 Thank you for coming. On behalf of the International Policy Center, welcome to the second of the four policy union debates. My name is Nate Smith, and I'm a master's of public policy here at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. As a student with a particular interest in human rights and international security, I'm privileged to serve as a moderator for today's debate on the responsibility to protect. The four policy union debates are intended to bring informed discussion of international policy issues of importance and interest to the students of the Ford School, the University of Michigan community, and the wider policy world as part of the Ford School mission to educate policymakers of the future. The International Policy Center plans to host several of these events over the remainder of this academic year, continue the series in subsequent years so as to enrich the educational experience of students, bringing leading voices on key policy issues to the Ford School, contribute to a wider, more informed discussion. We're grateful that the International Institute has joined us in the effort to organize today's event. Thanks to that effort, the debate on the responsibility to protect is part of the Human Rights Initiative, jointly organized by the International Institute and the International Policy Center. Today's topic is the doctrine of responsibility to protect, sometimes known colloquially as R2P. R2P is an international norm consisting of three main pillars. One, that states must act to protect our populations from mass atrocities. Two, the international community must support states' capacity to do so. And three, the international community must intervene using force if necessary to stop mass atrocities from occurring. Before explaining the mechanics of the debate, please allow me to introduce our participants. From Wayne State University Law School, Professor Brad Roth specializes in international law, comparative public law, and political and legal theory. And he's the author of the recent book, Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement, Premises of a Pluralistic Legal Order. And from the University of San Diego Joan B. Crock School of Peace Studies, Dean Edward Luck is a former Assistant Secretary General and Special Advisor to the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, focused on the conceptual, political, and operational development of the doctrine of responsibility to protect. Our debate today will be conducted in a fashion similar to a competitive forensic debate, but with the difference that there will be participation by the audience. Many of you have eye clickers, those little remotes that you were handed in the doorway out there. We'll be taking polls before and after the debate in order to discern how many minds have been changed by yourself. Now, as an aside, I should take care to note that the areas of disagreement between our participants here are much more nuanced than this kind of simplistic yes or no poll might suggest. Rather, our point here is to demonstrate to the students of the Ford School and the University of Michigan the importance of framing persuasive argument. So in other words, let's not read too much into it. The debate will be over this resolution. This House resolves that the traditional duty of non-intervention among sovereign states must give way to responsibility to protect populations from grave human rights abuses by force if necessary. Professor Roth will argue for the continued relevance of the norm of non-intervention, even in the face of grave human rights abuses. Dean Luck will argue in favor of the resolution under which the international community has a responsibility to intervene to stop such abuses. The debate will close with questions submitted by the audience. As you came into the auditorium, you'll receive cards upon which you may submit questions for this portion of the event. We'll start collecting these questions after the opening statements conclude and collect them until 6.45. We'll then collate and prioritize them and submit as many of them as time allows to the debaters. Following the audience questions, we'll then evaluate the results of the debate in two ways. First, we'll take a second vote of the audience using the iClickers as to whether or not the resolutions pass. While we're doing this, a trained forensic debate judge, Ms. Maria Loom, will evaluate the performance of the debaters by the standards of competitive forensic debate. When this is complete, we'll share the results of both evaluations with you. Once again, welcome to our ongoing series of international policy debates. Before we turn it over to our guests of honor, let's please take a poll. On the screen, you'll see the debate resolution, that to the side for now. You can see, you vote A for the affirmative and B for the negative. And I'll keep it open for, see our results there. Largely balanced, it appears. And of course, the interesting part we'll see at the end if any minds have been changed. But hopefully regardless of whether minds have been changed, a degree of nuance has been achieved. So, thank you everybody, get your last second votes in here. And all right. Good. So, I'm going to churn it over the debaters opening statements in a moment. But before I do that, I'd like to emphasize that you can submit questions not only via the old school technology of pencil and note card, but also via the new school technology of Twitter. You should use the following hashtag, which should be on the screen. But it's the hashtag is Ford Policy Union. So that means a little pound sign and then Ford Policy Union. So, thank you very much and enjoy the debate. I feel rather dismayed to see those numbers because they can only go in one direction. So, I'll try to dissuade all of you who were so affirmative to begin with. But I must say I very much pleased to be here. I spent much of the last five, six years debating with member states. So, I hope this would be no rougher than that. Although I think the numbers and affirmative are rather different when you're dealing with the Cubas and the Iran's of this world. Their views are maybe a little bit different and maybe the differences would be a little less nuanced and maybe a little sharper than we have here tonight. But I thought I'd begin by posing a very simple question. Where did Responsibility Protect come from? There have been those who've suggested it somehow appeared in the middle of the night from some people in the North who somehow wanted to impose their will on the people of the South. That's an invention of the strong to overcome the sovereignty of the weak. And that's not the way that we see it. We think that the Responsibility Protect came from the history, the legacy of the 20th century. We remember the Holocaust. We remember the killing fields of Cambodia. We remember the woods outside Srebrenica. We remember the carnage of Rwanda. There was a huge, huge public policy problem. There simply is nothing in the sovereignty of states that give them the right to murder their citizens in huge numbers. We have had a genocide convention since 1948. What we didn't have was any policy, any apparatus, any doctrine, any strategy to do something about preventing these kinds of crimes or responding when they happened. And there were those who traced Responsibility Protect to humanitarian intervention to the efforts of Bernard Couchner and others to talk about the right to intervene in such situations. We should remember that Responsibility Protect is not a nicer version, a neater version of humanitarian intervention. It's an alternative. It's saying, how do you do this first and foremost in a preventive way, not simply trying to respond? How do you do it using the whole tools of the UN Charter, the Pacific measures under chapter six, the coercive ones under chapter seven and the regional and sub-regional under chapter eight using the whole capacity of the international community. It insists that any intervention be multilateral, not unilateral, that it be conducted under the international law and international organizations. There are those who charge that we're trying to create a whole new chapter in international law, that this is a radical departure and it's nothing of the sort. As I've said, and as the Secretary General has said from the beginning, this is a political concept. It is based on existing international law. It is based on what we think is a proper understanding of sovereignty. States were not created in order to threaten their populations. States were created to protect populations. It's the most fundamental obligation of sovereignty. Citizenship has perquisites, but it also has responsibilities. So too for leaders. Yes, they have certain perquisites, but they have fundamental responsibilities first and foremost for the populations on their territory. Responsibility protect came from Africa. It came from the experience in Rwanda and elsewhere where the African Union in 2000 agreed that under grave circumstances, and they had three of the four crimes covered under R2P, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, that there was a collective responsibility to respond and intervene if necessary in eternal affairs. They recognize that when you're killing thousands and thousands of people, refugees