Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect

From Words to Deeds

Alex J. Bellamy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136868634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book provides an in-depth introduction to, and analysis of, the issues relating to the implementation of the recent Responsibility to Protect principle in international relations

The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) has come a long way in a short space of time. It was endorsed by the General Assembly of the UN in 2005, and unanimously reaffirmed by the Security Council in 2006 (Resolution 1674) and 2009 (Resolution 1894). UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has identified the challenge of implementing RtoP as one of the cornerstones of his Secretary-Generalship. The principle has also become part of the working language of international engagement with humanitarian crises and has been debated in relation to almost every recent international crisis – including Sudan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Georgia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur and Somalia.

Concentrating mainly on implementation challenges including the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities, strengthening the UN's capacity to respond, and the role of regional organizations, this book introducing readers to contemporary debates on R2P and provides the first book-length analysis of the implementation agenda.

The book will be of great interest to students of the responsibility to protect, humanitarian intervention, human rights, foreign policy, security studies and IR and politics in general.

1
From idea to norm

This chapter provides a brief account of the evolution of RtoP from an idea coined by the 2001 report of the International Commission for Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to an emerging norm endorsed by almost all the world’s governments. In so doing, it makes two principal arguments. First, that from relatively early on it was possible to discern two strands of thinking about the nature, scope and purpose of RtoP. These strands of thought have continued to characterize debates about the norm and its proper application. The first strand is primarily concerned with persuading states to fulfil their protection responsibilities and providing mutual assistance on a consensual basis. This line of thinking tends to downplay the role of coercive interference (while admitting that such interference may be necessary in extremis) in favour of upstream capacity-building and other non-coercive measures aimed at encouraging and enabling states and non-state actors to pull back from the brink when episodes of political instability threaten to deteriorate into mass violence. Proponents of this view typically see RtoP as primarily concerned with the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.¹ The second strand sees RtoP primarily as a response to the dilemmas of humanitarian intervention. Proponents of this view insist that RtoP’s most significant added value is in the generation of the international political will necessary to avoid repeats of Rwanda and other large-scale conscience shocking episodes of inhumanity. While most of the world’s governments – particularly those in the global south – subscribe to the first view, most academic commentators on RtoP and the principle’s critics subscribe to the second, creating dissonance between what states have actually committed to in relation to RtoP and what commentators and critics either believe they have committed to or would like them to have committed to. These two strands of thinking overlap and complement each other (sovereignty as responsibility and ideas about humanitarian inter vention directly informed RtoP) but also depart on crucial issues relating to the centrality of armed intervention, the scope of prevention, and the function of RtoP. Some of these complementarities and contradictions will become more apparent in subsequent chapters.

My second argument is that global consensus on the RtoP was not a matter simply of norm entrepreneurs selling the principle to states who, by dint of the persuasiveness of the argument, agreed to endorse the new norm. Instead – and despite protestations to the contrary by some of the key progenitors of the RtoP – the nature and scope of RtoP was contested, negotiated and ultimately revised through the process of norm contestation and diffusion that took place between 2001 and 2005.² Key components of the RtoP concept proposed by ICISS did not survive the process: the ‘responsibility to rebuild’ after an intervention was dropped in its entirety; proposed limits to the use of the veto by the UN Security Council were dropped; criteria to guide decision-making about armed intervention was dropped; and the idea that absent Security Council authorization, intervention for humanitarian purposes might be legitimized by the General Assembly or regional organizations was rejected. The norm that emerged from 2005 was therefore quite different to the concept proposed by ICISS in 2001 and it was precisely these changes that made consensus possible. Therefore if, as I will contend in subsequent chapters, RtoP’s greatest strength is the breadth of the consensus around it, it stands to reason that the practice of RtoP should draw exclusively from that consensus and not from earlier proposals such as that put forth by ICISS and others. This view lends support to the first strand of thinking identified above and leaves advocates of the second strand either lobbying for amendments to RtoP or – much more common – confusing the RtoP that governments have actually committed to with the RtoP that they would have liked to have seen. These tendencies are particularly clear in relation to the way in which some commentators have reacted to the implementation of RtoP in the UN system (Chapter 2) and to the way that analysts and some political leaders alike have framed their responses to RtoP crises.

