An expanded version of this policy brief has been published as a journal paper in Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Patrick Quinton-Brown
Dr Patrick Quinton-Brown is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Much has been written about the extent to which international humanitarian protection, including through force, has become legitimate practice in international society. By “international society” we mean that society of governments and statespeople, whose members comprise the United Nations and span the entire globe. The debate is not usually about other sorts of spaces, it is deliberately not about international civil society, for instance. Nor is it simply a matter of international law (though it is no doubt partly that). As a duty of states, humanitarian protection is of concern to policy practitioners, scholars, and the general public. It is very central, for instance, to current tensions around the future of “Liberal Global Order”; to the contestation of specific global rules, norms, and values that were established in the post-Cold War period, but seem to many incompatible or dangerous in a new and relatively de-centred era, which is also an era of US-China competition.

2021 was a special year for the protection debate: not only did it mark 20 years after the publication of the government-sponsored report that coined the phrase “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), it was also the case that the UN General Assembly agreed in May to adopt R2P as an annual agenda item. 115 voted for, 28 abstained, and only 15 voted against.[1] R2P supporters have been tempted to seize upon this development: is it not evidence of the concept’s cascading cultural appeal? In a revival of talk about this “idea whose time has come,” to quote former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the question is being asked: might May’s resolution not signal R2P’s durability as a “developing norm,” even “after Libya,” “despite Syria,” and in light of potential applicability in a much wider range of cases, including, for instance, Myanmar?[2] These sentiments encompass a large liberal literature that conceives of a world of state solidarity in the face of gross injustice, according to which the failure of states to protect their civilians from large-scale violence implies the legitimacy of international protective action at the expense of sovereignty.

The liberal view has always been met by an equally sophisticated, if less acknowledged, critical literature. On this account, the Responsibility to Protect violates the laws of non-intervention that are at the heart of a stable, pluralist co-existence among states, in which steadfast sovereign equality is essential to the survival of the smaller and weakest. R2P’s core notion of “sovereignty as responsibility” is the latest incarnation of a “standard of civilization,” whereby foreign hegemony and trusteeship is re-institutionalised, and a strong interpretation of emergency collective action underplays the implications of other humanitarian priorities, including development. And it is of course the case that this second perspective is especially prevalent throughout Southeast and East Asia, where experiences of empire and imperialism are not easily forgotten, and the idea of intervention for humanitarian purposes appears incompatible with principles like those of the ASEAN Charter.

But there is a need to move beyond these tired oppositions, to critique and improve upon them, and there is a need to re-situate the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) on its 20^th anniversary. This brief is about the political concept and vocabulary of “the responsibility to protect,” as it has evolved in the UN and among its member states, with attention to members of the G77 and Non-Aligned Movement particularly. It is not a paper, in the first place, about R2P the international norm or R2P the doctrine, as usually defined in academic literature. Instead what it seeks to map out, in the records of recent UN debate, are two distinct practices of responsible sovereignty or sovereignty as a responsibility; to revise the terms of ongoing global discussion, it sketches out two major models of humanitarian protection associated with two major identity projects, not simply regions, called the Global South and Global North. There is an alternative to R2P as we typically know it, another conception of “sovereignty as responsibility,” one that is non-Western but not inherently illiberal or non-universalist, which explains and exposes the inadequacies of the prevailing meaning.

To better manage humanitarian protection in a globalized and more multipolar international society, policymakers must re-interrogate the language of its recent institutionalisation. This other approach starts not from “how far have states accepted the Responsibility to Protect, as proposed by ICISS in 2001,” but “what is and has been the Responsibility to Protect, according to groups of states themselves?” A practice that we might be tempted to call “Southern R2P,” or at least a Southern conception of “sovereignty as responsibility,” counters the framing of the protection debate that has been prevalent for 20 years: the framing of “Northern R2P.” The Southern approach is clearly more than the “thin” notion of “sovereignty as a right”---one that is “absolute,” or unqualified by the obligations of international human rights and humanitarian law, for instance---but less than the “thick” liberal-interventionism of post-Cold War period, wherein state sovereignty is suspended in humanitarian-emergency circumstances, and local-political authority transfers outwards, however temporarily, to international rescuers. It is in the hybrid character and discursive history of R2P that we can locate a more “non-aligned” logic of sovereign responsibility in Asia and the world.