are spilling across borders. When ethnic group, other sectarian groups are on different sides of borders, that that kind of massive killing represents a threat to international peace and security. It is not a national issue. It is fundamentally an international issue. It requires an international response. So the UN wasn't in the forefront in inventing R2P. In fact, it was responding to efforts happening in various regions and the growth of international norms and standards in these areas. At the World Summit in 2005, all the heads of state and government agreed on a formula for the responsibility to protect. It was in our job in Ban Ki-moon's administration to turn that into strategy and doctrine to try to get 193 member states on board, a few are still a little reluctant, but by and large they're coming to be very supportive and they understand what we're trying to do. And then to operationalize it and apply it in individual situations. In Kenya, in Kotevwar, in Kyrgyzstan, in Guinea-Conakray, in Libya, we have applied responsibility to protect by and large with positive results. You don't tend to read about it in newspapers because it has not required military intervention. It's required quiet diplomacy. It's required having the international criminal court or regional courts, so there no longer is impunity, that there is accountability to leaders who would commit mass crimes. It has been a quiet effort in most ways and it's been an effort step-by-step to bring the member states aboard and get them to understand that this is not a threat to sovereignty, it is the essence of sovereignty. Who is the enemy of sovereignty? Those who would try to restore international law and order or those who would wantonly kill tens of thousands in some cases, more than a million of their own citizens. Are they the ones who are upholding sovereignty or are they the ones who are giving sovereignty a bad name? So we think what we are doing is first and foremost, is trying to assist states to meet their fundamental responsibility. We believe the sovereignty comes from the people. It is not imposed upon them. And we believe in sovereign member states there wouldn't be a UN without them. But we do recognize that there are obligations, there are responsibilities that come with sovereignty and we recognize that the general course of international law of international standards has been toward building stronger institutions. These are not institutions that make it harder to govern. They're institutions that make it possible for states to govern because there's enormous sovereignty gap. It's hard to think of any issue on which the state by itself can deliver to its populations. It needs to join with others. That's why international law has grown in one area after another. That is why international institutions have taken on new roles. Not as the enemy of the state, but to allow the nation state era to proceed longer, to be more sustainable and to be more survivable because it's limited things like clashes between states. It's a limited weapons of mass destructions and it's beginning to limit mass atrocities against one's own people. So we think that this is a fundamental direction of international law and governance. We think it's something that's very consonant with the times and we recognize it as more and more states come aboard and as a practice becomes more established, there's not more opposition, there's more support because they recognize that in fact, historically most of the interventions have been south to south. They've not been north to south. Big, powerful countries are not looking for excuses to intervene. This is why John Bolton, when he was the US permanent representative, opposed the responsibility protect because he thought it imposed obligations and restrictions on US sovereignty because it implied that we should do something about this kind of carnage. So we recognize this is not a plot of the big against the small. It is in fact, we found from member state after member state, they said when we had problems, when we had instability, when we had sectarian violence, no one was there to help, no one would respond. So it's not trying to force something on these states, it's something that they want but it needs to be done on international law, needs to be done in a logical way, a proportionate way with a large stress on prevention, not on response. We recognize that if we're always trying to respond to all this kind of violence, it's hopeless. The UN cannot substitute for the sovereignty of the state but it can and we think it is helping to reinforce that sovereignty. Thank you. Thank you, Ian Luck. Professor Ralph? I should be wearing a black hat, I guess, and as representative of the 24%, I don't know. The difficulty with this debate is that I'm really in the position here of saying not so much no to Dean Luck but yes but and explaining the bases of the yes but is going to require a kind of journey through some issues about the nature of the international legal order and about the role that R2P plays within that basic structure. And the difficulty here is that R2P has become rhetorically a kind of device that has gone far beyond the kinds of modest propositions that Dean Luck has put forward here. And so in some sense, I'm going to be arguing not as much against Dean Luck but against some of the kinds of extrapolations that perhaps Dean Luck himself would resist but that are inherent in the kind of discourse that we have about R2P. Dean Luck talks about R2P having three pillars. The first two pillars really I don't want to talk about because the first pillar about the responsibility of each state to prevent mass atrocities within their borders is not by any means an innovation. It's not an innovation in the sense that states have long had international legal obligations specifically with respect to these matters. It's also not an innovation because sovereignty itself as conceptualized in the fundamental documents of the present international legal order actually is conceptualized as a manifestation of the self-determination of the whole population of the territory without distinction. And that itself implies an understanding that sovereignty is to be respected for the purpose of protecting the fundamental interests of whole territorial populations. So the first pillar of R2P is not legally significant. The second pillar of R2P is not really a matter of legal obligation. It's a political development and one that I think all of us could get behind as a positive move in the international community to take responsibility for what goes on within the borders of other countries to try and assist in thwarting efforts by certain kinds of rogue elements to engage in mass atrocities. But the third pillar is the crucial one and I am gonna have to disagree with the claim that R2P is fundamentally not just humanitarian intervention dressed up in a neater way because what is really distinctive about R2P actually is the revisitation of a very old argument in international law which is essentially about the license of states to invoke uses of force that are presumptively unlawful in the international legal order in the name of humanitarian purposes. That is a live question. It has long been a live question both within and without international law. And it's important to recognize that when we're talking about responsibility to protect in this third and crucial sense we are talking not simply about responsibilities and obligations, we're talking about licenses. We're talking if you like about a license to kill. But I don't mean to be demagogic about this, a license to kill may be exactly what you need in certain circumstances to head off mass atrocities or to stop mass atrocities in progress. But we're talking about something that is extraordinarily potent here, extraordinarily consequential from the standpoint of territorial populations and that applied in particular cases is going to be a matter not of ending civil wars but participating in civil wars on one side or other. And you have to look at the kinds of situations where interventions have taken place. Whether expressly for humanitarian reasons or with humanitarian reasons invoked after the fact is a kind of rationalization for big power interests. Sometimes it's difficult to make the distinction between those two things. Sometimes people with different things in mind support the same kinds of interventions. But we've seen what's happened in many interventions around the world in places where powers who are seeking to affect matters on the ground and perhaps indeed in a beneficent way have made a terrible mess of things at great expense to human life in the territory. So it's important not to oversell the idea of humanitarian intervention to create the situation where you have in mind on the one hand the terrible, ugly world of sovereignty and on the other hand, a kind of idealized vision of civilization to the rescue. In fact, the issues are much more complicated and Dean Luck understands that those issues are much more complicated. That's not where we actually disagree. But the problem is that the rhetoric of R2P has a tendency to take on a life of its own and to undermine the fundamental structure of the international order, I'm afraid, with respect to a kind of caricature of