In the shadow of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the Srebrenica massacre, the world made a promise that never again would mass atrocities unfold while the international community stood by. That promise took institutional form in the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), endorsed unanimously at the 2005 United Nations World Summit.

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Two decades later, that promise is fraying, and dangerously so.

R2P was meant to redefine sovereignty. No longer an absolute shield, it became a conditional responsibility: states must protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. If they fail, the responsibility shifts outward, to the international community.

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It was an elegant idea. For me and other keen observers of what happens to the Congolese Tutsi in eastern DR Congo, the R2P we applauded remains a fragile one.

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The early test case came in Libya in 2011. Acting under the authority of the United Nations Security Council, international forces intervened to prevent mass killings allegedly threatened by Muammar Gaddafi. For a brief moment, R2P appeared to work: swift action, legal backing, and a clear humanitarian objective.

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However, the aftermath told a different story. Libya’s collapse into prolonged instability still raises uncomfortable questions about whether R2P was stretched beyond civilian protection into regime change. For many states, particularly in the global south, this was not a success story, but a cautionary tale.

If Libya dented R2P’s credibility, Syria shattered it.

For over a decade, the Syrian conflict has produced some of the most documented atrocities in modern history. Yet the international response has been paralysed, largely due to divisions among major powers within the Security Council. The same institution that authorised intervention in Libya proved incapable of acting in Syria or eastern DR Congo.

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This inconsistency is not a footnote. It is the central problem that nobody wants to talk about. And when the institution debates about the situation in DR Congo very little is raised about the vulnerable Congolese Tutsi citizens whose persecution is widely known and reported. Such a silence at the UNSC and the Geneva based Human Rights Council encourages the abusers (Congolese officials, hired Burundian troops, Mercenaries, Wazalendo and genocidal FDLR militia) to continue their activities unabated.

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From Myanmar to South Sudan, and now Sudan, the pattern has repeated itself: strong rhetoric, limited action, and a widening gap between principle and practice. R2P is invoked selectively, often where geopolitical costs are low and ignored where they are high.

The result is a doctrine that risks being seen less as a universal commitment and more as a discretionary tool.

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Clearly, the failure of R2P is not conceptual but political. The principle itself remains compelling. Few, today, would openly argue that sovereignty should protect governments that commit mass atrocities against their own people. The problem lies in implementation, where moral clarity collides with strategic interests of the few powers in this world.

Major powers continue to treat humanitarian crises through the lens of rivalry and influence. Intervention is weighed not only against human cost, but against geopolitical risk. In such a system, consistency becomes impossible while multilateralism silently but surely dies the same way the UNSC resolutions remain dead letter in UN drawers for lack of enforcement.

Yet abandoning R2P is not an option. The alternative is not a more stable world, but a more permissive one, where the threshold for inaction is lowered and the consequences for perpetrators are diminished.

Instead, the challenge is to rethink how R2P operates in a more divided and complex international order.

First, there must be a shift from reaction to prevention. R2P was never intended to be synonymous with military intervention. Its strongest pillar lies in early action: diplomacy, mediation, targeted sanctions and support for institutional resilience. These tools are less dramatic, but often more effective if properly chosen and applied.

Second, accountability must extend beyond local actors. External enablers, those who finance, arm or politically shield perpetrators, rarely face meaningful consequences. And they are known. Without addressing these networks, efforts to protect civilians will remain incomplete.

Finally, the credibility of R2P depends on consistency. This does not mean identical responses to every crisis, but it does require a principled baseline: that mass atrocities trigger serious, coordinated international engagement, regardless of where they occur.

The R2P doctrine was born out of failure. It was an attempt to ensure that the horrors of Rwanda and Srebrenica would not be repeated through indifference or delay. It also emerged in response to repeated warnings about alarming events in eastern DR Congo, where violence against civilians has often been justified along lines of colonially manufactured and inherited ethnic divisions—rather than recognizing those affected for what they are: human beings with an equal right to protection.

Today, the danger is not that the world has forgotten those lessons. It is that it has learned to live with ignoring them.

R2P’s greatest test is not whether it can justify intervention. It is whether it can compel action before intervention becomes the only option.

So far, the record is not encouraging. Qui vivra verra!

The writer is a political and diplomatic analyst specialising on Africa and countries of the Great Lakes Region.