Abstract
Since the unanimous adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in 2005 at the UN General Assembly, the international community has become increasingly concerned with curtailing and preventing mass atrocity crimes. In this context, regional organisations, notably the African Union, emerged as a willing agent to engage in R2P-related conflict resolution. Drawing on own experiences as political officer with the United Nations in three Missions, on semi-structured interviews, primary documents and secondary literature, this thesis examines the emerging trend of the UN Security Council’s “outsourcing” first-response R2P deployment to regional organisations. It evaluates the effectiveness of regional R2P operations between 2004 and 2014 through the comparative analysis of three case studies, namely, the African Union-United Nations Joint Operation in Darfur (UNAMID), the multi-national Operation Unified Protector by NATO in Libya, and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), by examining how decision makers and related national political dynamics influence choices of deployments.The study argues that the UN has delegated and outsourced first-response engagement with R2P. Despite partial successes, such faced significant political and operational challenges, hampering the effectiveness of related operations, foremost, given the failure to sustainably addressing root problems of conflicts, instead of containing mass atrocities merry for a limited period of time. This thesis contributes to ongoing debates in the fields of human rights protection, international conflict resolution, as well as the study of the United Nations and regional organisations.
| Date of Award | 1 Apr 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Alexander Bellamy (Supervisor), Jane Henderson (Supervisor), Ralph Wilde (Supervisor) & Benjamin Bowling (Supervisor) |