Human Security and The Legitimisation of Peacebuilding

Abstract

One of the most dramatic turns in international relations since 1945 has been the recent legitimisation of interventions by the international community under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, which, since its first conception in the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), seems to have posed an ethical responsibility for the international community to act on behalf of individuals in cases where states are unable or unwilling to protect them. For critical theorists, the R2P norm has become an instrument for legitimising and giving moral authority to new, more direct forms of Western intervention and regulation.1 For post-colonial critics, external intervention, under any name, can hardly create a just world order, for it sustains the existing asymmetry of power in international relations. After all, the South can never in conceivable imagination muster the resources or the confidence to intervene in the North, even though a number of industrialised states, plagued by the downturns of economic globalisation, are failing in their responsibilities to protect the jobs, welfare, social security, and health care of their populations. But advocates of utilitarianism and liberal internationalists counterclaim that the alternative of disengagement, or non-action, is not a viable solution.