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R2P is the widely employed acronym for Responsibility to Protect, the principle adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 that addresses genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. This article discusses the extent to which R2P Focal Points, appointed government officials from around the world, can potentially contribute to the prevention of mass atrocities. Protection is both a national and an international responsibility. Informed by social network theory, this article focuses on the roles of the Focal Points, their relations to each other in a global network, and how they can contribute positively both domestically and abroad.

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is the national and international responsibility to protect populations from mass atrocities, adopted at the 2005 UN World Summit. International action through the UN Security Council is activated when a state fails to protect. This article asks why R2P objectives are difficult to realize through the Council. The main focus is on the reactive component of R2P where the use of military force is an option. The discussion has four sections: R2P as a policy; the composition of the Council and the role of the veto powers; a discussion of organized hypocrisy, which is well known in complex organizations; and the relationship between decision makers and implementing actors. Together, this paints a picture of an “alliance” between R2P and the Security Council which is “unreliable.” The analytical tools are a classic study of implementation and theoretical insights about how complex organizations perform.

The \"thin cosmopolitan\" view of international relations presents humanity as a single moral community. Given the accompanying obligation to safeguard all members of this community, TOR DAHL-ERIKSEN explores the connection between thin cosmopolitanism and the recently established norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), while drawing attention to the gap between theory and reality in humanitarian interventions (or failures to intervene) and human rights from Rwanda to the present day.