Well, I'm delighted, Ramesh, that you have agreed to have this conversation, not just because you're a leading authority on the responsibility to protect, but also because of course you played a very direct role in the conceptual evolution of the notion. And I wanted to sort of go through the history leading up to essentially where we are today. And I wanted the natural question before we turn to the work and your role on the ICISS is really the origins of the R2P as you see them. And I suppose I'm interested in here is not just Srebenica and Rwanda in the early 90s, but also of course Kosovo. So if you could give us a bit of a sense of how you understand the sort of immediate and perhaps also the long-term origins of the thinking around the R2P. Sure. I think it goes back to Kofi, the late Kofi Anand. He was, you knew him better than, well, you knew him at least as well as I did, if not better. He was a deep humanist. He was the ultimate insider. The only person who began at the lowest rung and then went all the way to Secretary-Generalship. He was the under Secretary-General for peacekeeping as you know, at the time of Rwanda and Srebenica and deeply scarred by that to the point where when the inquiries presented the report, he was happy to authorize them to publish everything worse and all. And at the same time, he was extremely sensitive to the strength of raw emotions in the developing countries, particularly Africa in his case, extra sensitivity. But he picked up the fact that it was wider than that and that they felt as strongly about the NATO intervention in Kosovo on moral grounds. And I think that struck him, God forbid. So his initial speech in September 99 about the challenge of humanitarian intervention, which provoked such an outcry, led him to thinking, well, what can we do to bring this, all this together as well. And he convened some internal confidential meetings with David Malone at the IPA as it was then the first to get me, where they went back and forth about how to proceed. And I think the idea of an international commission may have come out of that. Now, David, of course, being a career diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service would have had entree into the Canadian foreign policy establishment. And it's Lord Axworthy who picked up that and said, well, are you serious about it? And then use his connections to bring together a package. And they obviously decided. Now, I don't know who were the guiding forces who decided on the two coaches. Mohammad Sanon, the late Mohammad Sanon and Dan Favon. In the meantime, you may remember, we did a major project at the UN University. Yes. On the Kosovo intervention. Yes. And that created quite a splash in the UN community. I remember my office in New York was extremely nervous at the idea of doing the project. And then even more nervous when in March 2000, I said, we'll do a project in the secretariat talking about that results. And I said, look, I'll be there. I'll chair the whole meeting. It's my neck on the line and said, okay. But that created part of the story. And I remember running into Kofi a week or so later. And he said, I don't know what you did, but people are still talking about your seminar. So I suspect that factor plus the fact that I knew Gareth from before. Lloyd had met in the connection with human security and he was fascinated to discover that someone had actually been working on the academic side on that, which at that point, people in Canada haven't really been doing. So between the three of them in Lloyd, Gareth and Kofi, my name would have come up somewhere along that line. And they brought together the commission completed it. I think they tried very hard. I know several women who were approached. They tried very hard on the gender balance didn't succeed with that but decided to proceed anyway, rather than delay it. And the idea was not to preach as the position. They made it a point. They never asked me what my views were on that subject and assemble the commission and I think they were lucky in the two coaches, obviously a lot of care goes into it every time. But they were very fortunate in this case, in the way it worked out in many ways. And in retrospect I think they were very fortunate in that they had three people who are unusual. That's Michael Ignatieff, Gareth and myself. And usually in the sense that all three came with a degree of intellectual gravitas. But with the capacity all three of them to write complex abstract ideas and arguments in a way that is accessible to the lay reader who's interested. And I don't think it's unfair to say that we were the three who drove the intellectual agenda. At some stage, we decided that we would actually take responsibility for writing the report. So again, it was an unusual, possibly a unique. We were an international commission in that three of the commissioners wrote the report directly. And I don't mean we tell others to write it, we actually took up the pen and drafted it. And Gareth, when Gareth, he then takes over and tweaks here and there, but we wrote it. So that's the origins and that's how it ended up the way it was. In terms of origins, but not clearly inside the commission. What happened in Rwanda. And what happened in Kosovo. More than separation. Yes, these two were the most crucial background cases that we kept coming back to. And in many ways we kept framing it. No more Kosovo's and no more Rwanda's. So how do we find a balance that allows us to find a way through this. And in that, the East Timor experience came in as well. As an example of a good operation. You and authorized with buying from the regional actors, etc. And the fact that again, Gareth and I in particular in that commission being from here were deeply familiar with that case. I think was a helpful factor too. So those, all those came together in that it was a working thing that