Responsibility to Protect in Libya and Syria: The R2P Discourse within the UN Security Council

The past five years, Northern Africa and the Middle East have been characterized by revolutions and civil wars. Today, we can see two major civil wars raging in the region, one in Libya and another in Syria. In 2011, the UN Security Council (UNSC) passed resolutions that would ultimately lead to a military intervention in Libya, with the purpose to protect civilians from the regime. This intervention was legitimized by invoking R2P (Responsibility to Protect) and since then, R2P has been a reoccurring subject within the UNSC. R2P has both theoretical and practical implications within the scope of international relations, the latter being demonstrated by the intervention in Libya. In this paper, I have analyzed the R2P discourse within the UNSC and how it differs between the issue of the Libyan civil war and the civil war in Syria. By analyzing meeting records from the UNSC, I will show that the discourse itself has changed, but that the lack of intervention in Syria, within the R2P paradigm, is mostly a result of a ‘cold war’ discourse between the Western member states on one side, and China and Russia on the other.