International Law and The Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

In the UN, there is a doctrine called the Responsibility to Protect that allows the blue helmets from the UN to intervene in a country if a country violates international human rights laws. This doctrine was created to aid refugees and the international community when their own countries abuse power and, as a result, them. My question was what determines when the UN decides to intervene under R2P. My hypotheses theorized that GDP, nuclear weapons, or race demographics must influence the verdict of when the UN intervenes. I thought that countries that had a higher GDP probably had a lower chance of being intervened even if they had committed humanitarian crimes. I also figured that any country with nukes would have high unlikeliness to be intervened upon, and finally, I hypothesized that countries with a white majority population were less likely to be intervened in. I found that a combination of portions from all three hypotheses was ultimately correct. Of the countries I tested most countries that had been intervened in under R2P were poorer than countries that had not been protected by the UN despite being guilty of similar injustices. My second hypothesis was arguably arbitrary since no country that owns a nuke has been intervened in by the UN. Lastly, the countries I tested for their race demographics were mainly non-white countries, and, therefore, the countries that had and had not been intervened in under R2P were isolated from the race debate.