we worked at a rapid pace. So that that I suspect is a background to it. At the first meeting of the commission. There was a sort of hint that the secretariat which was staffed by the foreign ministry in Canada Defeat. They thought that they might run the show. And it became very clear that that wasn't going to happen. Not just with the coaches, but with the commissioners who were there, it was going to be our product. One of the thing that they did that was very good. I think not only did they not seek our views in advance. They didn't direct. They didn't say this is what we want to come out of it. What they did say was it's your product. If we like it, we will promote it. If we don't like it, we will still publish it, but it's your product, and we'll wish you luck with it. And that was the extent of how intrusive, how much they were going to intrude into our discussions. So we kept them informed. But then never ever suggested anything by the way of what they would like to us. I think that worked very well, that it was genuinely independent in balance and composition in range of perspectives and in freedom to think through and to talk to whoever you wanted to. I wonder whether you could, having just set the scene in terms of the origins and say a little bit about the sort of central idea of moving beyond the notion of humanitarian intervention and using this term responsibility to protect and perhaps also respond to some of the comments, or not the criticisms, but the comments that in actual fact, that is just a change of terminology, but fundamentally some of the challenges are similar. I think your argument that there is a major difference there and it is important. And I wonder whether you could comment a little bit upon that. I also wondered in light of what you just said, I mean thinking about when the report came out and I wonder whether you had time to, you know, you thought about this of course very soon after that in 2004 on the eve of it we have the events of 911 and then a dramatic change in sort of geopolitical context from then on. I wonder whether how you think that influence the sort of struggle up to the summit in 2005 when you got this consensus document, whether that made it that much more difficult. I mean it has this concept survived through that period but it was a very difficult and different geopolitical time take from the 90s debate. I don't know what you thought about that. Well, let me start with that in fact and then come back to your question because in a sense it makes it easier. We signed off on the final draft of the report at a final meeting in Wakefield in Ontario outside Ottawa. And it was a sort of like a cottage retreat where we came together and really went through everything. Clause by clause, punctuation mark with punctuation mark. And that had some shall we say, not just free and frank but tense moments and discussions as well. But we went through that and I think they're the contrasting personalities of the two coaches were very important in getting that through one making sure that it was driven through. And the other making sure that this commission didn't fragment and fracture, and there was consensus. It's again an interesting thing to remember that it's, it's a report that doesn't just use boilerplate platitudes. It actually has substantive things that says very forcefully and clearly, but it was a unanimous report with all the range of different opinions around the table. So I think the two coaches were very important for getting that outcome and the commissioners I mean we had our own points of view we had a bottom line but we were prepared to listen. They hadn't just come to try and convert the other side. And that is late August, I don't remember the exact date but it's mid to late August the dates actually in the commission report somewhere. Yes, of the different meetings. Then you have nine 11. We convened a special meeting in Brussels at the crisis group headquarters with Garrett as opposed. And all commissioners who could were asked to come and attend to discuss the report in light of 911. So that would have been some point a couple of weeks later we couldn't leave it too late because we didn't want to delay the publication. And the both the coaches were there I went. And we did go through it even before getting to the meeting. We went through it very carefully, and we came to two conclusions, which were in a sense very heartening. We decided all of us unanimously that we did not need to change a single word in our report that we assigned off on that what we were talking about was interstate relations, not terrorism by armed groups. And that it was going to take our report off the priority on the international agenda priorities. That's fine. But there was no reason for us to change our report. However, it, we tweaked the coaches forward with some acknowledgement of what had happened. The substantive part we didn't change but that's where it came in. That in a sense, we let the thing lie. What was more damaging to that in the short term was not 911. Well, that had happened before. But more than that was Iraq war. Yes, yes, which comes after our report that was more damaging. So the 911 happens we published our report in December 2001. Then you get the Iraq war. And Tony Blair in particular, using the language of humanitarian intervention. And then the Americans more and more coming to use that because all the other justifications fell apart. Yes, yes. And that was damaging. And Garrett and I in particular, we wrote quite a few opeds at that time. Garrett with his access in the financial times. I forget where else he made a version. And I was writing for national papers like Japan Times and the Globe and Mail in Canada in particular, but also the main Australian papers and some of the Indian ones. And what we said was consistently that Iraq would not have met the