HUMAN RIGHTS VERSUS SOVEREIGNTY?

The modern formulation of the Responsibility to Protect is often distinguished from humanitarian intervention, by both states and academics alike. But of course R2P does trace its origins to the intervention debates of the 1980s and 1990s. What links these distinct concepts over time is a particular understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. Near to the end of the Cold War, what we might call a Northern understanding of the sovereignty-human rights relationship emerged around a series of well-known arguments concerning the use of force: the “droit d’ingérence” proposals of the French government (when Foreign Minister Dumas proclaimed a “right to intervene on humanitarian grounds”), President Bush’s position on “humanitarian needs,” Defense Secretary Cheney’s invoking of “humanitarian missions,” the “humanitarian war” arguments of the Clinton administration, and the 1999 speech, for instance, of British Prime Minister Tony Blair on “just wars” for “values.”[3] Equally this was an understanding that encompassed a series of rejections: of the “Mogadishu line” and a culture of impartiality in delivering emergency assistance, and of peacekeeping when there was “no peace to keep.”[4]

Although the humanitarian intervention argument took many forms, its core notion was that sovereignty might be overcome or suspended for higher purposes. In the pages of Foreign Affairs, for example, commentators began to speak of a “New Interventionism,” said to justify NATO action in places like the former Yugoslavia. Statespeople adopted a similar position in the UN General Assembly. To quote the representative of Belgium in 1999, “[i]f there is one lesson for our Organization to learn from the twentieth century, it is that for no state can the massacre of its own people be considered an ‘internal affair,’ under any pretext.” Such a “legal formalism” would “amount to admitting that, as the head of the UN Interim Administration in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner has said, it would be ‘legitimate, although not elegant, to massacre one’s own people.’”^[5] From this states like Italy and Poland drew far-reaching conclusions: “we have come to understand that absolute sovereignty and total non-interference are no longer tenable,” “this implies a rethinking of the principles…that have governed the community of nations for over three centuries”; a new international order would abolish the “sovereign right to ethnic cleansing and genocide”; it was time to declare “sovereignty cannot mean impunity for genocide and human rights abuses.”^[6]

Throughout the history of modern international society, sovereignty had no doubt been used to deflect criticism of large-scale human rights abuses and some governments had certainly cited sovereignty in attempts at excusing horrendous crimes. At the same time, it needs to be said that a Northern understanding of sovereignty depended on a very misleading depiction of actual international rules and norms. The claim that there existed a “sovereign right to ethnic cleansing and genocide” was simply not true in the UN of the mid- to late-20^th century. To say so was to ignore existing obligations of international human rights and humanitarian law: the purpose of the Genocide Convention, unanimously adopted in 1948, was of course to criminalise the “massacre of one’s own people” and to commit states to the prohibition of genocidal acts. And as illustrated by the international and UN-based struggle against apartheid in Southern Africa, for instance, the prevention of such crimes against humanity was very often conceived as a shared duty of states and the international community---located essentially outside of domestic jurisdiction (that sphere in which, according to Article 2[7] of the Charter, the UN was not authorized to interfere).

Yet the importance of the New Interventionism, and its arguably Northern formulation of sovereignty versus human rights, had less to do with the veracity of its historical claims than the reach of its discursive effects. That is to say: sovereignty did not imply “impunity for genocide and human rights abuses” in the late 20^th century, but such a characterisation of sovereignty, identifiable with a loose Western coalition, was being popularized in ways that successfully re-arranged the parameters of global political debate.

In other words, at the so-called unipolar moment, rival understandings of sovereignty came to be largely suppressed, among them a practice common to much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This other approach has been too easily caricaturised and too often historically misconstrued; as if to reject the prevailing human rights versus sovereignty dichotomy was also to accept the blank cheque of “absolute sovereignty.” In fact, on its own terms, a Southern logic of the humanitarian duties of sovereign states seems almost totally lost in existing reports. To be sure, the move being made by the Non-Aligned Movement and G77 was very clearly to reject classical humanitarian intervention. Agreements at the South Summit of 2000 and the Movement’s 13^th Ministerial Conference in Cartagena (the same year) stressed that the “so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’” had “no legal basis in the United Nations Charter or in the general principles of international law.”[7] But at the same time, there was a parallel push to define international humanitarian responsibility in the context of UN-based peacekeeping, emergency humanitarian assistance, and development, with an emphasis on the independence of humanitarian action from political objectives such as those having to do with control or composition of local government.

