Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect

Interrogating Theory and Practice

Philip Cunliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136848452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume critically examines the widely supported doctrine of the 'Responsibility to Protect', and investigates the claim that it embodies progressive values in international politics.

Since the United Nations World Summit of 2005, a remarkable consensus has emerged in support of the doctrine of the 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) – the idea that states and the international community bear a joint duty to protect peoples around the world from mass atrocities. While there has been plenty of discussion over how this doctrine can best be implemented, there has been no systematic criticism of the principles underlying R2P. This volume is the first critically to interrogate both the theoretical principles and the policy consequences of this doctrine.

The authors in this collection argue that the doctrine of R2P does not in fact embody progressive values, and they explore the possibility that the R2P may undermine political accountability within states and international peace between them. This volume not only advances a novel set of arguments, but will also spur debate by offering views that are seldom heard in discussions of R2P. The aim of the volume is to bring a range of criticisms to bear from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including international law, political science, IR theory and security studies.

This book will be of much interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, human security, critical security studies and IR in general.

1	Introduction
	Philip Cunliffe

It is remarkable how quickly the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ has suffused the language and institutions of international politics. Since it was affirmed by all member states of the United Nations (UN) at the 2005 World Summit – the largest gathering of world leaders in history – the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ would appear to be an established principle of international politics.¹

Beginning its life in post-Cold War discussions about how to cope with remote international conflicts and flows of displaced peoples,² the responsibility to protect now echoes in the chambers of global diplomacy, and is often heard on the lips of foreign ministers, statespeople, diplomats, civil society activists and UN officials and peacekeepers. The newly sanctified status of the doctrine of the responsibility to protect is reason enough for analysts and scholars to begin casting a sober and wary eye over the claims made for the doctrine. Yet criticism of the doctrine is rarely heard. Initiating the work of scholarly critique is the purpose of this volume.

The doctrine of the responsibility to protect appears increasingly to be the dominant framework through which the role of the international community is understood in relation to crises and conflict today. In so far as the doctrine has been accepted by states, the ‘responsibility to protect’ is also increasingly seen as a defining characteristic of legitimate statehood. At the core of the doctrine is the idea that states have to maintain minimal standards of human security with respect to the population on their territory. In the words of Alex Bellamy, in its most basic form ‘the endorsement of R2P [responsibility to protect] by the [UN] General Assembly and Security Council [in 2005] demonstrates a broad consensus that international society should be engaged in protecting populations from grave harm’.³

The new consensus on the responsibility to protect is often dated to the 2005 World Summit. As the responsibility to protect was explicitly mentioned in the official Outcome Document of the summit, this was understood to give the doctrine the imprimatur of the international community. The Outcome Document articulated the requisite responsibilities in terms of protecting ‘populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’.⁴ Such a task encompasses the state but also goes beyond it – notably when human suffering is the product of state neglect or predation. In such a case, these default duties of human protection may fall on to the international community as a whole. This duty encompasses preventive measures to halt conflict before it arises, through the use of force to halt mass atrocities, right through to international involvement in post-conflict reconstruction.

There has been no shortage of discussion of the responsibility to protect. In preparing its 2001 report The Responsibility to Protect, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) organised roundtable discussions in capitals around the world, including Beijing, Cairo, Maputo, New Delhi, St Petersburg and Santiago. There has also been plenty of debate over how best to implement the tenets of the doctrine of the responsibility to protect and whether its ideals are practicable.⁵ As the ICISS report was widely seen as the touchstone for the doctrine, the 2005 World Summit prompted a wide-ranging discussion as to whether or not the Outcome Document had diluted the ideas contained in the earlier ICISS report. Some commentators have asked whether the most far-reaching and radical aspects of the doctrine have been stripped out in order to facilitate global consensus at the UN.