tests that we had laid out for responsibility to protect operation. And the fact that we did that from the start. And I believe that cost Garrett his friendship with Tony Blair as well. But the fact that we did that from the start, clearly and forcefully, not using a code language and diplomaties was very helpful later on. Because when the passions tied down, and I carried the burden of talking between 2001 and 2005 to governments and leaders throughout this region in particular, but also more generally in the developing world. And remember, or you may not know, I was the one who represented the Commission, for example, at the 10th anniversary mark for Rwanda in the Secretary building, along with coffee and the Rwanda and Canadian foreign ministers. So I had in that period, a very high profile as one of the two or three sportsmen on behalf of the Commission for that. And we made the point. Look, here is what we said. Forget about whatever preconceptions you may have with this. Do you believe if you had had this already adopted, would it have been easier or harder or no difference for the UK and the US to go into Iraq. And that forced them to think it through. And that's where I think slowly, we began to win the war in terms of converting people to thinking well actually, this is both license but also leash. Yes, and maybe it might have restrained them a bit more. And coffee was saying that, also in many ways as well. So from that, let me go back now. There are two things at the start, at the very first meeting. Maybe the idea came from Mohammed because he was a commissioner on the Bruntland Commission report. But whoever it came from, there was pretty much unanimous support for the idea that we should aim for something similar. Where the Bruntland Commission had taken to apparently contradictory intention. Concepts and reconcile them with the phrase sustainable development. So we said, could we think of something that will serve the same purpose. While like sustainable development, still being effectively a bumper sticker concept. It's not a clip phrase, but something which encapsulates both the debate, which hints at the tension behind it, but also the reconciliation that we might. Yes. So we are conscious of that. Second, there was no doubt that several of us in the commission. Had deep familiarity with the discomfort throughout the developing world with the baggage of humanitarian intervention and the contrast between the mythology of humanitarian intervention as used by westerners. And our own historical narrative of colonial oppression. And frankly, I think that would be an easier sell today around the world, because of black lives matter, etc. But at that time, it still had problem. And the whole notion of white man's burden, etc, which kept coming up when we went to different places. Meetings in Beijing in New Delhi certainly in Maputo in Africa. It was a factor, but also in Latin America where they said, you know, they subjected probably to more interventions than any other continent by a great powerful neighbor to the north. So it was a powerful factor there. And the fact that we were very familiar with the inconsistency and double standards and hypocrisy behind that. And how the language of humanitarianism had been appropriated by the powerful to camouflage commercial and geopolitical interests and say it was for our own benefit. And then they had sent us a bill for it. So there's no question that a lot of us were very, very familiar with that. We wanted to not only did we understand the passion behind opposition to that. We were able to communicate that to the rest. And going back to the course of a project we did from UN University. One of my abiding memories from that is that when we convened the meeting which is still in 99. I think it was in September in Budapest. What was fascinating to me as someone who straddles both worlds. People from developing countries. And from Western countries actually came face to face and realized that the other side has strong moral feelings about that. And that was interesting. Also, so so we are very familiar with that that we want to avoid that. I personally don't remember who came up with the phrase responsibility to protect. Gareth says he did. And no one else has disputed that I have no reason to believe that that is not right. And I think he says he, he thought of it in the shower. I know that we tossed around similar things and duty to protect was one of them. And for someone who doesn't speak French, one of the fascinating discussions that was held in the commission with a lot of people who did speak French. Was that that the French version doesn't convey the same potentially negative connotations that the English version does the throughout the phrases. I can't comment on that but I know that we discussed that and that there are certain legal implications of using that phrase, as opposed to responsibility, which is much more clearly a political thing. So if you go back to our report, it's very clear that we want to do embedded in a legal context. But we never went for the argument that this is going to be a legal duty. A lot of genocide convention, for example. So that was an important factor there. But wherever it came from. And let's let's assume that it came from Gareth which highly likely is is the case. I started tossing it around at every subsequent meeting, it grew on us. And funnily enough, I, when I was doing my collection of essays for the last book. Last year, or the year before I went back. I first use the phrase in print in March. The question with the destruction of the bombing on statue thing who has the responsibility to protect a cultural artifact. That is part of the common heritage of mankind. Can it just be a matter of sovereignty. So it's an interesting thing that I said I used it at the time. And the question then became, what is the