This chapter proceeds in three parts. First, I consider the main antecedents to RtoP, in particular the concept of sovereignty as responsibility and the development of cognate ideas in Africa. Second, I briefly outline the main findings of the ICISS report which first coined the phrase RtoP. Finally, I examine the background to the 2005 World Summit and briefly analyse the commitment to RtoP made there.³

Antecedents

Sovereignty as responsibility

During the 1999 Kosovo crisis, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote a landmark article in the Economist magazine in which he contrasted two visions of sovereignty. Traditional accounts, Annan suggested, insisted that states enjoyed the privileges of sovereignty (non-interference etc.) irrespective of the way they treated their citizens. But, the Secretary-General continued:

[S]tate sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined … States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice-versa. At the same time individual sovereignty – by which I mean the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in the Charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties – has been enhanced by a renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights. When we read the Charter today, we are more than ever conscious that its aim is to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them.⁴

According to this view, sovereignty entailed both rights and responsibilities. Only those states that cherished, nurtured and protected the fundamental rights of their citizens and thereby fulfilled their sovereign responsibilities were entitled to the full panoply of sovereign rights. As such, sovereignty as respons ibility rested on two foundations. First, the inalienable human rights of individuals.⁵ Second, the idea that governments have the primary responsibility for protecting the rights of populations in their care and that when they abuse those rights or fail to protect them due to incapacity, the international community acquires a responsibility to step in, in a manner consistent with the UN Charter.⁶

The immediate catalyst for the articulation of sovereignty as responsibility in the post-Cold War era was the appointment of Francis Deng, a well-respected former Sudanese diplomat, by Annan’s predecessor, BoutrosBoutros-Ghali, as the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in 1993. Along with his colleague, Roberta Cohen, Deng developed and advocated sovereignty as responsibility. In appointing Deng and highlighting the problem of IDPs, Boutros-Ghali was responding to both urgent humanitarian need and a vexing political dilemma. As wars became less a matter between states and more a struggle between forces within states, so the number of internally displaced people grew. When Deng was appointed there were some 25 million IDPs globally, compared to a little over a million a decade earlier.⁷ Because they remained within national borders, IDPs were afforded no special international protection commensurate with that offered to refugees and remained critically vulnerable to the whims or failings of their home state. A combination of violence, disease and deprivation contrived to make mortality rates among IDPs higher, sometimes as much as 50 times higher, than that among the general population.⁸

The principal challenges confronting Deng and his colleague, Roberta Cohen from the Brookings Institution, was how to persuade governments to improve protection for IDPs and find a way to navigate around the potential denial of humanitarian assistance by sovereigns.⁹ As Deng himself put it, ‘the internally displaced are paradoxically assumed to be under the care of their own governments despite the fact that their displacement if often caused by the same state authorities’.¹⁰ The starting point for sovereignty as responsibility was recognition that the primary responsibility for protecting and assisting IDPs lay with the host government.¹¹ No legitimate state, they argued, could quarrel with the claim that they were responsible for the well-being of their citizens and in practice no governments did quarrel with this proposition. Where a state was unable to fulfil its responsibilities, it should invite and welcome international assistance.¹² Such assistance helped the state by enabling it to discharge its sovereign responsibilities and take its place as a legitimate member of international community.¹³ During major crises, troubled states faced a choice: they could work with international organizations and other interested outsiders to realize their sovereign responsibilities or they could obstruct those efforts and sacrifice their good standing and sovereign legitimacy.¹⁴

