International Ethics and the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

I examine the roots of “Responsibility to Protect” in international ethics. International responsibility to protect is as a whole at odds with international law, but deeply familiar to Liberal international ethics. But, controversially, I argue that even the Realist and Marxist traditions include commitments to human respect that make humanitarian concerns far from foreign. I then explore how it evolved out of the crisis in Kosovo and the question of its policy significance today in cases in which it has been invoked, ranging from Myanmar to Kenya and Guinea – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, successfully and not. My conclusion is that R2P has contributed to the increasing pluralism, contested and contestable, of the normative architecture of world politics, and thus has produced confusion. But, this confusion may reduce as RtoP norms are accumulated in customary law and reshape the discourse of international ethics. In any case, where the alternative to pluralism is clarity that either abandons vulnerable populations or imposes unrealistic expectations of enforced human rights, confusion is a step forward, a resource for responsible policy and the best we are likely to get if we continue to care about both vulnerable populations and national sovereignty.