the non-intervention norm. The non-intervention norm is not a norm about non-responsibility. As I've said, sovereignty in the international legal order has long been predicated on the idea of responsibility for the territorial population. On the other hand, sovereignty is not reducible to responsibility and much of the rhetoric that you hear is about sovereignty as responsibility as opposed to merely sovereignty and responsibility. When you start to reduce sovereignty to responsibility, you create all sorts of opportunities for various actors with various agendas to say that states have forfeited their right to sovereign inviolability in the international order. That right to sovereign inviolability in the international order is based upon basically matters of principle, matters of policy and matters of politics, matters of principle having to do with the importance of the self-determination of territorial populations, people who have an unshared stake within their territorial boundaries in the future of public order and the basis for the creation of lives for themselves within the particular context in which they live. Secondly, crucially, the question of policy, the problem of untrustworthy implementers of universal values. The big problem in the international order is that interests and values are very much in flux. We have a horizontal system of international enforcement that creates the license potentially on the part of particular states in the name of the international community to intervene rather than actually a centralized force carrying out that intervention. Now, of course, and the third part is the untrusted nature of the implementers, the fact that the international system requires an accommodation broadly among states with different interests and values in order to have a basis for international peace and cooperation, we need to have a set of ground rules that are clear. Now, of course, what of Responsibility to Protect has been accepted by the United Nations establishes that the Security Council is indeed the source of authority for making the determination about the use of force. On the other hand, there's a problem of a kind of disconnect between the substantive norms of Responsibility to Protect on the one hand and the procedural norms on the other, that the substantive norms speak about the state manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. But if you include war crimes in that unadulterated, that could describe any civil war and it becomes very unclear what R2P then has by way of its limits. On the other hand, if we are going to rely heavily on the procedural aspect to work this out, to see to it that we respect the decision of the Security Council, then we have to be concerned about the vetoes in the Security Council and the efforts to do and runs around vetoes where the notion is somehow that the process of the international order is incapable of fulfilling the promises that have been made substantively and what I'm most concerned about is that the promise of R2P substantively brings us to a kind of fork in the road potentially where we find ourselves in a situation where there's a demand for a kind of action that our institutions by their very nature are incapable of fulfilling and the result of that is potentially one of two things. One, a collapse into cynicism and the other, the embrace of a kind of unilateralism that we have seen invoked frequently in the international order often with very negative consequences. And so those are the concerns that I wanna put before you at the outset, thank you. Thank you, Professor Roth. Now, Dean Locke, you'll have a chance to pose a question to Professor Roth and he'll give you an answer and you'll have a chance to respond to that. Well, I know we're in an academic institution and I respect the academic rigor of your arguments and I'm not myself a legal scholar, but I've heard similar arguments made by member states maybe for less elevated reasons. And you hear a lot of talk about the misuse of the Responsibility Protect and you talk about the potential misuse of Responsibility Protect. My problem and this is to the question is what specific cases do you have where member states invoke the Responsibility Protect to do things they should not have done in other places? Yes, theoretically it can be misused. My problem is I don't know of what those cases are. And likewise, you speak of the Security Council as being an imperfect vessel for holding R2P. Most political institutions are, what is the alternative? Because if you're going to talk about the hypothetical possibility of creating international institutions that don't have vetoes or don't have blockages or don't have political considerations, are we dealing with a public policy problem here or are we dealing with a theoretical issue? So I'd be interested both in terms of misuse and in terms of other vessels to make these decisions. Are you talking about any specific instances or are you talking about hypotheticals? Well, I think with respect to misuse, there haven't really been a great many uses of the third pillar of R2P in practice. And so one in an official sense. And so then the question arises of whether states have been prone to invoke humanitarian considerations in service of other agendas, often at great cost. And we've seen, of course, that happen. The problem is that in order to get people, in order to get states interested in actually applying the power that they have and investing the blood and treasure they have in the more extreme versions of R2P, you need to have some sort of confluence of interests between the states that are being sort of contracted out to do this task and the interests of the international community as a whole. And the problem there is that it's hardly clear whether that confluence of interest will hold throughout the duration of a project. And you can see a number of efforts of states to engage in intervention that have had sort of quasi-humanitarian justifications, clearly the issues of the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the justifications of the Ethiopian incursion into Somalia in 2007. All of these were, of course, quite fraught episodes. None of them, of course, were under the banner of responsibility to protect. And I'm not concerned that the Security Council is an untrustworthy instrument by and large for doing these operations, where the Security Council actually invokes responsibility to protect and authorizes states. I think that's the best thing we have, potentially. But the problem I'm concerned with is that the Security Council will end up becoming delegitimated by the very fact of its inability to agree to the circumstances of what counts as a justification for the invocation of the third pillar. And under those conditions, we're likely to be, define ourselves back in all of the other cases, going farther back, going back to various kinds of policies being asserted during the Cold War by various states that all of us could probably agree had a kind of predatory quality under humanitarian guise. And it would be very difficult to contain that dynamic because of the way in which there would be a sort of legitimation of an end run. But in terms of what the alternative is to all of this, I think that the alternative is to go for consensus in the Security Council, and then failing consensus in the Security Council, we are frequently gonna have to bite the bullet and not go forward, even if we think the Security Council is wrong in not affirming the invocation of responsibility to protect in those circumstances. Do you like a chance to respond to that or? I would, I think that in some ways, your arguments against Responsibility Protect, actually in the end, are rationales for the Responsibility Protect. Because of the historic misuse of humanitarian intervention, and I agree there has been some, the pre-R2P history, in fact is why we need the Responsibility Protect as we have it, as agreed by all the heads of state and government as 2005, as embedded in the Charter Framework, as using the multi-latrical vehicle of the Security Council. We don't have any examples since 2005 that I know of where there has been this sort of humanitarian intervention regardless of international opinion, regardless of international law. I think what we are doing with R2P is taking that danger and that risk, which I agree is out there, and putting it in a legal, institutional, political framework to tame it in essence. The problem was that before, there was much more temptation I think for unilateral use of force. Now I think the standard, it's not a norm in UN terms, because it doesn't have a binding legal quality. It is in political science terms, but not in UN terms, a norm. But the normative nature of it, the fact that this is becoming an accepted international standard, the fact that there is very wide public support and engagement as this evening is one more example of that, shows that there is a public involvement in this issue, which I think is enormously helpful, because it will help to keep governments accountable. And I think what we have done in essence is taken a dangerous beast in some ways of humanitarian intervention, put it in a framework that tames it and puts it in a positive direction. So I think what we have done is to listen to all