The announcement of the disputed 2007 presidential election results in Kenya on December 27th, 2007 led to what could be described as the worst political crisis in Kenyan post-colonial history. This massacre claimed over 1000 lives of children, men, and women, and left about 600,000 Kenyans internally displaced. The immediate and remote causes of the crisis have been analyzed by different experts. Thus, it is pertinent to note that remote causes of the violence are traceable to the advent of multi-party politics in the 1990s and it was manifested in different forms in different parts of the country. Although exacerbated by political feuds, the violence had its roots in ethnic rivalries and struggle for ancestral lands. The internal feud had been brewing for decades and the election results were the catalyst and immediate cause that finally ignited the conflict. This essay undertakes a cause-effect analysis of the conflict with focus on the internal and global responses to Internally Displaced Persons.
There is anxiety over the future of the emerging norm of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This anxiety stems from the controversial nature of the first test case of operationalisation of the ‘responsibility to react’ component of R2P carried out by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Libya in 2011. The article argues that the Libyan crisis reinforced the claims of states who argue that R2P is susceptible to abuse and this has made it difficult to act in Syria. As a way forward, the paper contends that regional organisations in Africa, led by regional hegemons such as South Africa, should take the lead in the implementation of R2P on the Continent. Drawing illustrations from Libya, the author maintains that South Africa should leverage its membership of brics and other multilateral frameworks to advance the African Agenda at the United Nations Security Council particularly with reference to the operationalisation of R2P in Africa. In order to be able to do this, the paper suggests a reappraisal and recalibration of the R2P implementation framework to give emphasis to regional organisations.
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