During the General Assembly debates of 1999, a counterargument referred to what might have been called the liberal and international-democratic merits of sovereign equality, and the preservation of sovereign equality in a renewed and more effective international humanitarian program. If an emerging Northern narrative explained sovereignty as if it granted a “license to kill,” then a Southern reply approached sovereignty as “a shield”---against foreign hegemony and control, and not, as the shield metaphor came to be appropriated in New-Interventionist circles, against the international promotion of human rights.^[8] To quote the Indonesian delegation: “…to blame this principle [sovereignty] for the inability of the Organization to come to the aid of suffering humanity anywhere is to distort the truth. To extend such assistance is a solemn obligation. Indeed it is imperative.”[9] Yet there were other reasons that the UN often failed to act “swiftly and decisively”: they included “resource constraints,” “selectivity”, “misplaced media attention,” and, above all, “lack of political will.”[10]

For all the period’s references to Rwanda, for instance, quickly forgotten was that Nigeria, on behalf of Non-Aligned Movement, had proposed a draft resolution under Chapter VII that would have empowered the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) to enforce “law and order and the establishment of transitional institutions” while protecting civilians. This was a draft, as recently declassified documents show us, to “increase the strength of UNAMIR and to revise its mandate”---precisely what Roméo Dallaire considered necessary to stop the killing.^[11] What was needed was not a “rethinking of the principles…that have governed the community of nations for over three centuries,” but new political and material investments in humanitarian agreements already made.^[12]

Somewhere between “absolute sovereignty” and the “right of humanitarian intervention” was a more “non-aligned” and “Southern” formulation---Southern not just in the sense of its being associated with a large number of developing states, but more in the sense of its upholding traditionally Southern values, such as those of the Asia-Africa (Bandung) Conference and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. At the Durban Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1998, the following formulation had been declared:

In four and a half decades, the world has changed vastly from the days of the Bandung meeting. Yet the principles laid down by the founders of the NAM remain valid, and the ideas, goals, and vision articulated then, continue to guide our movement. As we mark the 50^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nothing should be used as a convenient mask to hide genocide, gross violations of human rights and crimes against humanity, nor should human rights be used as a political instrument for interference in internal affairs.[13]

RESPONSIBILITY AS CONTROL

To understand the logic of the above passage, and why its last clause might seem incoherent according to conventional terms of R2P, it is helpful to look at the ICISS report itself. The independent report of the ICISS was sponsored by the Canadian government in September 2000, in response to then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Millennium Report.[14] With a membership intended “to fairly reflect developed and developing country perspectives,” its objective was to “build a broader understanding of the problem of reconciling intervention for human protection purposes and sovereignty” and “develop global political consensus.”[15] And it set out to do so by “shifting the terms of the debate” such that its “proposed change in terminology is also a change in perspective”: to move from “humanitarian intervention” to “a responsibility to protect” was to move from an understanding of “sovereignty as control” to one of “sovereignty as responsibility.”^[16]

But what should be confessed is the possibility that ICISS sanctioned something else as well, the full implications of which were much more latent. To recognise the ways in which, fundamentally, the “terms of the debate” were in fact not shifting with the report’s “proposed change of terminology”---to recognise how a distinctly Northern conception of the sovereignty-human rights relationship remained central to the Commission’s understanding of effective protection---is to show how R2P, as it is usually known, represents just one of multiple understandings of the nature of sovereign responsibility.

The central theme of the ICISS report comprehended the following: “sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from avoiding catastrophe---from mass murder and rape, from starvation---but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.”^[17] Still there was some equivocation as to the nature of what it meant to bear responsibility: yes, three specific responsibilities were implied by the R2P (to prevent crises before their outbreak, to react to outbreaks, to rebuild afterward), but if, when a state was unable or unwilling to protect, “it becomes the responsibility of the international community to act in its place,” exactly what sort of transfer of authority was involved in a transfer of responsibility?^[18] While the Commission acknowledged that “the primary responsibility to protect” rested with the state, might international actors, in fulfilling the residual R2P in extreme circumstances, take on local-political responsibilities?