To translate ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ into protection for IDPs, Deng and Cohen developed ‘Guiding Principles’ which were released in 1998. They worked with legal experts to define IDPs, identify the rights they already enjoyed under existing human rights instruments, place those rights into the context of displacement, and present them in the form of ‘Guiding Prin ciples’.¹⁵ The principles recognized that primary responsibility for displaced people rested with the local authorities but that access to international humanitarian aid should not be ‘arbitrarily withheld’, especially when the local authorities were unable or unwilling to provide the necessary assistance.¹⁶ They were adopted by the UN’s Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the UNHCR’s execu tive committee, the OSCE and the AU. ECOWAS called upon its mem bers to dis seminate and apply them. In addition, several countries (Burundi, Colombia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka) have incorporated them into national law and others are considering following suit.¹⁷

‘Sovereignty as responsibility’ focused on the responsibilities of governments towards their own population and maintained that effective and legitimate states were the best way to protect vulnerable populations. In practice, active protection for IDPs required an invitation from the host state and where that was not forthcoming, Deng’s arsenal was limited to the power of persuasion. Sometimes, persistent diplomacy paid dividends (for instance, Turkey improved access to displaced Kurds in 2002).¹⁸ In many more situations, however, diplomacy failed.

In the late 1990s, several academics, policy-makers and politicians in Europe and the US put forth their own conceptions of sovereignty as responsibility. For American policy-makers associated with the Clinton and Bush administrations, responsible sovereignty was tied not just to human rights, but also to security imperatives such as WMD non-proliferation and anti-terrorism cooperation.¹⁹ A key advocate of the American conception of sovereignty as responsibility was Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Director of Policy Planning in Colin Powell’s State Department. Haass argued that sovereignty should be conditional on human rights as well as a commitment to WMD non-proliferation and counter-terrorism. In 2002, he insisted that ‘sovereignty does not grant governments a blank check to do whatever they like within their own borders’.²⁰ Two years later, Stewart Patrick, one of Haass’ colleagues at the State Department elaborated, insisting that:

Historically, the main obstacle to armed intervention – – humanitarian or otherwise – has been the doctrine of sovereignty, which prohibits violating the territorial integrity of another state. One of the striking developments of the past decade has been an erosion of this non-inter vention norm and the rise of a nascent doctrine of ‘contingent sovereignty’. This school of thought holds that sovereign rights and immunities are not absolute. They depend on the observance of fundamental state obligations.²¹

This doctrine later became an official part of America’s defence strategy, with the 2005 National Defense Strategy declaring that, ‘it is unacceptable for regimes to use the principle of sovereignty as a shield behind which they can claim to be free to engage in activities that pose enormous threats to their citizens, neighbors, or the rest of the international community’.²² These views partly informed Clinton’s decision to intervene in Kosovo in 1999, and were subsequently associated with the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq. Inevitably, this association (especially with Iraq) had a damaging effect on global consensus about RtoP.²³

The debate surrounding NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo provided the impetus for Tony Blair to put forth his own ideas about sovereignty as responsibility. Shortly after NATO intervened in Kosovo, Blair gave a landmark speech in which he argued that sovereignty should be reconceptualized to take account of the transformative effects of globalization. As Blair put it:

We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations. Many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world … We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other countries if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure.

According to Blair, enlightened self-interest created international responsibilities relating to egregious human suffering. Moreover, sovereigns also had responsibilities to the society of states as a whole because problems caused by massive human rights abuse in one country could spread across borders and create instability elsewhere.²⁴ To balance respect for non-interference with concern for human rights, Blair proposed a series of tests to ascertain the legitimacy of armed intervention – setting in train a debate about the use of criteria to guide intervention which crystallized in the work of the ICISS.

The adoption of variants of sovereignty as responsibility by the US and UK attracted criticism, especially when the doctrine was associated with attempts to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Critics complained that the US and UK were abusing and selectively applying a partial account of human rights to justify armed intervention in weak and mainly postcolonial states.²⁵ Tellingly, however, such criticisms were aired well before sovereignty as responsibility was picked up by Washington a...

Table of contents

• Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 From idea to norm
• 2 Implementing RtoP at the UN
• 3 Humanitarian crises since 2005
• 4 An assessment after five years
• 5 Economic development and democratization
• 6 Early warning1
• 7 Regional arrangements
• 8 The UN Security Council and the use of force
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index