We respect Ramesh Thakur and thank him for his fair summary of our main points. We are happy that he agrees with us on several key issues and look forward to working with him in the future. This letter responds to the most important points on which he feels a “strong sense of unease”—our book’s focus on mobilizing the domestic will to intervene in Canada and the United States and our making recommendations to Ottawa and Washington rather than criticizing the five permanent members of the Security Council and their failures to react at the international level.
Thakur states his criticism directly: he believes that “the real task is to mobilize the international will to intervene” [our emphasis] and to focus on convincing the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to act at the international level “to honour and not shirk” their “responsibility to act” when mass atrocities loom. And since the Responsibility to Protect mainly concerns protecting threatened people in developing countries, he proposes that “the conversation on R2P should be principally among their governments, scholars and civil society representatives.” He criticizes us for omitting their voices in our book. What we need to do, he recommends, is “focus instead on the international policy community in New York and hold the feet of the Security Council to the fire of an internationalized human conscience.”
With all due respect, we believe that Thakur and his fellow members of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty addressed that task in their 2001 Responsibility to Protect report. The staff at the New York office of the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect is continuing to pursue that task today, ably assisted by experts like those of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect in New York.
In Mobilizing the Will to Intervene: Leadership to Prevent Mass Atrocities, which focuses on Canada and the United States, we carried out a different, but complementary task—beginning to fill the gaps identified by the authors of the R2P report when they wrote “the key to mobilizing international support is to mobilize domestic support, or at least neutralize domestic opposition” and when they acknowledged that “the extent to which the domestic factor comes into play does, however, vary considerably, country by country and case by case.”
We agree. And that is why we first studied the obstacles to mobilizing the domestic will to intervene in the United States (where our recommendations are making significant progress) and Canada (little progress yet) and why we are joining with national research teams in South Africa and Britain to prepare studies identifying the obstacles to mobilizing the will to intervene in their countries. We see organizing a series of such country studies in our role in the international division of labour and hope that Thakur will eventually recognize the value of our approach by joining us in our work to operationalize R2P principles.
