Decolonizing the Responsibility to Protect: On pervasive Eurocentrism, Southern agency and struggles over universals

Abstract

Many postcolonial or critical scholars are rather sceptical of the Responsibility to Protect principle. In most of the critical literature, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is presented as a product from the West, whose liberal ideal relies on a perception of Southern states being potentially dysfunctional, which in turn justifies an interventionist discourse with neocolonial overtones. The problem with this interpretation of R2P is that it essentially ignores non-Western, particularly Southern, inputs on the concept, falling precisely into the trap that, many authors claim, vitiates Responsibility to Protect: its West-centrism. Building upon a mix of critical, decolonial, postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law scholarship, this article proposes a number of additional steps to decolonize R2P in an effort to avoid what Pinar Bilgin describes as ‘conflating the critiques of the particularity of universals with critiques of the idea of having universals’. What successive decolonizing layers expose is a negotiation process in which the agency of states from the global South in shaping the – still controversial – principle has proved particularly obvious. Decolonizing Responsibility to Protect, this article argues, requires critical scholars to engage in a contrapuntal analysis in order to acknowledge the concept’s mutual constitution by the West and the ‘rest’ and the deeper struggles over universals hiding underneath.

Critical and Problem-Solving Perspectives on Decentring EU External Action Studies

“…The large body of existing work in the post-positivist and post-colonial tradition of IR can serve as a foothold for scholars wishing to study Europe's role in the world from a non-Eurocentric perspective. However, critical perspectives are also criticised for their 'enduringly Eurocentric gaze' resulting in 'avatars of Eurocentrism' in critical and postcolonial approaches (Sabaratnam 2013;Hobson and Sajed 2020;Murray 2020;Toley 2021;Pison Hindawi 2022). As critical theorists call for a fundamental rethinking of the frameworks and assumptions that mainstream scholars have been using, the latter may be more deterred from than enticed to consider a decentring approach.…”

Civil War between the Ethiopian Government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front: A Challenge to Implement the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine

“…At the same time, it gave proponents of R2P reasons to rethink and build consensus on how the doctrine could be best reformed. The purpose would be to ensure its longevity and acceptance in the long term (Wamulume et al, 2022;Pison, 2022).…”