This paper offers a delicate understanding of the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle and analyses the status of this significant principle within the international law. The place of the use of ...force is evaluated within R2P doctrine. The R2P norm and the pillars contained therein will be analysed to set out the legal responsibilities it contains towards member states and the international community, assessing the legality of the responsibilities held by states towards its population in addition to responsibilities owed by states to populations in other states and the obligation from the international community to intervene. Identifying the issues surrounding the principle of R2P in international law and the message it delivers with what it involves and what responsibilities it carries. It also illustrates the importance of the evolution of the concept, and the advances evolving around the principle including the use of military force for humanitarian ends.
Novice Lee (‘Frank’) seeks world peace and thinks he has found it in the Liberal world order. He informs the Learned One, head of the monastery. Through their discussions, Frank discovers that the ...Liberal world order, despite its promises, offers neither ‘democracy’ nor ‘peace’. Turning to the Confucian world order of ‘all-under-heaven’ (tianxia), they find it similarly top-down and one-way. Finally, Frank and the Learned One, now joined by their brother monks and sister nuns, consider the life of the 7th century monk, Xuanzang. He inspires Frank to imagine a ‘worldly world order’ where humility and learning drive one's engagements with others, rather than what we have today: hegemony and imperialism.
How do rising powers execute normative resistance to shape international order? Contrary to the existing literature, I argue that rising powers are productive agents of normative change and ...international order-making, through the use of rhetorical adaptation to contest pre-existing orders. Rhetorical adaptation is a strategy and set of tactics that simultaneously modifies norm content, while reducing critiques of obstructionism. To make this argument, this article traces China’s efforts as a ‘norm shaper’ regarding the responsibility to protect through the inception, institutionalization and implementation of the norm in the landmark 2011 Libya intervention. China layers traditional sovereignty norms under the responsibility to protect, focusing and narrowing the emerging norm by fortifying the primacy of the state. While I show how China resists co-option into an evolving ontological order that challenges traditional sovereignty, the article also addresses the unforeseen consequences of China’s normative efforts that ‘backfired’ to permit the use of the responsibility to protect to justify Libyan regime change. More broadly, this article speaks to rising powers as agents crafting international order, and the process of normative resistance that occurs throughout the norm life cycle. I draw from publicly available documents and semi-structured interviews with Chinese foreign policy and United Nations elites.
A look at the duty of nations to
protect human rights beyond borders, why it has failed in practice,
and what can be done about it The idea that states share a
responsibility to shield people ...everywhere from atrocities is
presently under threat. Despite some early twenty-first century
successes, including the 2005 United Nations endorsement of the
Responsibility to Protect, the project has been placed into
jeopardy due to catastrophes in such places as Syria, Myanmar, and
Yemen; resurgent nationalism; and growing global antagonism. In
Sharing Responsibility , Luke Glanville seeks to diagnose
the current crisis in international protection by exploring its
long and troubled history. With attention to ethics, law, and
politics, he measures what possibilities remain for protecting
people wherever they reside from atrocities, despite formidable
challenges in the international arena. With a focus on Western
natural law and the European society of states, Glanville shows
that the history of the shared responsibility to protect is marked
by courageous efforts, as well as troubling ties to Western
imperialism, evasion, and abuse. The project of safeguarding
vulnerable populations can undoubtedly devolve into blame shifting
and hypocrisy, but can also spark effective burden sharing among
nations. Glanville considers how states should support this
responsibility, whether it can be coherently codified in law, the
extent to which states have embraced their responsibilities, and
what might lead them to do so more reliably in the future.
Sharing Responsibility wrestles with how countries should
care for imperiled people and how the ideal of the responsibility
to protect might inspire just behavior in an imperfect and troubled
world.
