IDRC governor Andrew Knight has been named executive director of the new Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.
The Manhattan-based independent research and advocacy body is dedicated to ensuring effective global responses to genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Launched at the United Nations headquarters in New York in February, the centre will serve as an information clearinghouse and resource for governments, international institutions, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) fighting mass atrocities.
The idea for the centre grew out of the groundbreaking Responsibility to Protect principle, which states that if countries fail to protect their own people, other countries have the moral responsibility to intervene, even if it means using military force. The concept was adopted unanimously by government heads at the 2005 World Summit.
The centre will generate research, conduct high-level advocacy efforts, and support the activities of both governments and NGOs around the world working to advance and implement the Responsibility to Protect principle.
Knight has had a distinguished academic career, and is currently a professor of political science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He will join the centre full time in July.
Inaugural patrons of the center include Canadians Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Senator Romeo Dallaire, who headed the ill-fated United Nations peacekeeping force for Rwanda between 1993 and 1994 during the Rwanda genocide. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Jordan’s Prince El Hassan bin Talal, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu will also serve as patrons.
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Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is one of the world’s leading institutions in the generation and application of new knowledge to meet the challenges of international development. For more than 37 years, IDRC has worked in close collaboration with researchers from the developing world to build healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous societies.
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