S.T. Lee Lecture: After Syria: The Future of the Responsibility to Protect

In this lecture, Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University and former Foreign Minister of Australia, posits whether it is possible to end, once and for all, genocide and other major crimes against humanity occurring behind sovereign state walls to ensure that there will never again be another Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, or Darfur. Evans also questions if the new principle of "the responsibility to protect" (R2P), which was unanimously embraced by the U.N. General Assembly in 2005 and was applied with dramatic effect in Libya in 2011, has run its course with the Security Council paralysis over Syria. Evans examines whether China, Russia, Brazil, and India would ever support the use of coercive military force for human protection purposes, and he will discuss if R2P is an idea whose time has come and now gone. The lecture is supported by the Dr. S. T. Lee Fund for Historical Studies.