It is reasonable to assume that people working on issues related to mass atrocity response and prevention are concerned with addressing human suffering and harm. This does not, however, absolve them ...of critical scrutiny. On this matter, Didier Fassin’s (Citation2011, 37) framing of ‘the moral untouchability of humanitarianism’ highlights the difficulty of critiquing ‘morally prized social activities, precisely because those activities involve persons and institutions believed to be above suspicion because they are acting for the good of individuals and groups understood to be vulnerable’. That my article, ‘The Moral Untouchability of the Responsibility to Protect’ (Hobson Citation2022), provoked a response sufficient to merit this forum in some ways demonstrates the point. In that piece, I argued that it is important to directly consider the political and ethical dimensions of attempting to advance and institutionalise the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. Yet on this there is evident discomfort: asserting that states might have mixed motives (Pattison Citation2010, ch 6) is one thing, acknowledging the same logic can apply to academics and activists is apparently another.
In current discussions, many commentators express a fear that 'broad' human security approaches are being sidelined by the rise of the 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) and the 'narrow' focus on ...military intervention. An alternative reading is sketched out here, which suggests that debates over 'narrow' or 'broad' human security frameworks have undertheorized the discursive paradigm at the heart of human security. This paradigm is drawn out in terms of the juxtaposition of preventive human security practices of resilience, working upon the empowerment of the vulnerable, and the interventionist security practices of liberal internationalism, working upon the protection of victims. It is suggested that human security can be conceptually analysed in terms of post-intervention, as a shift away from liberal internationalist claims of Western securing or sovereign agency and towards a concern with facilitating or developing the self-securing agency – resilience – of those held to be the most vulnerable. This approach takes us beyond the focus on the technical means of intervention – whether coercive force is deployed or not – and allows us to see how international intervention, including under the R2P, increasingly operates under the paradigm of resilience and human security, thereby evading many of the problems confronted by liberal framings of intervention.
Abstract
The responsibility not to veto is the idea that the Permanent Five at the UN Security Council should voluntarily refrain from using their veto in the event of atrocities. There are currently ...three veto-restraining initiatives, one of them from a P5 member, France. Despite its importance in diplomatic and UN circles, this debate has attracted little academic attention. This is partly because of the difficulty to access primary sources such as the details of the French proposal that circulated among the P5. Empirically focused and using diplomatic archives and experience, this article intends to fill such a gap. It provides the most detailed picture of the RN2V genealogy to date while offering a behind-the-scenes perspective on how the idea emerged and developed inside the French administration. It then unpacks the French strategy, its motivations and diplomatic efforts toward the P5, Group of 4, other states, and nongovernmental organizations, and eventually makes four recommendations for the initiative to have a chance of progressing among the Permanent Three.
The end of the Cold War was to usher in an era of peace based on flourishing democracies and free market economies worldwide. Instead, new wars, including the war on terrorism, have threatened ...international, regional, and individual security and sparked a major refugee crisis. This volume of essays on international humanitarian interventions focuses on what interests are promoted through these interventions and how efforts to build liberal democracies are carried out in failing states. Focusing on Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, an international group of contributors shows that best practices of protection and international state-building have not been applied uniformly. Together the essays provide a theoretical and empirical critique of global liberal governance and, as they note challenges to regional and international cooperation, they reveal that global liberal governance may threaten fragile governments and endanger human security at all levels.
Abstract
The case of Myanmar has become one of the most glaring examples for the failure of the international community to realise the promise made with the adoption of the responsibility to protect ...(R2P) norm in 2005: 'Never again' has turned into again and again. A mix of unwillingness and inability to prevent atrocity crimes has in Myanmar over the past ten years led to several instances of atrocity crimes and genocidal violence against the Rohingya. Most recently, the military coup of February 2021 has showcased that the notion of an international community exercising a responsibility to protect the population of Myanmar against crimes against humanity and other atrocity crimes dissembles into a few states openly shielding the perpetrators, a few condemning and countering the newest cycle of violence, and many silent bystanders to the ongoing atrocities. This article discusses the role of the R2P norm in the case of Myanmar and introduces the different contributions that comprise the special issue on Myanmar and the failure of R2P.
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