se to humanitarian intervention, however, in practice it is difficult concept to implement due to the differing nature of conflict within states. Finally, I will conclude however that despite its conceptual limitations, in the context of 21st-century African conflict, R2P has had a positive effect on mitigating and alleviating developing mass conflict.

The emergence of R2P can be considered through the lens of the unparalleled violence of the 20th-century. Genocidal events within nations such as East Timor, Sri-Lanka, Cambodia and Rwanda are just some of the atrocities which demonstrated that the international community was failing on a fundamental level to recognise and protect citizens from ‘mass conflict’ during the 20th-century. In this vein, there is little debate surrounding the emergence of R2P, it is considered as a UN response to its failure in protecting the human rights of citizens’ from events of 20th-century mass atrocity. More specifically, however, the literature focuses on two main events during the 1990’s which became catalysts for the UN to formulate a more coherent plan for humanitarian intervention.

The first of these events was the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which, estimates suggest that 800,000 people were systematically killed in the space of 100 days by the Hutu majority government against the Tutsi population. Within this conflict, the UN fundamentally failed in protecting the Tutsi population in Rwanda from the ethnic-cleansing of the Hutu regime. The available evidence affirms this claim, as a small force of only 2500 soldiers known as United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) was sent to Rwanda in an attempt to alleviate the conflict.(Hehir 2005, p61) This small force however was a futile and unconvincing effort on the part of the UN to palliate the genocide, as, not only did they severely lack arms, but the credible warnings and shocking reports sent by the UNAMIR to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in New York were ignored or rebuffed, over concerns that the UNAMIR may, “exceed the mandate and endanger the lives of UN peacekeepers.”(Ibid) It certainly could be argued that the United States was particularly culpable and restricted the UN in its ability to act as the Clinton administration had made the conscious decision to stop supporting significant UN missions after the torture and televised death of 18 American soldiers in Somalia during a UN humanitarian assistance programme.(Oppong and Gritzner 2015, p60) However this has not stopped the lack of coherent humanitarian intervention in Rwanda being termed by Paul Kennedy as “the lowest point in the UN’s history” and “the single worst decision the United Nations ever made.”(Kennedy 2006, p103) The lack of action undertaken by the UN in the face of the Rwandan genocide sparked international debate surrounding the merits, legality and necessity of humanitarian intervention. Further to this, it raised the problematic debate surrounding unconditional sovereignty, questioning whether the international community had the right to intervene in the case of a humanitarian disaster. (UN, n.d)

These questions would yet again be raised by a second event w