Thomas Weiss, for example, has condemned the vision of the responsibility to protect offered in the Outcome Document as ‘R2P-lite’.⁶ According to Nicholas Wheeler, ‘those who were most opposed to the idea [of the responsibility to protect] were increasingly persuaded that they could use the language in the [Outcome Document] to undermine efforts to promote intervention at the UN’.⁷ Alex Bellamy wondered whether ‘in order to secure consensus, the concept’s advocates have abandoned many of its central tenets’.⁸ Michael Byers echoes this view, arguing that ‘In the search for international consensus, the content was stripped out of the responsibility to protect, leaving the legal constraints on humanitarian intervention firmly in place’.⁹

Others have challenged this view of retreat at the World Summit. Gareth Evans bluntly asserts that the Outcome Document ‘does not vary from core R2P principles in any significant way’.¹⁰ Alex Bellamy believes that even if the Outcome Document is more restrictive than the earlier ICISS report, the former nonetheless provides ‘a mandate for a wide range of institutional reforms and international activities’ that will further the goal of reducing mass atrocities.¹¹ In Bellamy’s view, precise articulation of criteria under which state authority is rescinded in favour of international action is a distraction from building and developing the consensus in existence, which includes building more ‘holistic’ strategies of engagement and stimulating new approaches to ‘human protection’.¹²

Whatever the merit to these various arguments, the fact remains that all these views assume that the doctrine of the responsibility to protect is a ‘good thing’. This debate tends to hinge on questions of whether or not the principle can be rolled out across the world and what compromises may be necessary in order to do so. The consensus surrounding the doctrine is also visible in international diplomacy. The basic ideas outlined in the ICISS report have been reiterated in subsequent flagship UN reports, such as the High-level Panel Report on Threats, Challenges and Change as well as former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s report In Larger Freedom (for the ways in which discussion of the responsibility to protect has evolved across these documents, see David Chandler’s chapter in this volume).¹³ The African Union has formally endorsed the ‘responsibility to protect’ as a concept in the ‘Ezulwini Consensus’.¹⁴ Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister of France, called for military intervention in Burma to force humanitarian aid into the country in 2008 following Cyclone Nargis and for intervention in Guinea during civil unrest following a coup in that country in 2009. The responsibility to protect has also been invoked in relation to the violence that followed the dispute over Kenya’s elections in December 2007 (see O’Connell’s chapter in this volume).

This degree of consensus is striking when one considers how the ‘responsibility to protect’ emerged out of the bitter controversies over humanitarian intervention. The ICISS project was explicitly conceived in the aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo war, which saw the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bomb Yugoslavia, citing the need to protect the ethnic Albanian population of the breakaway province of Kosovo (for a critical discussion of this episode, see Tara McCormack’s chapter in this volume). One of the controversial aspects of this conflict was the absence of UN Security Council backing for the NATO campaign. UN support was denied at the time by permanent Security Council members China and Russia, who saw the NATO operation as unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. As this episode illustrates, the claim to a ‘right of intervention’ opened a broad fissure between wealthy, powerful states and developing countries. Matters were not helped by the fact that the language of humanitarian intervention so strongly echoes the colonial-era discourse of the mission civilisatrice, which trampled on ideals of equality in the name of higher values and altruism. As ICISS commissioner Ramesh Thakur observes, ‘[Humanitarian intervention] conjures up in many non-Western minds historical memories of the strong imposing their will on the weak in the name of spreading Christianity to the cultivation and promotion of human rights.’¹⁵ Through building up and elaborating the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, the ICISS sought to defuse these antagonisms and restore the comity of the UN.

The breadth and depth of this new consensus on the responsibility to protect necessitates that it be interrogated. Public criticism of the doctrine was heard at the UN General Assembly in 2009, when the Assembly hosted an Interactive Thematic Dialogue that saw three analysts questioning the animus underlying the doctrine and its focus (namely Noam Chomsky, Jean Bricmont and Ngugi wa Thiong’o). Critical scholarly work, by contrast, has lagged behind.¹⁶ For all these reasons it is a privilege to introduce voices into this debate that reaffirm and extend the criticisms heard in the UN debate in 2009. The contributors to this volume break with the prevailing consensus on the responsibility to protect by taking direct aim at the idea itself. Each contributor addresses the question of the responsibility to protect from a different angle, and from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Outline

The discussion is divided into three parts: ‘The Responsibility to Protect: History and Politics’, ‘The Responsibility to Protect: International Law and Order’, and the ‘The Responsibility to Protect in Africa’.

