Description
This draft monograph (to be conditionally published as part of CUP's Asylum and Migration series) offers the missing story of how powerful liberal democracies are partially responsible for creating barriers to consensus around the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This is demonstrated through the empirical case study of the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) in Syria. This is because the research revealed that the way the UK has understood R2P shows a clear resistance to R2P’s explicit requirements around peaceful measures in favour of the norm’s most controversial and contested aspect (intervention). Thus, a significant problem arises as this interrelation exacerbates existing contestation making effective mass atrocity responses and prevention impossible. The UK case study is then compared and contrasted to an empirical study on the US, which will be undertaken in the next few months. The peaceful measure of refugee protection is explored in terms of how it interacts with R2P in the UK and the US case studies around Syrian refugees.
