Now, before I go . . .

As of Sunday, I’ll be out of town for a week, with very limited access to the internet, so consider this a week’s worth of entries.

Last week at a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ conference in Chicago, Gareth Evans, President of International Crisis Group and Co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, delivered the keynote address, The Responsibility to Protect: From an Idea to an International Norm.

And, if anyone knows R2P, it’s Gareth Evans. He doesn’t just understand it, he belives in it’s moral implications and the idea that in the end, it all points back at us, all of us:

And the third piece of unfinished business, the biggest of all as always, is the ever-recurring problem of generating the political will to act. We just have to get to the point where, when the next conscience-shocking mass human rights violation comes along, as it inexorably will, the reflex response of both governments and publics around the world, will be to talk immediately about the responsibility to protect, and find reasons to act, not to pretend that it is none of our business.

That is exactly it. We can point fingers all we like at politicians and policy makers, but if we believe in R2P and we really did mobilize around Darfur and Uganda with that demand, it would be invoked. In fact, I don’t see any other way it ever will be, unless civil society stands up and demands action.

And I can't end it any better than this:

When we say that R2P is the responsibility of the international community, that means all of us.