“Utopian in the Right Sense”: The Responsibility to Protect and the Logical Necessity of Reform

Abstract

In this article I argue that the claims made about the efficacy of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) echo the pejorative conceptions of "utopianism" advanced by E. H. Carr and Ken Booth, in two ways: by virtue of RtoP's supporter's determination to claim "progress" in spite of countervailing empirical evidence, and the exaggerated importance supporters ascribe to institutionalization, which mistakenly conflates state support with a change in state behavior and interests. I argue that RtoP's impact on the behavior of states has been, and will continue to be, limited and that while RtoP has garnered widespread support amongst states, this is due to it having been rendered largely impotent through a process of norm co-optation. While both Carr and Booth criticized a particular form of utopianism, I demonstrate that both also defended the articulation of normative prescriptions that are not immediately feasible; to this end, I conclude by suggesting a potential reform of the existing international legal order that meets Carr's preference for normative thinking that is "utopian in the right sense".

Humanitarian crisis in Myanmar: Another failure for “responsibility to protect”

“…Currently the international community is witnessing civil wars or armed radical group activities (conflicts) in Syria, Southern Sudan, Yemen, the Republic of Democratic Congo and human rights violations in Burundi, Cameroon, Venezuela (Adams, 2019a, p. 5). Since 2014, many institutions have reported that while crimes against humanity, genocide, and pressure have increased around the world, the international community remained reluctant to respond (Hehir, 2017, p. 340). The events in Myanmar are described as ethnic cleansing, war crime, crimes against humanity, acts amounted to genocide by the independent institutions and mechanisms of the UN.…”

‘An expensive commodity’? The impact of hope on US foreign policy during the ‘unipolar moment’

“… 11. A notable exception is Bloch (1995). In addition, the Realist tradition has a long history of cautioning against statecraft infused with passion and moralistic fervour in the attempt to achieve ‘unrealistic’ goals, although Realists are not uniformly opposed to normative thinking; see Hehir (2017), Lebow (2003), Molloy (2006) and Williams (2007). Realists are, however, generally sceptical of hope, although the term itself is rarely used explicitly; ‘hope’ is conflated with optimism and/or idealism and framed pejoratively through the use of terms such as ‘delusion’ or ‘utopianism’ (Kagan, 2008; Mearsheimer, 2018; Walt, 2019).…”