The “Responsibility to Protect” has emerged and matured in a normative sense since its launch by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in December 2001, especially the agreement by the UN’s 2005 World Summit. But the embryonic nature of political support led a group of non-governmental organizations with financial support by several governments and foundations to establish the GCR2P in February 2008. Housed at the RBIIS, the Centre conducts research and advocacy on the operationalization of R2P within international institutions such as the United Nations with explicit reference to the four crimes specified by the world summit, “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

The ICISS Research Directorate, located at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), provided essential support. This international research team was led by Thomas G. Weiss, Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute and Presidential Professor, Stanlake J.T.M. Samkange, a lawyer from Zimbabwe and former UN staff member, and Don Hubert, of the Peacebuilding and Human Security Division at Foreign Affairs Canada (FAC).

In support of the Canadian government’s initiative to seek global agreement on the balance between state sovereignty and the prevention of mass atrocities, the Research Directorate of the ICISS was established at RBIIS in October 2000. It functioned through the publication of the commission’s report, The Responsibility to Protect, and research volume, and then afterwards until 2003 to ensure follow up and to update the annotated bibliography.

Research was compiled as a supplementary volume entitled The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, Background. The first part contains background research in the form of nine substantial research essays; the second part is a comprehensive bibliography; and the third, about the Commission, contains background information in how the Commission functioned and summaries of the consultations held around the world during its year-long mandate. This volume, like the report itself, should prove a quarry for scholars, specialists and policy makers for years to come. The first and third parts are available through FAC’s R2P-Home. The bibliography, which is periodically updated, is available through the Research Directorate home.

To visit the Global Centre on the Responsibility to Protect website, click here.