difference. I don't know if you want me to go into that right now. But before that, let me come back to that later. We then I'm an I wrote that chapter which is not a secret for the commission report. And we went back to look at the thing. One of the formative documents in my thinking and writing at the time was funnily enough a foreign office memo from the UK from the mid 80s, 86, I think, which talked about this and really summarize the argument against humanitarian intervention in three key arguments. Firstly, they said the weight of legal opinion is against such a right in terms of how the world has gone. Secondly state practice since 1945 argues very strongly against it because the developing countries were very firm in expressing the opposition to it. And third, the potential scope for abuse of any such right was so huge that they didn't think it was going to be accepted. Now this is 86 in the UK from office and then of course you have the cost of working from them anyway. So that was there. And I think it's, there were too many western analysts who are suspect with hindsight, supported R2P, because they thought it was humanitarian intervention, dressed up in more polite language. But once they took that position then not surprisingly, many people in developing countries thought well if that is the case why should we support it. And the leash part was forgotten. And looking back over it. The bigger problem has been not overuse but underuse. It's not as though people have been rushing in authorizing interventions right left and center under the R2P umbrella in fact it's been the greater criticism and I think that the more stinging criticism is that we have not been able to mobilize international support. In those cases perhaps we should have been so it hasn't in that sense achieved its purposefully. I think that argument also. And you may remember actually I think I first developed this argument for you. When I did that lecture for you to your house that I went through that and then published that as an article later on in my books or as a chapter. I think it is disrespectful to multiple constituencies. Starting with the commission. I think it's a degree of disingenuousness on our part that we knew what we were doing was actually made an intervention, but we were just giving it a spin and dressing it in a different language, modern dressed as lamb if you like, or whatever the other around might be better. I think it's just disrespectful to people from the developing countries who came around to accepting our argument that it was qualitatively different and I will come back to that. And I think it's just respectful to the UN community. I certainly never got the sense that coffee thought it was essentially the same. I think he accepted that yes, it is different. The language would have been easier for him to use to convey what he was trying to convey that there are two sides to the argument. And what we need is a new normative understanding and shared understandings of what it is we are trying to do. What are the limits and what are the procedures through which we have to go. To go back to his dilemma. It meets that you know, can we afford into this world to say that sovereignty is a tyrant charter charter or a shield behind which a tyrant can commit any atrocities and human abuse. The world simply will not accept that. But if you remember he went to the other side as well. Yes. He accepted any one country or any one coalition can go in. What does that do for precedents in the future. Does that mean that any other group can go whenever they like. And he was I think genuine in doing that. And this one recognized it and put it through the UN. So then what were the differences and I think that is key. So let me just go back to that. The first differences are political conceptual normative operation. Political differences are essentially what I've gone through already. The origins the history of colonialism. The disrespect it implies in terms of a deliberate spin either.  It's true. So if you put the political side aside and then think of the consequences on the politics side as well. If in fact we agree that it is the same, then that consensus will fall apart as well. Whereas the important thing to remember is for all the controversies. It's been contested conceptually in the academic world. But as a principle it has not been the contested or relegated as the lawyers would say, in the diplomatic world in the world of states. The controversy has been political with regard to implementation. Yes, both when we should go in and we should not and what limits and oversight should apply during and out of the operation. But the principle has not been reopened for discussion. So that remains. Okay. So conceptual is important. I think there's two parts in the conceptual difference. Firstly, humanitarian intervention recalibrates the relationship between sovereign states. Shunts the international community right out. International community has no voice no say no presence in this. If we the interveners decide that you are abusing your people. We have the right and we have the privilege to take all means necessary, including military force, either in singly or in coalition of the building to intervene and set you right. We don't need permission from the UN. That's irrelevant. We don't need to justify ourselves to the world court. We will take action. So, following from that, not only is it states against states and nothing to do with the international community or the UN, but also it is a license and only license. The international imposes no obligations on the interveners. It's a license and that's it. By contrast, R2P recalibrates two sets of relationships. Firstly, domestically, between the state and its citizens. And that's where the reconceptualization of responsibility comes in. If states are sovereign that sovereignty implies