Serena Sharma - Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect: The Case of Kenya

This book provides an account of how the responsibility to protect (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) were applied in Kenya.

In the aftermath of the disputed presidential election on 27 December 2007, Kenya descended into its worst crisis since independence. The 200708 post- election crisis in Kenya was among the first cases in which there was an appeal to both the responsibility to protect and a responsibility to prosecute. Despite efforts to ensure compatibility between R2P and the ICC, the two were far from coherent in this case, as the measures designed to protect the population in Kenya undermined the efforts to prosecute perpetrators. This book will highlight how the African Union-sponsored mediation process effectively brought an end to eight weeks of bloodshed, while simultaneously entrenching those involved in orchestrating the violence. Having secured positions of power, politicians bearing responsibility for the violence set out to block prosecutions at both the domestic and international levels, eventually leading to the cases against them unravelling. As this book will reveal, by utilising the machinery of the state as a shield against prosecution, the Government of Kenya reverted to an approach to sovereignty that both R2P and the ICC were specifically designed to counteract.

This book will be of interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, African politics, war and conflict studies and IR/Security Studies in general.

Serena K. Sharma is a Fellow in Global Politics at the London School of Economics (LSE), UK, and a Senior Fellow of the R2P Global Scholars Network.

Series Editors:
Alex J. Bellamy
Griffith University
Sara E. Davies
Griffith University
and
Monica Serrano
The City University of New York

The aim of this book series is to gather the best new thinking about the Responsibility to Protect into a core set of volumes that provides a definitive account of the principle, its implementation, and its role in crises, that reflects a plurality of views and regional perspectives.

Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect
From words to deeds
Alex J. Bellamy

The Responsibility to Protect
Norms, laws and international politics
Ramesh Thakur

Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect
Security and human rights
Cristina G. Badescu

Sri Lanka and the Responsibility to Protect
Politics, ethnicity, genocide
Damien Kingsbury

International Responsibility and Grave Humanitarian Crises
Collective provision for human security
Hannes Peltonen

Global Justice, Kant and the Responsibility to Protect
A provisional duty
Heather M. Roff

International Organizations and the Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect
The humanitarian crisis in Syria
Edited by Daniel Silander and Don Wallace

Moral Responsibility, Statecraft, and Humanitarian Intervention
The US response to Rwanda, Darfur, and Libya
Cathinka Vik

Reassessing the Responsibility to Protect
Conceptual and operational challenges
Edited by Brett R. OBannon

The Responsibility to Protect and the International Criminal Court
Protection and prosecution in Kenya
Serena K. Sharma