those arguments. As I say, I spent most of the last five or six years arguing, struggling, discoursing with member states, many of whom were highly, highly skeptical. So every year we've gone back to the General Assembly with a new report. The first report I wrote in 2009, the big report in the strategy, and then looking at rapid response, then looking at regional, and then this most recent one, looking at this third pillar, the response pillar. So I think we need to look at this and say, okay, what's a comparator? We can't compare it with an ideal situation. What other norms have we seen develop over the years? We think of human rights. Where were human rights seven years after the Universal Convention? Where were human rights in 1955? Did people think they had any traction? More states then were disputing, saying it was an intervention in terms of sovereignty. But over time, the political power and the moral persuasion has been enormous. Yet there's no real enforcement norm. And it seems to me that if you look at that kind of trajectory, we might 10 years, 15, 20 years from now, saying responsibly protects has become a very ordinary part of our lexicon and of the standards and expectations we have of states. And that's where I hope we're going to be. So we're at an early stage, but I think the trajectory is quite encouraging. And as I say, we've applied it in seven, eight different situations with by and large, pretty good results. Thank you. If you'd like to pose a question, yeah. Well, I'm concerned again about this question of the fork in the road. So I want to ask you about the inclusion of this unadulterated term war crimes as distinct from genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the charge for the use of force. And I'm concerned too about the relationship between that and the idea of anti-impunity because we've seen associated these two different ideas. In fact, R2P was originally about just humanitarian catastrophe more broadly and became narrow to deal with specific crimes. But the more that it's associated with crimes, the more it's associated with this idea of anti-impunity. And I'm wondering whether you share my concern that in so far as anti-impunity comes to replace in some sense the core value of non-use of force across borders as the core of the international legal order that you end up in a situation where you potentially license a ruthlessness to end all ruthlessness. That if the quest is to end impunity at all costs, then don't we lose sight of the fact that peace is essentially a peace among people who regard one another as criminals much of the time? Interesting questions. One, on war crimes. The four crimes that are covered, genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, it's an odd group. I admit to that. Ethnic cleansing is not well established in international law, though it could well be a precursor to other kinds of crimes. When we look at individual cases, almost always they end up being crimes against humanity, such a broad category, and if it's systematic and widespread, such as mass rape and other things, they clearly fall there. Genocide is very clear, but you rarely know what it is until after the fact, given the proofs that are required in terms of intent and eliminating all on part of a particular group. You just don't know that when it's unfolding. War crimes hasn't been applied very much in this area because one, we're trying to do prevention before war takes place. In most cases, this is not in what one would call war, unless you call a government, or in this case, we've also included rebel groups or others that they should be bound the same way. Non-state armed groups should have the same restrictions as governments in this sense. It's not usually a contest. Now, in the case of Syria, actually I think I was the first person in the UN system back in June of 2011, said that evidence suggests that there's a real likelihood that crimes against humanity are being committed. Now more recently, since the ICRC has sort of said, this is no, this is a civil war situation, people have started to call this war crimes. Now, I agree there's difficulties with war crimes because they can be individual acts. They may not be mass acts. They don't always fit very well. But these are the four sets of crimes that the member states agreed to. And so we accept that. We don't try a variance on that. But we have not seen that it is a hindrance to include war crimes. There could be the mass kinds of violence that we associate with atrocity crimes as a war crimes. I say it's not been typical. Now on impunity, we think that accountability is at the essence of this. Government leaders should be accountable to their people and they should be accountable to their neighbors and to international law. They don't just have willy nilly to do what they want to do whenever they want to do it. And we don't have quite frankly very many tools. It's going to be rare that the Security Council is going to vote to take coercive action and even rarer that that action is going to be military. We looked at Kenya. This was the first case that came up. We didn't even have the strategy laid out. It was a year before the Secretary General's report. I was just beginning my work. But it looked to me at least that this was something that could unfold into something very, very nasty. It looked like ethnic cleansing was happening. We saw large groups of people by tribal identity being burned in churches. It reminded us of Rwanda. We saw the ethnic differences in Kenya. We saw where this could go. We saw the very dangerous combination of dissatisfaction about a political result tied to ethnicity to tribal affiliation and looked very, very dangerous. So I said, look, we need to focus on prevention. We need to stop things. When you're responding, it's not gonna be very effective. And this is a chance to make a difference. Fortunately, the Secretary General agreed. Many other people didn't and coffee and on in his mediation in Kenya use an R2P lens. And when the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon went there, he did the same thing. And he went to the leaders of the opposition and he went to the president and he said, your people are inciting further violence. And people forget that in the summit from 2005, the agreement wasn't simply to prevent four crimes. It was to prevent the four crimes and their incitement. And that is very, very important. Because that's the first thing you can see or hear and try to do something about. When Gaddafi says that his opponents are cockroaches. Well, we heard that before in Rwanda. The Tertzys were cockroaches. When President Bagbo's supporters in Kotevar started marking houses by tribal affiliation, we said, we've seen this before. This has to stop. And it stopped. So, what do you say to these people? You say, these things are not acceptable and they're now our international criminal mechanisms. The ICC, the International Criminal Court, regional tribunals, you cannot take it for granted that impunity will protect you. And that is a deterrent. And that would dissuade this kind of action. And as long as you can deter it, as long as you can dissuade it, that's a lot better than having to send the Marines after the fact. And so that's what we're trying to do. So if we take away impunity and say it's sacrosanct, you know, if we say we can't raise accountability issues, that for us loses a big, big tool and a peaceful tool. Thank you, Dean Locke. If you'd like to respond. Yeah. Well, the concern that I have, of course, is that with the emphasis on anti-impunity in the context of talking about war crimes, you are always going to have in civil conflicts war crimes. And indeed, the less technologically sophisticated the armed forces are, the less likely they are to be engaged in a kind of conflict that will look like the rules of the Geneva conventions directly applied. And so the difficulty is that by stressing the notion of anti-impunity as crucial to all of this, you make it that much harder for people who have committed themselves already to then engage in any kind of peaceful process. The difficulty of low-hanging fruit here is substantial, where typically there is culpability going all the way down in these movements, where war crimes have been committed substantially by both sides. Or even when they're only committed by one side, the difficulty is that you have people who have already sort of in for a penny, in for a pound. They can't simply throw their top leaders overboard because they're sufficiently implicated. But in the very first act that they've committed in all of this, and that creates a great deal of difficulty in trying to bring about negotiated settlements of these questions. Just a small response. I think your point is a good one. But I don't think peace is sustainable without justice. And I think we need to move forward on both the peace and justice fronts. And in the end, that combination, I think, is the strongest. So it's not, to me, in either or situation. Thank you very much. We're going to have just five minutes each for some closing statements. And then we're going to move into the question portion of the evening. So Dean Locke, if you'd like to give your closing statement. Well, I've enjoyed the debate so far. And I hope the rest will