responsibility for the protection and welfare of the citizens against external threats but also against internal threats. And if states fail to discharge that responsibility. Citizens avoided of the duty to obey the state, and they can dissent, and they can do various things. In particular, Westphalian system, tyrants in particular, use the shield of sovereignty to suppress with as much brute force as they wanted to their own people. And therefore sovereignty had been corrupted into protection from citizens. Not protection of and for citizens by the state, the protection of the ruling authorities from their own people using any means necessary. We change that and I think we change that in a way that would be very difficult to go back now because that that is accepted all around the world. No government isn't going to argue against that. But the second thing we did was, we change the relationship between the state. And the international community as encapsulated or as embodied in the United Nations. Not between State A and State B. That we left untouched. But between State A, which is committing atrocities, and the UN community. So State A and all the other states that make up the international community, speaking in and through the United Nations. A number of these is present with humanitarian intervention. And it's quite a significant double conceptual shift. But the second part of that is, we said, yes, license when justified, but a leash also. If it's an RTP, then it has certain safeguards built into it. You cannot claim it as an RTP authorization and then go and act as if it will maintain intervention. Okay, so that's a conceptual part. Then the normative part. Under humanitarian intervention, you put aside, you break the norm of sovereignty and its correlative norm of non-intervention. And instead you talk about the rights and privileges of the intervenants. Under RTP, the norm is human protection, the needs of victims. Those in whose name you are intervening have to be the primary focus of all your efforts. It's not about your rights and privileges. It's about their needs and wants. The responsibility that places on their own state and should that default, the responsibility that places on the other states that make up the international community. So even under RTP, interveners have responsibility not rights, rights are with the victims. And also, if it is human protection, it's embedded in solidarism, the concept of international solidarity. The all responsibilities to fellow human beings, wherever they may be, or whatever faith or whatever gender, etc, etc, because they are fellow human beings. But if that is the case, it doesn't start and end with military intervention. It imposes responsibility to prevent and responsibility to rebuild. And my only substantive criticism of the reformulation into three pillars by Ed Luck and Ban Ki-moon, which in most cases works better. So I'm not complaining overall, but it loses sight of that peace building element, rebuilding element. And I think that was one of the factors that went wrong in Libya, for example. So that's worth remembering. So if it's built on international solidarity, you have to stay the course until you recreate it. Again, as in East Timor, I think is a good example of that. So conflict prevention, intervention and peace building. And finally, normatively, it raises a question, okay, responsibility to whom. Go back to Kosovo. Under humanitarian intervention, your primary responsibility remains to your own citizens and to your soldiers, to the point where you had three months of bombing, no ground troops. The burden of risk was transferred entirely. Firstly, to the Serb soldiers. But secondly, to civilians. They were prepared to accept large numbers of civilians being killed, rather than risk a single soldier of their own being killed. You can't do that under RTP. The primary risk has to be borne by the soldiers. That's their professional duty. The primary protection is that of the at-risk populations. And the second responsibility under RTP is to the international community. Both of these were forgotten, overlooked and violated in Libya. And that's why it's important to think of it like that. Yes. Because they did not accept oversight from others. You've authorized us, now stay out of it. And we are not interested. Then, procedure. That's a simpler one. Under RTP, you have to go through the UN. You have to go through this case through the UN Security Council. And finally, operational in the sense that again, if your norm is human protection, then your rules of engagement have to reflect the fact that the burden of risk has to be with soldiers, not with civilians. So that distinctive guidelines and requirements that come in. I think you helped in that by the fact that we had Klaus Norman, who after all was a senior military officer at the time, of course, for NATO. So that's a long answer, but I hope it clarifies the distinction. It's an excellent answer and very, very clear. I mean, you also in that answer have, I suppose, anticipated or provided a glimpse of how you'll respond to the issue of Libya. I mean, I was struck by, you made the point and I remember it very well that you and others repeatedly said that Iraq did not meet the criteria for RTP, but of course the initial reaction after the Libya operation in 1973, particularly the threat of Benghazi. I know Gareth as well. And I think you also wrote a piece, I believe, in a paper saying that this did meet the criteria, but of course, but of course the problem, you already hinted at afterwards. I wonder whether you can just say a little bit more about the way in which it initially looking promising and then in effect, not abiding by the original conception of the RTP, but also what long term damage that has done and whether, for example, some of the things that followed in its wake, the Brazilian