The responsibility to protect: A forward-looking agenda

Abstract

One of the most dramatic normative developments of our time relates to the use of military force to protect human beings by finessing the tension between state sovereignty and international intervention through a redefinition of “sovereignty” and “humanitarian intervention” as the “responsibility to protect”, the title of the 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Traditional warfare is the use of force by rival armies of enemy states fighting over a clash of interests: us against them. Collective security rests on the use of force by the international community of states to defeat or punish an aggressor from within the community, whoever that may be: all against one. Peacekeeping involves the insertion of neutral and lightly armed thirdparty soldiers as a physical buffer between enemy combatants who have agreed to a ceasefire: us between formerly fighting enemies.