doctrine still lacked definitional clarity. For example, according to Thakur and Maley (2015), in 2004, R2P was generally characterized by the UN as "an emerging norm," which assumed some additional definitional clarity by 2005 when the UN General Assembly's World Summit "invoked [R2P] in the context of helping States build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out" (p. 305).

This expanded conceptualization of the R2P doctrine — to include assisting populations prior to the onset of conflict and crises — clearly amplifies the inherent challenges involved in the provision of timely humanitarian assistance where it is needed most. Moreover, the geopolitical sphere has changed in fundamental ways since the R2P doctrine first emerged a quarter century ago, yet many of the same challenges remain firmly in place. In this regard, Axworthy (2016) emphasizes that R2P "came about as a way to overcome barriers to a new global order that were entrenched in an outmoded security architecture and a realpolitik mindset that were hangovers from the Cold War [and] those barriers still exist [but] new challenges, such as Putin's aggressive territorial conquest, have been added" (p. 1).

Conclusion

Complex problems demand complex solutions, and the research was consistent in showing that intervening in the violence that ravaged Darfur during the 2000s was certainly no exception. Despite the inexplicable delays that were involved, the international community did finally take action to ameliorate the suffering taking place in Sudan, but many observers argued that this assistance was "too little, too late" to prevent the genocide that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. In the final analysis, it is reasonable to conclude that the Responsibility to Protect doctrine will continue to undergo reform in view of the ongoing realignment of the geopolitical landscape and the new humanitarian challenges that continue to emerge.

References

Axworthy, L. (2016, June). Resetting the narrative on peace and security: R2P in the next ten years. In The Oxford handbook of the responsibility to protect, 1–17.

De Waal, A. (2007). Darfur and the failure of the responsibility to protect. International Affairs, 83(6), 1039–1054.

Henir, A., & Murray, R. W. (2017). Protecting human rights in the 21st century. Routledge.

Mamdani, M. (2009). Saviors and survivors: Darfur, politics and the war on terror. Doubleday.

Stuenkel, O. (2016, June). Responsibility while protecting. In The Oxford handbook of the responsibility to protect, 1–20.

Thakur, R., & Maley, W. (Eds.) (2015). Theorizing the responsibility to protect. Cambridge University Press.

Weiss, T. G. (2016). Humanitarian intervention. Polity.