THIS year marks the 20th anniversary of the adoption of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) as a norm by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2005. Its basic idea is that national governments have a responsibility to protect their populations, but if they are unable or unwilling to do so, then the international community has a duty to intervene to protect people at risk.
This concept has, however, since become widely discredited by the NATO military intervention in Libya in 2011, which abused an R2P UN Security Council mandate to protect civilians to effect ”regime change” against the 42-year autocracy of Muammar Qaddafi. The ill-conceived intervention was widely condemned as having spread instability to the Sahel which remains destabilised 14 years later, with Libya itself still divided among several warring factions.
The irony of R2P is that the concept was fathered by an African, a foundational role that has often been erased from history. South Sudanese scholar-diplomat, Francis Deng, crafted the doctrine of “sovereignty as responsibility” in 1996. Many of its tenets were included – without acknowledgment – in R2P, particularly its emphasis on the need to build state capacity to protect populations in peril. “Sovereignty as responsibility’s” three pillars -the responsibility of the state; the state requesting assistance; and international intervention to protect populations as a last resort – were also replicated in R2P. Deng is thus widely acknowledged, in knowledgeable circles, as the “intellectual Father of R2P.”
He was born in British-ruled Sudan in 1938. His 1971 book on tradition and modernisation among his ethnic Dinka won the most prestigious prize in African Studies in the U.S. His 1986 biography of his father, Deng Majok, the paramount chief of the Ngok Dinka between 1943 and 1969, was a magisterial study covering indigenous methods of conflict resolution and the constructive management of diversity in the country’s North-South border region of Abyei.
This area symbolised Sudan’s North-South and Muslim-Christian divide. Deng had thus been born into what he described as a “racial and cultural crossroads and a microcosm of the Afro-Arab Sudan.” The young Francis learned at his father’s feet in the royal court, where he had engaged in mediating communal disputes.
After obtaining his doctorate in Law from Yale University in the U.S., Deng worked as a UN Human Rights officer, before serving as Sudan’s minister of state for foreign affairs under the military regime of General Gaafar el-Nimeiri. In this role, he engaged in mediation efforts between Dinka and Arab groups. While serving as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Internally Displaced Persons (1992-2004) and the UN Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide (2007-2012), Deng also contributed substantively to the development of human security. He shifted attention away from enhancing the security of states, and moved it towards the protection of individuals.
He worked hard to convince governments across the globe to protect populations at risk, while noting that the most effective way to guarantee their sovereignty was to govern responsibly. The South Sudanese was also influential in discussions – as a member of an Organisation of African Unity Eminent Persons Group – that led to the adoption of Article 4 (h) of the African Union’s 2000 Constitutive Act, advocating African-led interventions to stem egregious human rights abuses.
Deng, however acknowledged that small, weak states were the most vulnerable to interventions that raised the spectre of self-interested interventions by powerful states, replicating the bogus pacification rationales used by European imperial powers to colonise Africa, Asia, and the Americas. NATO’s intervention in Libya could well represent the death-knell of R2P, and no intervention has been launched in its name since 2011.
Professor Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
