Web of Democracy

"I had a conference in Chicago that was kind of an insiders game to discuss and decide what some of the elements of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine should be so that the political extremists wouldn't get a hold of it before considered people were able to define it..."

- Richard Cooper, convenor, R2P Coalition, speaking at U of Berkeley Human Rights Center's 'International Conference on the Responsibility to Protect,' March 14, 2007

"In the development of any complex and dispersed social institution, the initiating stages, the prototypes, are the key to the future evolution of the whole. The initiators naturally become the experts in the field. They are called upon to advise in the setting up of the off-spring organizations, and they are the teachers and superiors of the personnel who staff them." 

 - Horowitz, David. (1969). "Sinews of Empire." Ramparts October, 1969

In 2000 and 2001, four out of the top eleven U.S. philanthropic Foundations that award international grants (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Hewlett, MacArthur) provided seed money for the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which produced the R2P document. The cheques were made out to the Ottawa-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a quasi-governmental ('arms-length') organization that receives and spends some $140 million per year from the Canadian government in pursuit of  foreign policy objectives. This is the network that they spawned to help advance and 'operationalize' the R2P doctrine...