initiative, for example, to try to act responsibly, whether that was something which already you had covered it as it were in the original doctrine, whether that was We had. That's my sense as well. We called it. Yeah, I forget which, which, which version called it what but one version called it legitimacy criteria the other version called it precautionary principles. Yeah, precautionary principles, I think yes. I forgot which is which. And we went back and said to the Brazilians and said to the others that we welcome the Brazilian initiatives, because it actually picks up what we had recommended that that it's something that the General Assembly should take up not the Security Council, because the development, the normative development is responsibility of the General Assembly, by the way, under the 2005 formulation, the authorization is a Security Council, but consideration and development. Ideally should be the Secretary General's office and General Assembly. I think what happened was this. When they took the resolution 1973. They got the resolution through on the argument and in the language of civilian protection. But having got that. Whether they had intended to all along. Or whether they changed mid course. I don't know that's something you'll have to speak to them. Yes, on the bay on the open public evidence. Notice that the chains in mind after getting 1973. Because to be fair to them if you want to be charitable they realized that they couldn't get civilian protection without raising change. But it could be that there were too many, there was too much baggage with Gaddafi too many countries had had problems with him, and they were going to go after him now that they had the chance. I think that was a crucial mistake. It may have come to that in the end anyway. But they were astonishingly dismissive and disrespectful of the African Union. When you have a group of African leaders who are mandated by the African Union to go to Libya meet the different parties and try and media between them. And just think of the optics. African elder leaders are required to seek permission from Europeans to go inside an African country in an effort at mediation mandated by the African Union. And that permission is refused. It was an extraordinarily short sighted and damaging thing. It was one that which they lost the support of the Africans by and large. It was a terrible mistake. It may be nothing would have come of that that it should have been tested. And then something that people have said to me repeatedly well, was there an alternative. Could we have done something else. And I keep going back to Iraq, even as of today. If you go back over several decades. The one period that was the best in Iraq's modern history was between Gulf War. And Iraq war. The through Saddam out of Kuwait. George was senior had the foresight to stop the troops, rather than let them engage in a massacre. He had some stayed in power, but he'd been defiant. We had the no flies on, which by the way was never authorized by the UN. The allies claim that. And there's just no stomach in the international community to challenge them on it. So you can argue that implicitly the UN community accepted that, but it worked. That 12 year period was better than the 12 years before or the 12 years after. Yeah, we could have had the same in Libya. We could have defamed Katafi. And fettered him inside Libya, stopped him from any nefarious activities. He imposed punishment in the form of rage and strikes. If he violated something. So he came back inside the box. Would not have been the ideal outcome. But would have been better than the chaos and the mess and the dysfunction. And the deadliness that we have had since then. And I think it has had a huge enduring impact. It's the Libya. Overuse of the authorization. That killed off any chance of effective security council action in Syria. It gives sufficient political cover. Now for China and Russia to veto as many resolutions as were brought forth for any effective action. And they were not going to be criticized after that. Very widely outside the West. If at all. So it cost us quite daily in terms of constraining our ability to take any meaningful, robust action, not necessarily military, but robust action in Syria. I think it set back the agenda quite a long time. And that's going to be very difficult to get back to now, not because of intrinsic problems that are to be. Because the balance of forces in the UN system has changed to the West net disadvantage compared to even 2003. And the ability of China and Russia to not just veto the Western agenda, but in a sense set their own agenda. It's quite different today, compared to what it was then so I don't think you're going to get back to that. In general, I think you and peace operations and peace building activities are going to have a markedly less liberal template now for these wider geopolitical reasons. Libya helped make it more palatable for the rest of the community to readjust to this reduced salience of the entire cluster of human rights and new Asian norms. So it's been unfortunate. The Syrians have paid the biggest price for that. So the thing to remember in all that is the basic problem and I don't know if you read it, but this was my answer to role in Paris, his big article in international peacekeeping about the structural dilemmas of our to be and I said no. The structural dilemmas are there, but they apply to any international use of force. You look at Afghanistan, you look at Iraq, you look at Yemen, you look at Libya, look at anywhere else. Whether it's UN authorized or not whether it's R2P or not, any international use of force is not deeply problematical. The unintended and perverse consequences are grave and very real. And with all this, some UN authorized one R2P authorized, others not even authorized, but the net result is that entire area of