The 'Failure' of R2P in Darfur

The concept of human security portrays human rights abuses by states as being due to unsuccessful governance within states, often contentiously referred to as failed states. States fail when they are unable or unwilling to protect and promote the human rights of their own people. The situation whereby states fail to protect and promote the rights of their own citizens, is the gateway for the international community to initiate the use of armed force as a humanitarian intervention. I contend that, the concept of ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), underlies the justification for armed humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention means the process where other states intervene with armed force in a state which has failed to protect its citizens’ human rights. Moreover, the doctrine of R2P means that human beings have a duty to their fellow humans to protect those who are facing insecurity. In this essay, I am going to explain the application of R2P as a doctrine in the conflict in Darfur, Sudan. I argue that R2P has not been adopted in practice as it should be, based on the definition of R2P that have described in the United Nation Charter (UN) and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report in 2001.

The conflict in Darfur has been described as the world's greatest humanitarian catastrophe, and can be characterized as an effort at ethnic cleansing or genocide of Darfurians by the Sudanese government or Khartoum regime. However, by labeling the situation as a genocide, the international community has not begun an armed intervention for humanity in Darfur based on the R2P doctrine (Kaufman, 2007). Even though initially, at least, it looks justifiable. This essay attempts to answer the question why this is the case. The first part of this essay will briefly discuss the concept of human security, it is insufficient to discuss the R2P doctrine without discussing the concept of human security concept which is a fundamental...