Abstract
Abstract Selective humanitarianism, it has been argued, may be condonable, or even preferable. Several arguments have been proffered in support of these views. This article revisits these arguments in light of the emergence of a discourse of protection and responsibility that now incorporates a wider spectrum of protection measures available to agents, of which armed intervention is but one. Consistency is an essential characteristic of ethics and the law—inconsistent practice diminishes the prospects of the development of norms of protection and associated practices and institutions. Furthermore, inconsistent practice means that fewer people receive protection from egregious violations of human rights. If the principles associated with human protection and humanitarianism are to become established norms of international society, international policy must be coherent, and international practice must be consistent.
Highlights
The present discourse of responsibility suggests that, when states disintegrate and societies break apart, international actors have a collective responsibility to provide protection where governments no longer do
Consistency is an essential characteristic of ethics and the law—inconsistent practice diminishes the prospects of the development of norms of protection and associated practices and institutions
Given that an aspiration toward consistency appears to be innate in our moral grammar, it is somewhat surprising that the normative scholarship on humanitarian intervention, when it emerged in the international discourse,[25] leaned crossley toward an assumption that consistency was a moral standard that international actors—predominantly states, in the traditional thinking—ought to aspire to, but that could not be realized in practice
Summary
The present discourse of responsibility suggests that, when states disintegrate and societies break apart, international actors have a collective responsibility to provide protection where governments no longer do. Even in the cases in which it is widely agreed that the “manifestly failing” threshold, according to the Responsibility to Protect principle has been met, or where there have been significant reasons to believe that the commission of mass atrocities was imminent, collective responses have been inconsistent.[21] Selective responses and inconsistencies continue to characterize international responses, and the structural factors contributing to a historical record of inconsistency, including the setup of the UN Security Council,[22] remain in place, by some accounts the emerging international human protection regime can be credited with a reduced incidence of mass atrocities in recent decades.[23] In any case, the discourse of responsibility has begun to change international perceptions about appropriate responses to humanitarian emergencies, as well as expectations about the consistency of those responses. Despite the gaps in implementation so far, the new discourse may improve the prospects for more consistent international responses in the future—as Jennifer Welsh suggests, the “issue of selectivity that has dogged humanitarian intervention may wane in the future.”[24]
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