The responsibility to protect: history and politics

The first part comprises contributions by Noam Chomsky, David Chandler and Tara McCormack. In his chapter, Chomsky sets the contemporary discussion of the responsibility to protect against a historical backdrop of Western colonialism and imperial expansionism. The responsibility to protect is often framed in terms of defending people from mass atrocities ‘by taking on the viewpoint of the victim’.¹⁷ Chomsky draws our attention to the ways in which colonialism has been propelled by claims of altruism and self-sacrifice made by the powerful on behalf of the weak. Chomsky gives us good grounds to think how humanitarian considerations may be instrumentalised and exploited, and how altruistic claims may mask more sinister motivations. Nonetheless, Chomsky points out that the barbarous behaviour of states has been checked by popular movements in the past and therefore he holds out some hope that the ‘responsibility to protect’ may function to discipline the behaviour of states, along similar lines to the effect achieved by popular mobilisations around the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In his chapter ‘Understanding the Gap between the Promise and Reality of the Responsibility to Protect’, David Chandler takes a different tack, identifying a paradox between the hopes invested in the doctrine and its practical effects. He analyses the genesis and evolution of the doctrine, and argues that the responsibility to protect has been promoted by virtue of the fact that it has allowed Western states to evade responsibility for the exercise of their power. While humanitarian intervention prioritised the rights of Western states to intervene in the internal affairs of developing countries, the new consensus on the responsibility to protect shifts attention away from the rights of intervening powers to the responsibilities of non-Western states for maintaining ‘good governance’ in ‘partnership’ with Western states. In this way, Western states avoid the costs of mounting immediate responses to crises. The focus on the responsibilities of developing countries also helps deflect attention away from structural questions of inequalities of power and wealth in the international order, and by extension the complicity of Western states in reproducing this order.

With Tara McCormack’s chapter, the perspective shifts yet again, to examine the responsibility to protect against the backdrop of the changing balance of power and structure of the international order in the twenty-first century. McCor-mack sees the responsibility to protect as testimony both to the (transient) power and historical decline of Western states in the international system. McCormack argues that the newfound consensus on the responsibility to protect fails to address the key problem posed by earlier debates on humanitarian intervention; namely, who is authorised to use force in the absence of consensus on the UN Security Council? As a result, McCormack argues that the consensus on the responsibility to protect is a shallow one, testament to the failure of the West to impose a new vision of international normative order on the world, despite Western victory in the Cold War. Tracing the evolution of the responsibility to protect through the controversies over the 1999 Kosovo war through to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCormack roots this failure to impose a new international consensus in the political weakness of Western states.

The responsibility to protect: international law and order

As the doctrine of the responsibility to protect encompasses questions of human rights, the duties of states and the use of force, many of the issues surrounding the doctrine are also legal questions. The next section provides several different perspectives on the relationship between law and international order as envisioned in the doctrine of the responsibility to protect.

In his chapter, Philip Cunliffe provides a critique of efforts to make the doctrine of the responsibility to protect a legally actionable duty. The argument proceeds by way of criticism of Louise Arbour’s attempts to render the responsibility to protect as an international ‘duty of care’. The argument is advanced that the perverse effect of the responsibility to protect is to undermine political accountability and, by extension, political responsibility. Cunliffe argues that the doctrine can only exist as an imperfect duty – one that no specific agent is obliged to fulfil. This poses insuperable problems of agency. As there is no agent or mechanism for enacting the ‘duty of care’, it is powerful states that will determine the conditions under which the duty is discharged. This means that the ‘duty to protect’ will remain tied to the arbitrary prerogatives of state power and national interest. In order to resolve this problem of agency, Cunliffe argues that Arbour is forced to replace the idea of law with the principle of ‘might makes right’. This ‘duty of care’ can also be shown to have regressive effects on domestic politics: the demand that states be made accountable to the international community ends up making states responsible for their people rather than to their people. Cunliffe warns that the responsibility to protect may become a vehicle for paternalistic state power (on this point, see also Adam Branch and Mahmood Mamdani’s chapters in this collection).

In her chapter ‘Responsibility to Peace: A Critique of R2P’, Mary Ellen O’Connell scrutinises the responsibility to protect from the perspective of the evolution of modern international law. In her view, the responsibility to protect continues to embody the ‘new militarism’ seen in humanitarian intervention. Like humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect carries grave risks for the preservation of international law and global order. Specifically, O’Connell argues th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The responsibility to protect History and politics
• 2 The skeleton in the closet The responsibility to protect in history
• 3 Understanding the gap between the promise and reality of the responsibility to protect
• 4 The responsibility to protect and the end of the Western century
• Part II The responsibility to protect International law and order
• 5 A dangerous duty Power, paternalism and the global ‘duty of care'
• 6 Responsibility to peace A critique of R2P
• 7 The responsibility to protect and international law
• Part III The responsibility to protect in Africa
• 8 The irresponsibility of the responsibility to protect in Africa
• 9 Responsibility to protect or right to punish?
• Index