The responsibility to protect: The case of Syria and Libya

Human rights violations occur across the globe, whether caused by racial injustice, gender inequality, poverty, genocide, or even war crimes. The effort to protect human rights extends the term just war to humanitarian intervention, in the 20th century, with the concept of Responsibility to Protect. The Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia, spread to many countries over time. In Syria and Libya, anti-government movements and uprisings turned into a civil war. While there was a humanitarian intervention in Libya, that's not the case for Syria. In the thesis, these two crises will be briefly explained and the Responsibility to Protect and its implementation will be evaluated with these two different decisions. In the thesis, documents published by the United Nations were used both while explaining the development of Responsibility to Protect and examining case studies. In cases where human rights violations occur, whether or not to intervene, and in what situations to intervene, is an ongoing debate. In international relations theories, The English School is one of the theories that discussed humanitarian intervention thoroughly. The humanitarian intervention debate in English School is between pluralists who argue that there should be no intervention in order not to disrupt the international order and solidarists who argue that intervention should be made to ensure justice, in cases where human rights are violated. English School writers argue that today's international society has a pluralist structure, however, over time it has become solidarist. Accepting English School's assumption that the international society is solidarist, in the thesis, can the concept of the Responsibility to Protect be considered as a solidarist institution of the international society? Focused on the question. While evaluating the responsibility to protect as a primary institution, used the methods of identifying primary institutions of Buzan and Holsti, who are the pioneers of both the theory and the concept of primary institutions, and used the founding texts of the Responsibility to Protect.