be, I don't know how much, the numbers have gone down on the affirmative. But I appreciate the exchange. But I think it's important to remember that this is a school of public policy. And we have a fundamental challenge to public policy here. We have to find responses that work, that are legal, and that there be sufficient political will to support them. And I understand there are lots of theoretical problems with responsibly protect. But I know from personal experience there are a lot of operational challenges as well. And I think we have to recognize that we're at the beginning of a journey here. This is a very new concept. What is really unusual is that people are trying to do something about these things. And I remember the International Court of Justice's decision on Serbia and Srebrenica. And, you know, not being a lawyer, I can say, as a layman, as a political scientist, it looked to me what they were saying was, there is a responsibility to try. You know, you knew something was happening here. You had every reason to believe that the possibility of a huge atrocity unfolding was around the corner. And you did nothing. You may have encouraged it, may not have encouraged it, but you did nothing. And I think what we're seeing with R2P, it's saying one of the worst features of the 20th century, one of the worst features of human history, have been these mass spasms of violence against completely innocent people in Cambodia because they wore glasses or were educated or visited another country. They should be eliminated. The Holocaust, because you're a Gypsy, because you're homosexual, because you're Jewish, you should be eliminated. Rwanda, because you're Tutsi Nara Hutu, you should be eliminated. You know, you have to do something about that. And yes, there are theoretical problems, but if you are frozen, and if you refuse to ask the tough questions, if you refuse to try, because there are theoretical possibilities of abuse, you will do nothing. And you will feed that spasm of hatred and the killing that goes on from time to time. And we have to recognize every country, if you look back at your history, there were incidents of this sort. And I may be a little bit naive, but I believe in the idea of human progress. And part of that is finding ways to cope with the very worst parts of our nature, the very worst abuses of our government. And we have a collective responsibility to try. And that's what I think our 2P is. We have to be very aware of the criticisms. We have to be very aware of the possible abuse. But I think what often people see is only that little part of the third pillar on the use of force. It's been done once with Libya. We think the tens of thousands of lives were saved in Libya. Was the Garden of Eden created overnight? No, there's still problems in Libya. But we took very serious when Gaddafi had his forces literally at the gates of Benghazi and he said, blood is going to flow on the streets. We took him by his word. We had no reason to doubt him. And I think it's a good thing that the international community responded. I think it's a shame that the international community has not responded effectively in Syria. But that has not stopped the Secretary General from repeating again and again that there is a responsibility to protect there. But we recognize that the politics and the Security Council won't always make those things easy. We also know there are no simple answers. But to look the other way as they did with Hama rules 30 years ago. When President Assad's father killed tens of thousands of people in a fortnight, and no one said anything. There is no international reaction. That's the danger. You find with the history of genocide, the history of mass atrocities, it's when people are silent, when they look the other way, when they find fancy reasons for not acting. That's the biggest danger. It's not that people want to rush in militarily or other ways in these kinds of situations. The history is they don't want to do it. And the responsibility to protect is saying, ask the tough questions, remember that you're all part of humanity and try to act as best you can. And that is our obligation. It's not an obligation to succeed all the time. It's not an obligation to use this tool or that tool. It's to use whatever tools reasonably you can at this point in time because we realize that kind of carnage is simply not acceptable. That's not the kind of humanity we want. And that's not the kind of world we want. Thank you. Thank you. Professor Ralph? Well, of course, my answer to all of this is yes, but. And so I really do embrace virtually everything that Dean Locke has said. I'm a little bit concerned about the proof of non-abuse being an N of one. And so we are too early in the process to know about abuse. And even with respect to Libya, we have this very serious question of whether the mandate was exceeded. It was one thing to use force to try to prevent what seemed to be an impending mass atrocity in Benghazi, which, by the way, is something that I supported. But then comes the question of, well, what men? Do we go all the way to regime change? And is regime change really within the scope of the authorization? There's debate about this, I think, or not. And I think that by transgressing the scope of the limited authorization that we've created great problems, including bolstering the recalcitrance of the Russians and the Chinese in future cases, for me once, shame on me, shame on you, for me twice, shame on me. So the difficulties there are considerable. But I think that this is all a very constructive project. And all of what I have to say is as an internal critic of R2P. And my concern has to do with the way in which this rhetoric can be abused, and particularly the way in which the setup for this is likely to create abuse, not because the Security Council will abuse the authority, but because what will happen is that the demand for intervention cannot be satisfied by the kind of diverse international legal order that we have, which is dominated by competing conceptions to this day of what counts as legitimate and just public order within states. We have the problem, not all so far unlike the circumstances of the Cold War as people like to imagine, that you have very different conceptions of legitimacy out there and very different notions of what is an appropriate moment to intervene in these sorts of circumstances and where you have deadlock, which is just predictable, then people are gonna run with the idea of sovereignty merely as responsibility to create other kinds of realities on the ground. And one must always remember the potential for massive human costs to all of that. Furthermore, I wanna guard against a kind of caricature of the nature of civil war violence. Yes, it's true that there are these cases involving ethnic cleansing and genocide and so forth, and I am foresquare in favor of doing whatever's necessary to prevent those kinds of atrocities, but it's also important to recognize that civil wars are fought all over the world over the fundamental terms of public order by contesting parties that have deep constituencies where it become a cliche to say that yesterday's terrorist is tomorrow's statesman, but we've seen it happen over and over again. We've seen people who are considered to be criminals in one era, like the current presidents of Brazil and Uruguay, for example, become now highly respected and broadly respected presidents of their country. We have situations like El Salvador and Nicaragua where we have not had a settling of accounts, and nonetheless where we've had things moving forward in all sorts of improbable ways where basically people needed to agree to disagree about who were the heroes and who were the villains in order for any kind of life in the society to go forward. We have to remember that we have both within states and within the international community fundamental disagreements about questions of legitimacy and justice and where there can be no consensus, where there aren't clear cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We are gonna be stuck with partisan conceptions about what counts as criminality that people are gonna take as license to invoke the notion of sovereignty being merely responsibility as a way to ignore the fundamental territorial inviolabilities ascribed by the international order to the sovereign states. And of course, particularly in favor of weak states to guard them against potential predations by strong states that have potentially ulterior motives in seeking to impose their will to choose sides within internal conflicts. Thank you both. This has been great so far and we're gonna open it up for audience questions at this time. Our first question concerns Libya. Obviously, this is pertinent and on many people's minds, this is relatively recent and appears to be a clear code example. This is from the audience. Isn't Libya an example of the dangers of R2P? The big powers went beyond the mandate from the Security Council and imposed their political solution via regime change. This is the Russian concern. Don't they have a point? Dean Locke, if you'd respond first. Well, I think the question of regime change is an important one and needed us to say we've had a lot of discussions with the member states about that. Then going back to