The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention

Abstract

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has come a long way in a relatively short space of time. From inauspicious beginnings, the principle was endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005 and unanimously reaffirmed by the Security Council in 2006 (Resolution 1674). However, the principle remains hotly contested primarily because of its association with humanitarian intervention and the pervasive belief that its principal aim is to create a pathway for the legitimization of unilateral military intervention. This article sets forth the argument that a deepening consensus on R2P is dependent on its dissociation from the politics of humanitarian intervention and suggests that one way of doing this is by abandoning the search for criteria for decision‐making about the use of force, one of the centre pieces of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001 report that coined the phrase R2P. Criteria were never likely to win international support, the article maintains, and were less likely to improve decision‐making on how best to respond to major humanitarian crises. Nevertheless, R2P can make an important contribution to thinking about the problem of military intervention by mitigating potential ‘moral hazards’, overcoming the tendency of international actors to focus exclusively on military methods and giving impetus to efforts to operationalize protection in the field.

“Responsibility while Protecting”: Reforming R2P Implementation

“…To date, few efforts have been made to further specify criteria beyond these and towards the direction of specific trigger thresholds. 64 While some, notably Bellamy, are critical of establishing more precise guidelines for R2P implementation 65 in the logic of a potential R2P-RwP synthesis, this issue is important for both sides of the original debate. For those primarily concerned with effective protection, enhanced criteria will strengthen arguments for measures in cases where Security Council members remain uninterested, increasing the political costs of neglect.…”

Human Rights Protection in Global Politics

“…This policy idea finds its counterpart in the work of philosophers such as David Miller (2009), who says that when one speaks of an international responsibility to protect human rights, one is talking specifically about the worst and largest-scale humanitarian disasters such as famine or mass forced displacement, and not about rights that go beyond this 'core' such as ordinary civil-political rights. Three of the main overall characteristics of the R2P policy framework are: (1) its identification of states as dutybearers, (2) its predominant focus on intervention in the affairs of other states in order to 'protect' individuals, (3) its focus on large-scale mass atrocities as constituting the circumstances in which such a responsibility is activated (Evans 2006(Evans -2007Bellamy 2008;. These are not entirely independent and separate elements.…”

The EU’s Affair with Kosovo

“…The sacrosanct principle of a state's exclusive sovereignty over its territory-and the people living there-has come under question. While chiefly explained as "a humanitarian intervention", the air strikes quickly led to development of the concept Responsibility to Protect (Bellamy 2008).…”