Introduction

Pillar three of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) focuses on the international community’s responsibility to take “timely and decisive action” to prevent and halt genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity in those instances where a state is unable or unwilling to protect its own populations. A range of tools have been devised to aid in this “timely and decisive action”: economic sanctions, international criminal trials and, most controversially, the use of force. The recent crises that have erupted in places such as Libya, Syria and the Central African Republic highlight the continued relevance of the RtoP debate, but it also gives rise to the need to better understand the processes, opportunities and risks involved in moving from the RtoP as a norm to its operationalization under the third pillar. Important questions related to the timeliness, legitimacy, proportionality and effectiveness of pillar-three responses need fleshing out and critically analyzing. Furthermore, there is further scope in apprehending how third pillar activities interact with, and mutually affect, the first and second pillars, and preventive and re-building initiatives aimed at avoiding pillar-three situations from occurring in the first place.