New York later this week for a retreat with the Security Council, I'm sure we have some more discussions there. And my response has been pretty clear. Yes, we believe in regime change in the sense that we want regimes to change their behavior. It's not about changing personnel. And personally, this is no longer the UN system, I can say we were not happy when the heads of state of the US, the UK and France published that op-ed or whatever it was saying that the object was to get rid of Gaddafi. We don't think that's the fundamental point. We think what you have to do is get a different kind of set of institutions in Libya. If Gaddafi were to stay, it would have to be that he convinced people that he actually had a different kind of intent. But we don't want to reduce it to one person. I don't think the fundamental question in Syria is whether Assad comes or goes. The fundamental question is mass killing. And we worry very much about the future in Syria, where there is no international intervention in terms of that small 12% of the population that's Alloite, other minorities there, if there's a change in regime and there's no stability there. So the goal of R2P is not to change the name on the door. That's not it. The question is to change the behavior. That said, my guess is that Libya is better off today than it would have been if Gaddafi had completed his work in terms of eliminating his opponents. You take a country like that, where you don't have well-developed civil society, you don't have well-developed political traditions. There are going to be complications. Nation-building doesn't happen overnight. It's a place where the UN has been deeply, deeply engaged, where we think there are a lot of positive trends. But there's still a lot of instability. We saw this in Benghazi, unfortunately with the killing of the US ambassador there. But things happen. And you can't attribute everything that's bad happened because of R2P. So it seems to me that on balance, it was the right thing to do. But were there some excesses in terms of regime change? I think there probably were. But there have been studies of the number of civilian casualties and other things. And they actually were remarkably low given the amount of violence that there was there. And we have to remember the course that Libya was on. They might still be involved in a horrific civil war if there hadn't been that kind of intervention. Professor Routh, would you like to answer as well? Well, I think had the foreign powers remained within the terms of the mandate, you would have had essentially a stalemate in civil war, which might have been worse than what you have now. But the difficulty is trying to evaluate the move beyond that. Because on the one hand, responsibility to protect is supposed to be about preventing the atrocities. But then the logical next step, once you've prevented the onslaught as well, now what do you simply then try to let the two sides fight it out in a fairer manner or something? And which sounds like it makes no sense whatsoever. Or do you try to determine the outcome of the armed conflict, but in which case you're into something which hadn't been agreed to in advance? And the difficulty with that sort of situation is breaking down the kind of system that makes possible accommodation over these matters in the first place. And we're seeing an outgrowth of that in Syria. I'm not necessarily convinced that the Russians and the Chinese would have gotten on board with Syria, even if they hadn't been betrayed in the Libyan context, but I think they do have a good talking point. And the Syrian context presents another kind of problem where you can have, with a breakdown of consensus, a situation where you have, as in the Cold War, intervention drawing counter-intervention. The assumption of so much discussion about humanitarian intervention is that the international forces can simply intervene to stop the war. That frequently is not the case. And in many instances, if you're going to have an intervention that is gonna be seen as illegitimate by other powers who are gonna take that as license to feed the fire by arming the opposite side, you can have simply an intensification of the conflict. So it's just unclear what the consequences of these things might be. At the same time, I was with you. I supported the initial effort in Libya and hardly have the solution as to what one gets into after that. Thank you. I have a question now for Professor Roth to address first. Looking at the recent examples of Libya and Syria, it might appear that the responsibility to protect is, to a significant extent, subject to the feasibility of the military mission. To what extent should practical limitations be taken into account in the face of grave human rights violations? I think, actually, that everyone is pretty much in agreement on this, that the issue that I'm speaking to is the question of the license for intervention. But the legality of the intervention doesn't actually over-determine the moral question of whether or not to intervene in one direction or the other. It may be circumstances in which it's lawful to intervene and there is a mandate to intervene and it's a really bad idea because what we can project as the consequence is going to be one that will increase rather than decrease the human cost. At the same time, of course, there may be circumstances where there is no legal authority and there is a clear violation of international law at stake. And then we have to take on a different question, which is whether or not, if we believe strongly enough that a massive atrocity can be feasibly prevented at a much lower human cost, whether, indeed, we have to sort of somehow weigh that consideration against the damage we're gonna do to the international order and the international scheme of accommodation by breaching the international norms. Those are very hard questions and I think they're on some kind of a sliding scale that we have to consider. And I'm simply wanting to say that the importance of maintaining the integrity of the international order is a critical element of that decision, not necessarily that it over-determines one's moral position, ultimately. Do you like a chance to address that? Yes, I would. I think Syria is a quandary from any viewpoint. It was a tough one. As Professor Roth said, I don't think the Chinese or Russian position would have been different if Libya had not happened. I sometimes wondered if Syria happened first and Libya happened second when things be different. I don't really think so. I think the calculations made in Moscow or Beijing don't have much to do with responsibility to protect, don't have much to do with Libya. It's just geopolitically something that matters to them for particular reasons. But what I think we see in Syria is this responsibility to try to do something. If there is no international outrage, if there is no international response whatsoever, as the case 30 years ago in Syria, that really is saying it's okay to do whatever you want to your people. We're going to look the other way, as in the Holocaust. People didn't want to acknowledge it existed. They wanted to look the other way. That simply isn't acceptable. But that doesn't mean we automatically have good effective policy tools in every case. But I think a political cost is being paid by the regime in Syria for the way it's acting. And now the opposition is paying a political cost because of the excesses on its side of the ledger. And these both sides need to be held to a higher standard than they've been able to perform. And it's interesting. The proposition tonight talks about intervention, including possibly military intervention. But if you hear these complaints, the squealing from various regime when their human rights behavior gets criticized, the very verbal condemnation is to them, intervention in sovereignty, intervention in their internal affairs. So I think we have to recognize that the term we use at the UN is not intervention, of course, we talk about engagement, degrees of engagement over time. And early active engagement is extremely important. The problem with Syria, of course, is we haven't had any way in. It's the kind of regime that doesn't give you any room. We've been trying to find ways of working with individual communities within Syria to try to build up some barriers if mass violence goes. Because we've seen in most of these cases some communities are not affected as much as others if they have certain things in place beforehand. And we just haven't been able to do a very effective job of that in Syria because of the nature of the regime. I can think of a few other places it would be like that today. But I think the good news is that borders are more porous than they used to be. Movements about human rights and atrocity prevention are much broader than they used to be. Communications is different than it used to be. And so the public engagement, the moral engagement in these kinds of issues, and potentially in most cases, the diplomatic engagement is much more possible than it used to be before. But Syria happens to be just a very, very tough case. But I think it's a lot better that people are trying to do things than sitting back like 30 years ago and saying, well, do whatever you want to, people. It's not our concern. You