The notion that sovereignty entailed responsibilities in addition to rights---even humanitarian ones across state borders---was neither new nor regionally-specific. Instead what was novel about ICISS was the way in which it linked the status and responsibility of sovereigns with the responsibility of international actors. Here the question was really about the limits of guardianship: might keeping guard of people, through the “provision of life-supporting protection,” also confer the position or office of becoming more generally responsible for their care?^[19] Put differently: when inheriting a responsibility to protect, might international guardians also inherit a tacit responsibility over the essentially domestic or internal affairs of the guarded? To answer yes would be to suspend competing claims to or sources of supreme authority.

In fact, in the 2001 report, this was explicitly admitted: “Intervention suspends sovereignty claims to the extent that good governance---as well as peace and stability---cannot be promoted or restored unless the intervener has authority over a territory.”^[20] The Commission did stress that “the suspension of the exercise of sovereignty is only de facto for the period of the intervention and follow-up, and not de jure.” But not only might there have been a concern here about slipping away from a logic of the preservation of life to one of “good governance” as well as “peace and stability,” there were also a number of reasons to doubt the relevance of a distinction between the de facto and de jure.[21] The central concern was always about intent; about whether the intent to interfere in internal affairs was legitimate in the course of protecting.

The ICISS proposal deviated from “sovereignty as a right,” but it was also more than a universal or globally-shared understanding of “sovereignty as responsibility,” particularly when, for international protectors, responsibility became control. In the penultimate chapter of the report---“Responsibility to Rebuild”---the promise to return the R2P to the state was described not as a returning of the obligation to defend civilians from violence, but “returning the society in question to those who live in it, and who, in the last instance, must take responsibility together for its future destiny.”^[22] The language of defeasibility---often used by lawyers to express a right that is open to forfeiture or annulment---captures much of the issue. While a qualified sovereignty refers to some constrained range of sovereign privilege (no “sovereign right to genocide”), a defeasible sovereignty was expressed in 2001.

THE SOUTH’S RE-INTERPRETATION

The ICISS report was not accepted by the UN. However the concept of a “responsibility to protect” was unanimously adopted at the UN 2005 World Summit---the Organization’s largest ever gathering of Heads of State and Government. The basic transformations from the ICISS report to paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document (WSOD) are well-known: the narrowing of threshold criteria or just cause to “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity”; the disappearance of reference to post-intervention obligations and precautionary criteria, as well as “coalitions of the willing” when “the Security Council fails to act”; the general move, later articulated in the Secretary-General’s 2009 report, from three responsibilities (prevent, react, rebuild) to three pillars.^[23]

But an alternative and more critical history of the World Summit shows us that 2005 was not about the definition of a single R2P or a move from “R2P” to some sort of “R2P Lite”---as it was sometimes put in academic literature.[24] Rather it was about compromise on a phraseology that accommodated multiple conceptions of international humanitarian protection. Paragraphs 138 and 139 committed the “international community, through the United Nations,” to “take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter,” should “national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.”[25] But if we look closely, this was not a Northern formulation at the expense of a Southern one, or vice versa. During the global adoption of a UN-based “responsibility to protect,” incompatible North-South models persevered; both could be read into the same document.

The Southern stance at the Millennium Summit of 2000 and World Summit of 2005 resembled, in a fundamental way, the positions taken by developing states during the 1999 UNGA debates. What again came into view was a certain practice of sovereignty as responsibility, including as a responsibility to protect civilians, but never a practice of foreign or international control over domestic or internal affairs (“we disagree with the assumption that the principles of sovereignty and humanitarian international law are at variance”; where intervention did occur, “[a]ction must be confined to the saving of lives, not the overthrowing of governments”, “intervention…must never be used as a guise for unwarranted interference in internal state governance.”)^[26] Sovereignty was qualified, but not defeasible; yes, an international responsibility to take collective action should “national authorities manifestly fail to protect,” but never a responsibility that precluded the protected from determining their own futures. In this way it was always a consistent argument, not some muddle or confusion, to say, as Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi did before the General Assembly in 2005, that “any intervention must give due recognition to the Charter principles pertaining to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference in internal affairs.”^[27]

