Libya and the responsibility to protect - Between opportunistic humanitarianism and value-free pragmatism
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The application of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) norm to Libya in 2011 was successful but controversial. For 350 years since Westphalia, sovereignty functioned as institutionalised indifference. International interventions in Kosovo and East Timor in 1999 broke that mould and provided the backdrop to United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s search for a new norm. With Canada’s help, an international commission formulated the innovative principle of the responsibility to protect.