The tragic events during the 1990s in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo, as well as the recent crisis in Libya, have triggered a fundamental rethinking of the role and responsibility of the international community in regard to mass atrocities. The principle of the Responsibility to Protect maintains that although individual nations bear the brunt of the responsibility to guard against genocide, ethnic cleaning, and crimes against humanity within their boundaries, the international community must step in when the state is unable or unwilling to provide such protection. This book assesses to what extent the principle is grounded in international law and examines how international institutions, including the United Nations, can contribute to the aim of protecting victims in cases of mass atrocities.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Principles and Practice in Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2011, held in Wollongong, Australia, in November 2011. The 39 papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They focus on practical aspects of multiagent systems and are organised in topical sections on coalitions and teamwork, learning, mechanisms and voting, modeling and simulation, negotiation and coalitions, optimization, sustainability, agent societies and frameworks, argumentation, and applications.