mentioned the Holocaust. And we actually have a thought experiment here from an audience member regarding World War II, if I might pose it to both of you. World War II involved both international aggression, i.e. invasion into Eastern Europe and the genocidal policies of the Nazis. Under R2P, would these genocidal policies alone have warranted full-scale intervention and the use of force on the order of World War II? It certainly would have justified intervention. You don't first go to military force. But clearly you would have had to go to that eventually. And I think if you look back, the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco in 1945, the Holocaust really was barely mentioned at all and that was by an NGO or two. Governments, including our own, didn't want to face that fact one way or the other. And people say, well, the UN was a response to the Holocaust. Unfortunately, it wasn't, because people wanted to look the other way and pretend it didn't happen. And that's the kind of shadow that I think is going to be with us over these kinds of policies. And that's why I argue, better to have early engagement, better to try to do something, even if you're unsuccessful than not. And that's fundamentally, but R2P is finding ways of responding and get as many people as possible behind that. If you had a UN, which you didn't have at the time of the Holocaust, and if you had been able to have the same kind of international will that you have now, there would have been all sorts of things that one could have done. Would that have changed the German program? I don't know. It might have, it might not have. But we know what happens when you don't try to engage those things. And I've gotten very interested in the individual responsibility for tech. And my wife, who's a psychologist, and I hope out in San Diego to help develop that further. Because in the end, it's not just governments and international institutions that have responsibilities, but individuals. And it seems to me the government's not black boxes. They're made up of individuals. They make choices. And these kinds of crimes are mass crimes. They require mass mobilization. So many, many, many, many people get involved in this. And they each make their individual decisions for whatever. Are they gonna stand up to hate speech and the signaling out of particular minorities within a country as targets? Are they gonna stand up to incitement? Are they gonna hold their own officials accountable? Are they gonna pay attention to these things? Are they gonna find it convenient to join the masses in crushing some minority? You know, those are fundamental issues and we can't pretend that our societies are immune from them. So when I had been touring around the government, touring around the world and these things, so many regions, they say with R2P is fine because it doesn't apply to us. And you remind them it's happened next door. It could happen next where you are. And it's not a coincidence that when everyone said this is all about the global south, that the secretary general's first speech in R2P was in Berlin to remind people. Professor Raul? Well, there's a line typical you'll hear in law schools among conservative law professors, particularly that hard cases make bad law. And I've always opposed that view. I don't think that hard cases make bad law. I do think that extreme cases generate bad dicta, as we say, that there's a tendency for fixation on extreme cases to give rise not to narrow exceptions that take into account the full range of possibility, but rather to use individual cases as a way of entirely seeking to discredit particular sets of norms. And so a situation like the Holocaust, a situation like Nazi Germany generally gets pulled out very frequently in many kinds of discussions, both in the context of intervention, the context of international criminal justice, as the sort of example that seeks to problematize everything about sovereignty, everything about non-intervention, everything about immunity, when in fact, Germany was an extraordinary case of a commission of pan-continental aggression, the commitment of multiple genocide, a legal order that not only breached the international system, but actually sought to and effectively did destroy the international legal order. And so one has to be concerned about examples of that as you know, applying to circumstances where we have a functioning international legal order that has particular kinds of mechanisms of response, and fundamentally the question we have in dealing with issues is how we address institutional failures at the international level, and that's a very different kind of question I think. The Rwandan genocide is another example that is typically pulled forward in this respect, and the important thing to note about the Rwandan genocide is that what was the failure, there was entirely the failure of political will, it was not the failure of a licensed intervene, it wasn't as though people were chomping at the bit to intervene, but restrained somehow by an international norm of non-intervention, the authority was open for any state that wished to intervene under those circumstances, the fact is that no one wanted to because no one had sufficient interest until such time as the French decided that they wanted to intervene in Operation Turquoise, and they did so in ways that potentially were infected by their own history of relationship to the perpetrator regime, and therefore perhaps then people disagree about the facts on the ground in this respect, but perhaps made things worse rather than better as a result. And so we always have to be careful in looking to the big, bad example as a way of reconceptualizing the fundamental structure of constraint on the exercise of power in the international system. You mentioned Rwanda, and that brings us to another question that I'd like to pose to both of you, and I'd like to give you the first crack at it. Do supporters and skeptics of R2P draw different lessons from the genocide in Rwanda? And by contrast, would they draw different lessons from the UN intervention in East Timor? Well, with respect to East Timor, the important thing to note is that the sovereignty of Indonesia that was claimed was never internationally recognized with respect to East Timor. And so East Timor was always a kind of sui genera situation. It was always within the scope of special UN consideration of concerns about self-determination and decolonization. The decolonization of East Timor from Portugal was thwarted when Indonesia invaded in 1975, did so terribly, bubbly, and imposed itself on that territory. And the international response to all of that has to be seen in that context and is very much within the basic framework of the self-determination and non-intervention regime that's actually existed in the international system. With respect to Rwanda, I think people do draw different conclusions and I would draw different conclusions to some extent and to other extent not. I think that on the one hand, the failure in Rwanda was politically very significant in drawing attention to the need of the international community to respond much more vigorously to these circumstances. It was a horrific embarrassment to the international order to have sat idly by and let 800,000 people be murdered in the course of three months. No question about that. But again, the greater licensing of the use of force in such circumstances doesn't actually provide any kind of guarantee that you're going to get more of the intervention that you want in the places that you want it. The problem there wasn't a failure of license, the problem there was a failure of political will. And as I mentioned, where there was the political will, that perhaps is the exception that proves the rule because the intervention of the French was at least certainly questionable with respect to its positive efficacy and one could go quite farther in speaking about how the French intervention actually gave the possibility of who to extremists to escape across the border and lead to further problems in the Congo that ultimately culminated in a civil war and set of mass atrocities. The drift that of Rwanda, the 800,000 people killed in Rwanda, horrible as that is, pales by comparison to some three million people killed in the chain reaction events that took place across the border in the Congo. After all that had taken place and people can disagree about whether or not operas in Turquoise actually had some effect in helping to bring that about. But the Rwandan case I think is much more complicated for in terms of its lessons for these issues than is ordinarily acknowledged. Dean Luck, would you agree with this assessment? I think there are areas here that we agree. I think I'd probably see it a little bit differently. I remember Rwanda rather vividly. I actually remember being on the 38th floor, Secretary General's floor, the day when there's so much pressure to pull the troops, the UN troops out. And one of the things we forget is how much this was related to Mogadishu and Black Hawk down and the attitudes in Congress and Washington about U.S. involvement in these kinds of situations. I remember the enormous, enormous pressure to find a thousand reasons not to intervene, to find a thousand reasons not to respond in these