Jason Ralph: fading consensus on R2P and failure over Syria?

“R2P does not begin and end with military intervention. There are many ways of fulfilling the responsibility. I tend to think that using military force in Syria would have made things worse for the people you are trying to protect. Military force is not Always the right thing to do. That does not mean our responsibilities end. The UK has been fulfilling its responsibilities, I would say, to the extent that its been the second largest donor of humanitarian aid“.

Jason Ralph (Professor in International Relations at the University of Leeds) addresses the challenges of R2P and the ICC in their first decade, and particularly the fading consensus on these ‘liberal norms’. He also assesses the civil war in Syria and to what extent R2P would warrant military intervention there. Professor Ralph works on a project titled ‘The Responsibility to Protect and Prosecute: The Political Sustainability of Liberal Norms in an Age of Shifting Power balances’.

On 2 July 2014, Prof Jason Ralph was interviewed by Josefine Ulbrich at the conference ‘Transatlantic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)’ hosted by The Hague Institute for Global Justice.