The ‘responsibility to protect’ in natural disasters: another excuse for interventionism? Nargis Cyclone, Myanmar

Abstract

The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) places the ‘international community’ under an obligation to take coercive action for the protection of lives in the circumstances of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Following the dismal response to the May 2008 cyclone disaster in Myanmar where many affected people were provided with almost no relief assistance by the country's military regime that also hampered external assistance, the idea of military humanitarian intervention under the rubric of R2P was proposed by Bernard Kouchner. However, considering the urgency of the provision of relief assistance in an emergency, which is often a matter of life or death, this paper questions the effectiveness of invoking R2P as a possible response strategy in the aftermath of natural disasters. Therefore, in relation to state sovereignty the paper focuses on the concept of ‘humanitarian diplomacy’ at macro and micro levels as an alternative strategy and having analysed the issue in the wider framework of humanitarianism, the paper concludes with the importance of exploring the opportunities provided by humanitarian diplomacy before invoking R2P in the context of natural disasters.