Afghanistan, westwards and southwestwards, all the way to northern Africa is in ferment is in chaos. It's impoverished. It's violent states have broken down. Economies have stopped functioning. That's the pathology that we have to deal with. So let's realize, recognize, it's not just R2P. What it does mean is that an R2P authorization in itself is not a guarantee of a good outcome. Good intentions don't necessarily make for good outcomes. To paraphrase, was it Brendan Behan in Ireland, I think we're talking about the police forces but you know, there is no international intervention. That is proof against worsening the humanitarian outcomes. There's no crisis humanitarian crisis so great that cannot be made worse by an outside intervention. And that's not just out to be but any intervention. Well, I think you sort of brought us up to what I was going to sort of finish on really on where we stand today and the sort of legacy of R2P. And I think what's a struck me a little bit. I mean, I do think I'm actually another positive is too strong a word but I have for example tried to follow these large scale you and piece operations in Africa. And one remarkable thing about that is that, you know, they're still at an all time high in terms of numbers. And I think, even though member states on the Security Council have said it's time to pack up and go home. And I do feel that there is a real sense in which there is still a kind of moral obligation and duty to stay remain where there is a prospect of mass atrocity crimes. And we had a conversation like this, not long ago with the head of the mission in South Sudan, SRS G David Shearer. And he was fatigued that I mean in when they opened the refugee camp you remember they had they present the protection of civilian sites. They did actually save tens of thousands possibly more from what he thought would be a certain genocide of mass atrocities. The link here I think to R2P is the sort of deepening sense and the sense that has been internalized I think across the membership that you know how a governmental authorities behave in relation to the citizens is a legitimate matter of international concern. It's difficult to quantify that or that are going to be acceptance and so and so forth but I do think it's real. And in that sense there is a legacy there in spite of this sort of geopolitical flux we're in now and these other aspects that you bring out. I'm not sure what you think I mean that is a major that isn't an achievement. Well, it is, but in a sense it's a good question to finish off on because it brings together several themes and strands. Now some of us are old enough to remember why the word interim was put into Unifil, the UN interim for Lebanon. Yes, we got a request, which I think the dominant sentiment in UN circles was we should say no, but for all sorts of reasons that we understand, we couldn't say no. So as a compromise we said okay interim to emphasize that is for temporary period to six months at a time I don't know what the current situation is, but for a long time the extensions were every six months. The other was this sends a message that okay we'll come in and help but if you're not interested in the diplomatic solution, we pull out again. But once we got there. The UN force itself becomes a stakeholder. And for several years. Unifil was carrying on the necessary tasks of local municipal government and offices registering birds and marriages. Land sales and things like that. And every time. The notion of extension came up. And there was any slightest chance that it might be pulled out. It's the people of the region who get together and say no you can't do that was going to look after us then. So there's that sentiment of wards. They are wards and be a custodian. Marry that to an incident from East Timor many years later. There came a point where the UN personnel were told to evacuate. Things were getting out of hand, very volatile, very dangerous. And there was more or less a rebellion. And a lot of people said, we can't abandon these people at the first sign of trouble and leave. A lot of people took leave from the UN and stayed on. And that helped to calm the situation. You go back to some incidents under classical traditional peacekeeping. General Premchamp in Cyprus when the Turks invade. And he gets his troops, unarmed troops at the airport and says, you're not going to come here. And the Turkish generals in here you've got to be kidding me. You don't have the capacity to fight. Well, I don't. You know that I know that. But we will fight.  And you will be killing the symbolic representatives of the international community. When that blows up, you think your politicians are going to accept responsibility or they're going to make you a scapegoat. And the fact that he took that position underlies every subsequent evolution of that history. Of course, without that it's conceivable that you would have taken over the whole pilot. I don't know if you know, General Richard, the founder of the IPA, had something similar in the 60s. At one point in the Middle East when he was with UNF. They were flying somewhere and some Israeli planes came and buzzed them and its captain says they're telling us to land. Because they'll shoot. And Inder actually said to the pilot, well, I don't take orders from the Israeli generals. I take orders from the Secretary General. You stay on your course. We'll see what happens. Now I mentioned these because there are other sides to that as well, including in Africa, where the lack of quality leadership has cost us dearly. When traditionally we have selected SRSGs and force commanders. We haven't paid sufficient heed to the importance of getting someone who can handle a crisis should one blow up. As opposed to satisfying donor requirements, political sensitivities, this and that and that. I think the entire Cambodia operation would have