ELAC receives funding to continue research on Responsibility to Protect
Congratulations to Professor Jennifer Welsh and Dr Serena Sharma, who have received funding on behalf of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) from the Australian Civil- Military Centre for the project Prevention toolbox: Systematising policy tools for the prevention of mass atrocities.
The award seeks to advance the implementation of the principle of responsibility to protect (RtoP) by elaborating on how one of its key elements prevention can be operationalised in international society. It will build upon the findings of the recent ELAC research project The Responsibility to Prevent: Developing Targeted and Systemic Strategies (funded by the Australian Governments Responsibility to Protect fund).
The principle of RtoP has gained traction in recent years as a way to both clarify the nature of the international communitys role in responding to the commission of mass atrocities - genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity - and build the political will to act when these gross violations of human rights occur. This next phase of research will identify a focused set of potential policy tools for preventing mass atrocities, and will focus on three overarching questions:
- What is the range of applicable policy tools and strategies for preventing mass atrocities?
- Under what conditions are such tools most likely to be effective?
- What are the challenges that arise from using specific tools in an imminent or actual atrocity situation, and how might they be resolved?
For full details of the project, please see http://www.elac.ox.ac.uk/R2P/index.html
For more information on the work of ELAC see www.elac.ox.ac.uk
Dr Serena Sharma is Research Associate, Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
