The politics of global humanitarianism: The responsibility to protect before and after Libya

Abstract

This article will trace the roots of Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) in international law and international ethics. RtoP is in tension with established Charter law on the use of force, but it may be beginning to change the law. It is, on the other hand, deeply familiar to international ethics, a widening of the circumstances that allow for overriding non-intervention. It evolved out of the failures to protect the populations of Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia (1992–1995) and NATO’s decision to intervene in Kosovo (1999). The chapter will show how RtoP has been invoked, explicitly and implicitly, successfully and unsuccessfully, in cases ranging from Myanmar and Kenya in 2008, to Guinea in 2009, and then recently, and controversially, Libya in 2011. And the last has had severe negative consequences for international protection for Syrians since 2011. I will argue that RtoP is both a license to and a leash against forcible intervention. As such, it has contributed to the increasing pluralism, contested and contestable, of the normative architecture of world politics. However, this confusion may decrease as RtoP norms become better institutionalized in the UN, reshape the discourse of international ethics and are accumulated in customary law. In any case, where the alternative to pluralism is a clarity that either abandons vulnerable populations or imposes unrealistic expectations of enforced human rights, contestation is a step forward.