been different and could have been a complete disaster. Were it not for the personality of General John Sanderson. At that level, even as a military person, you need diplomatic skills, courage and military skills. I think the same was true. I think you're lucky in one prefer with the general number. And some SRSGs have been very good. So that is very important there. One thing that no U.N. operation now will be able to do and survive with the reputation of its SRSG and force commander intact is abandoned people. It doesn't matter what the mandate says. If you have a force there. Remember how Romeo Delay pleaded to be allowed to protect the people. Just 5,000 people. I've talked to him since and he paid a very heavy personal price for that. But he insists, yes, he could have stopped it. All you need is a small number of professional troops armed with the determination. Same thing happening in East Timor. Peter Cosgrove. Yes. And Mark Smith has his deputy, both of them are known from before that time. They said we are not going into fight. But if challenge we will fight. If the Indonesian military or the militias want to take on a professional fighting force with the mandate and the heavy equipment for combat. That's their decision. It's not ours. But we are not going to run away. And one or two early incidents, not major ones skirmishes. That determination was conveyed. And that was the end of that. So that leadership element is important. Yes. The internalization of the realization that in today's world. The UN cannot cut and run. Yes. I think that is important. And that creative ability to think outside the box and try and diffuse the situation with a mix of firmness. To try and find a way around. That is going to be very important. And I think that that is important. So yes, the protection of civilians. One way or the other with or without a coercive mandate is an important ingredient. Just as gender sensitivity now is an ingredient that you cannot take out of any peace operation. Regardless of what the language of the mandate might say you're going to have to be sensitive to that. And the idea that you and peacekeepers themselves can be extortionist or sexual predators. That is so anathema that I think the next battle if you like in this ongoing war will be this notion of individual accountability. It will simply be the responsibility of the truth contributing country under internal processes. This is something that's going to have to be taken up. Incidentally, one of the, I think, possibly the first major study from within the UN system on the unintended consequences of peacekeeping was again, the project we did. So I think there are major changes that represent normative advances as part of that cluster of human rights and humanitarian norms are to be sits comfortably in that. And one of the major responsibilities to protect is it was never supply driven. It wasn't a collection of countries with militaries to spare, looking for crisis where they couldn't have been. It was essentially demand driven. There were atrocities into this world. They come into our living room screens, instantaneously. They sit by and pretend it's not happening and do nothing about it. It tugs on our conscience. So what are to be does is it. It's the organizing principle for the international community to respond ideally decisively and in timely fashion and effectively. Not so ideally, we feel on this criteria. But because it is demand driven. Because we know that in the foreseeable future the world will remain a world of sovereign states. Human nature being what it is. Not all leaders will be responsible, gentle, responsive to the citizens demands, accepting of withholding of consult as time to go gracefully and exit the political stage. And therefore, there will be leaders who will use force to brutalize young people in those circumstances. A choice remains. We go in unilaterally or multilaterally in an ad hoc manner, or with certain rules agreed upon in advance. And with a built in leash function, or just a license to do what we want to do. And on all those, I think, in reality, because it will be demand driven, because people will react, countries will react. The choice is not between intervention and no intervention. It's between some version of our to P tweak as we go along, or back to in the lateral interventions. And there I think the balance is quite decisively on the side of our to be type, which is why they haven't abandoned the principle. They haven't gone any further in trying to improve it. But that's because countries still are shy of addressing this ahead of crisis was the other final advanced about to be always was. It wasn't detailed it wasn't prescriptive. All of us had, most of us had deep knowledge of the US system. And we knew that at the end of the day. It would be a result of political resultant or various factors in the Security Council as to whether they're going if so with whom, and the what conditions, etc. And we didn't want to specify that that in advance. But it's a formula for reconciling institutionalized indifference a lot of the old sovereignty or you know that or in lateral intervention. It's a formula for channeling a shocked international conscience into collective remedies within a normative framework around which there is some minimum consensus that allows us to act. That's an absolutely terrific note on which to end. Ramesh, thank you so very much for giving up with your time and sharing both the history and a very good sense of where we are today. I'm really, really very grateful and let's let's stay in touch and hopefully when the world is less were prevented from moving around because of pandemic will have a chance. I hope our path will cross again in some conference setting or some other some other. Take it. Thank you so much, Ramesh. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Bye, Matt.