kinds of situations. That was the onus in those days. And I think we find the danger and the risk not only of acting, but the danger and risk of not acting and coming up with excuses not to act. And I think it's partly a question that R2P, in my view, makes you ask sometimes the right questions in these kinds of situations. And if you don't ask the right questions, you won't get the right answers. I remember very vividly the focus in those days was on the Arusha peace process. And Rwanda was a member of the Security Council at the time, feeding false information. This was a genocidal government about what was and wasn't happening. The UN didn't have the early warning mechanisms in those days. It didn't have the assumption that you should look very hard at the possibilities of this kind of sectarian violence. Instead, it was don't disrupt the peace process. Let it go forward. And I remember the enormous pressures first from Belgium to withdraw its forces, because remember there's 12 Belgian peacekeepers who were murdered trying to protect the Hutu moderate prime minister. And they killed her and they killed the peacekeepers at the beginning to show that they meant business. And assuming correctly that after Mogadishu, the international community didn't have the will to take any casualties in these kinds of situations. So yes, I think that if there had been a response for the protect in those days, if you had the early warning and other mechanisms, if you had a presumption like this secretary general does, that you have to look very carefully at the possibility of this kind of violence. You would have had a very different result. I was with Romeo de Lair a couple of weeks ago, who is a Canadian colonel then, not now general, who refused to leave. Three times, the secretary general Boutroskali called him, told him it was time to go. The mission was over. Three times he told the secretary general, no, I'm staying. The Western forces by and large left. The Ghanaian forces, other African forces stayed. I know the general very well, the Ghanaian who stayed. And he said, we have to stay to protect our African brothers. We don't know the numbers, but tens of thousands of lives were saved because those two individuals said they would stay, even though they were told they were supposed to leave. So that's why I get back to the individual responsibility to protect. If you don't think saving those lives is terribly important, if you have a lot of theories about why that's too complicated, you say, yeah, well, this is a tough one. Let's go somewhere else or do something else. But they said, no, this matters. And they stayed, and a lot of people are alive today because of that. Could you address Professor Roth's point that the eventual French intervention down the line ended up costing many more lives than it saved? Well, since I'm no longer at the UN, I can comment on a permanent member of the Security Council, I suppose. I agree with his point about their involvement with the Hutu side throughout. Some questions of perhaps behind some of the arming of the government, et cetera. Perhaps being a little more willing to look the other way. And yes, Operation Turkwiles, of course, was not under R2P, there was no R2P. It tended to protect the retreat of many of those who'd been most responsible for the genocide that then did destabilize the Eastern DRC. And I think all of this shows that if you had the responsibility to protect in place, if you had a doctrine, a strategy to carry it out, if you had wide international acceptance of that, if you had a Secretary General very attuned to that, we would not have the kinds of problems we have in Eastern DRC today. It's in the absence of all of that that we ended up with this mess. So you can't tie that to R2P. I don't think very much, it's a lack of R2P. It's a lack of an effort to really take these kinds of issues seriously as a high priority in national and international policy that allowed this to happen. Because we find with all these crises, and our little office that we had in genocide prevention and responsibly protect, we were asking questions that no one else was asking. We were concerned about things that other people were not concerned about. You had a lot of big departments with a lot of big responsibilities, whatever. But if you don't have people saying, our job is to prevent atrocity crimes, and that is job one, and we're gonna do that, it's not gonna be done. And if you didn't have R2P, it would not be done. Because no one would have that job. No one would be looking at the early warning. No one would be saying incitement is bad. No one would be looking at the histories and ethnic differences and things within the society. And no one would look at that course of events down the road. I mean, in Syria, we're very, very worried about eventual genocide. And probably the genocide against the Alawites, because the President Assad has used them in this way. That's an enormous danger. If you're just talking about peace processes and who should rule Syria, whatever, you're not gonna ask those questions. And by and large, those questions are not being asked. And I really worry what's gonna happen in the next couple of years there. Professor Roth, we're just about out of time. What if you'd like 30 seconds, 45 seconds to respond to that? Well, yeah, I'm kudos on all of these matters. I mean, I think that it's excellent what the United Nations has attempted to do in many of these circumstances. But the fundamental problem, particularly from the standpoint of international law, is what you can actually expect by way of exercises of such political will as you have or are going to have. And if there were the wholesome political will on the part of empowered actors to do what's necessary to prevent atrocities for purposes only of seeing to humanitarian ends in these places, yes, that would be a wonderful thing. The question is, do we have any evidence actually that that is the sort of political will engaged in these sorts of questions? And if we don't have assurance of that, then what we have basically are legal protections that deal with conditions of mistrust. As legal protections so frequently do. And so we have a continued significance of the non-intervention norm subject, of course, to the kind of consensus that is required for a Security Council chapter seven resolution. And in the absence of that, the important thing is to not use R2P as a way of delegitimating traditional constraints on the exercise of power across borders that we know from history have not tended toward humanitarian outcomes. Thank you very much to both of you. I'd like to give you a round of applause. I'm gonna turn it over briefly to our professional debate judge here to make some comments for the edification of the wider University of Michigan community while I get our electronic polling set up again. Thank you. It felt weird with that title, but I think that you guys are both fantastic debaters. If you, it was great. I think that the way that you framed the arguments, whether it's through the historical progress of the benefits of R2P or the potential problems and the use of examples demonstrates that the resolution that we've come up with here is a bit too simplistic to really what the R2P is about. So I think that there's agreement that we all probably, we have the responsibility to try and there's, I think in a consensus here that we need to act. I think that what this debate does is raises important questions about potential legal or political difficulties or operational difficulties of what the R2P can or cannot accomplish. So I think that we have turned, there's a trend in the right direction. I think that this is a demonstration of why debate and discussion is good because it might help us figure out how to come closer to an optimal solution instead of trying to polarize the discussion. So I thoroughly enjoyed the debate and I wanna see what the new results are. It sounds like you could be a diplomat. Maybe, I don't know. I'm in law school, so we'll see. Okay, so the resolution is on the screen. Feel free to vote here and make it known if the discussion tonight has changed your mind. And also please let us know in person and by email and contact if you learned something else. Maybe your mind wasn't changed but maybe your understanding gained nuance or texture. All right, I see a few changed minds up there. It was great to see. So, once again, I'm gonna stop it. Oh yeah, we see a dissenting vote on E over there. So while that's up there, I'd like to thank the speakers. This has been a very thoughtful and engaging discussion. I think that we tackled a lot of the nitty gritty details with respect to the theoretical foundations and responsibility to protect as well as to the implementation of the operation of these interventions or non-interventions. To those of you with eye clickers, I'd remind you to return them outside in the foyer and get your M cards back. And we hope to see you again in our next policy, forward policy union debate. It's going to take place on January 16th and it'll feature our own Alan Dierdorf and Thea Lee of the American Federation of Labor, Congress of Industrial Organizations, debating the pros and the cons of free trade. Thank you very much and thank you very much to our participants.