WATERLOO, Ontario — The responsibility to protect is the mobilizer of last resort of the world's will to act to prevent and halt mass atrocities and mitigate the effects of sovereignty as organized hypocrisy, as Stephen Krasner famously put it.
It is our normative instrument of choice to convert a shocked international conscience into timely and decisive collective action. It navigates the treacherous shoals between the Scylla of callous indifference to the plight of victims and the Charybdis of self-righteous interference in others' internal affairs.
Libya today is the place and time to redeem or renege on R2P's solemn pledge. The people's uprising against Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi is tailor-made for it. Many have already been killed and a carnage is feared.