Ten years after the formulation of the responsibility-to-protect (R2P) principle as a guide for driving international intervention in a country, it is worth making three points:

• First, as shown in Libya last year, R2P is the norm of choice for galvanizing moral outrage at conscience-shocking atrocities into decisive collective action. R2P repaired a broken United Nations paradigm and created a new policy template that repositions the global consensus between institutionalized indifference to mass killings and unilateral interventions based on the arrogance of power.

Averting our gaze from the Rwanda killings (1994) was an act of collective civic cowardice. Intervention in Kosovo (1998) by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was illegal but legitimate. Together, Rwanda and Kosovo highlighted a triple-policy dilemma of illegality, paralysis and complicity.