The Use — and Misuse — of R2P: The Case of Canada

Abstract

In the heated debate that has emerged over whether the Libyan intervention of 2011 advanced the entrenchment of the norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), there is one facet of the Libyan case that both R2P celebrationists like Alex Bellamy and Paul Williams (2011; also Bellamy 2011), Thomas Weiss (2011), and Ramesh Thakur (2011c) and sceptics like the editors of this volume (Murray 2011; Hehir 2012) agree: the Libyan case was unusual. Indeed, Tim Dunne and Jess Gifkins (2011) have gone so far as to use the ‘perfect storm’ trope to describe the interconnected set of permissive conditions that allowed the use of force against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. These unusual conditions included both domestic and internal elements. First, and most importantly, Gaddafi was willing to openly threaten his opponents with slaughter, and his televised claims that his opponents were ‘rats’ and ‘cockroaches’ (Ford Rojas 2011), the latter characterization explicitly evoking the word used by Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda to describe their victims. Second, although relations between Libya and the West had improved since 2001, it was relatively easy to re-demonize both Gaddafi and his regime simply by recalling a string of past misdeeds: the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland; the 1986 bombing of a discotheque in Berlin; or the 1984 murder of a British police officer by a sniper shooting from the premises of the Libyan embassy in London.