The ‘Responsibility to Prevent’: Strategies, Tools and Dilemmas of International Crimes Prevention

After more than ten years of normative development, there is now widespread agreement that prevention is the key constitutive element of the principle of responsibility to protect (R2P). It is still unclear, however, what exactly prevention means and entails in an R2P context. In short, the content of the so-called ‘responsibility to prevent’ remains sketchy and alarmingly ill-defined. Much of the emerging scholarship on the ‘responsibility to prevent’ adopts a conflict prevention framework and simply maps it on to R2P (e.g. ICISS, Gareth Evans and Kofi Annan). In other words, the prevention of conflict generally is seen as the best means of preventing the commission of the four crimes associated with R2P. However, this way of conceptualizing the R2P’s prevention dimension is increasingly challenged. Scholars and practitioners such as Jennifer Welsh, Don Hubert, and Edward Luck emphasise that the R2P deals narrowly with the prevention of four specific international crimes (genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity). This paper, therefore, argues that the ‘responsibility to prevent’ is best analysed through a ‘crimes prevention lens’. Drawing on literature from criminology and international criminal law, it seeks to illuminate the conceptual and practical consequences of approaching the ‘responsibility to prevent’ as international crimes prevention. How is international crimes prevention different from conflict prevention? What tools form part of an international crimes prevention strategy? How are those tools used? And what are the dilemmas that might arise from their use?