Abdullah was serving at the time as Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement. No doubt, as he noted, there was internationally “a growing consensus to accept the justifiability of the use of force to protect civilian populations from crimes against humanity, such as genocide and ethnic cleansing.”[28] He might have had in mind important developments in the African continent, where a version of the international R2P had been adopted six months earlier in the AU’s Ezulwini Consensus. But even here protection could be interpreted as neutral, impartial, and independent from political action: the Ezulwini Consensus stressed that while “[i]t is important to reiterate the obligation of states to protect their citizens,” “this should not be used as a pretext to undermine the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of states.”[29] And in all cases, for non-aligned leaders like Abdullah, protection was to be more broadly located in a development-led humanitarian program. “I should like to say that it is equally a crime against humanity to allow poverty and deprivation to persist in these modern times. How can we continue to stand by while eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive?”[30]

The WSOD stressed “the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect”; the UN’s first debate on R2P occurred in 2009 and was followed by annual informal interactive dialogues.[31] To summarise a basic Southern position cutting across these meetings: “the responsibility to protect should not contravene…the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states”; if R2P, and an international R2P, then one “implemented pursuant to premises that do not undermine the guarantees and sovereignty of states,” sovereignty does “not exempt the state from its obligation to protect its population. On the contrary, it is from that very attribute that such obligation derives.”^[32] Hence “it is critical that our discussions not be reduced to the simplistic dichotomy of states on the one side insisting on absolute sovereignty and, on the other side, R2P proponents demanding that states surrender absolute sovereignty.” Clearly “we are all united behind our fundamental desire to protect innocent people and to prevent another Rwanda and Srebrenica.”^[33]

Many argue that NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya---explicitly justified on the basis of R2P---was a turning point in related UN debate.[34] This is true. But it is too easy to say that R2P or the atrocity prevention agenda “died” in the First Libyan Civil War.^[35] Nor did R2P necessarily “decay” or “erode” as an international norm---unless we have in mind its Northern conception specifically.[36] Locating what The Economist called R2P’s “first full-blown test” in a longer global-discursive history, there is another reading still: it was in Libya that international suspicions of Northern R2P (whereby, if national authorities are unwilling or unable to protect their own people, “they lose the right to control them anymore”) were vindicated, but not international humanitarian protection scorned.[37]

Is it not possible to suggest that widespread rejection of the “Libya model” was also the re-articulation of a Southern conception of responsibility? In the UN, state critics claimed NATO had gone “far beyond the letter and spirit of resolution 1973” by “[a]busing the authorisation granted by the Council to advance a political regime-change agenda.”^[38] From a Southern view: interveners came to contravene the conditions provided for in the Council because of the way in which intervention became involvement in civil war---through sustained air coverage for rebel fighters---rather than in the arguably separate activity of guarding civilians from impending violence---both civilian supporters of the TNA and of the government. As Anne Marie-Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, herself later admitted: “We did not try to protect civilians on Qaddafi’s side.”[39] It can be inferred from the discourse of states identifiable with the Southern view that a legitimate application of R2P, including through no-fly zones and civilian protection by “all necessary means,” was plausible in March 2011. But it had to encompass, to quote a section of Resolution 1973 too often overlooked, a “strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity, and national unity of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”[40]

Again, none of this was to deny, inherently, the international use of force for humanitarian purposes, authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII. In fact, more was to be done in international society on precisely this level of emergency collective action, though in a different chord: to quote the Indian delegation in the Security Council, “in this context it is pertinent to mention that we find several member states all too willing to expend considerable resources for regime change in the name of protection of civilians” yet “unwilling to provide minimal resources, like military helicopters, to the United Nations peacekeeping missions.”[41] A Southern model of international protection, anchored in state sovereignty and nationally-owned political processes, also seemed consistent with diplomatic initiatives relating to non-violent prevention and the strict and effective monitoring of the implementation of Security Council resolutions, such as the Brazilian concept paper of “Responsibility while Protecting.”[42]

Can intervention that stops short of regime change successfully perform its protective function? If so, in which contexts, across what range of cases, and how, exactly, to draw the line? What resources might be necessary for such operations to succeed and, in the first place, be shouldered and approved by states? These are of course not easy questions to answer. But existing practice suggests that, now, they are also more politically consequential than the questions and choices most usually offered in the liberal-interventionist circles of the post-Cold War era in passing: of variations on humanitarian intervention and the suspension of sovereignty on the one hand, and of “absolute sovereignty” and standing idly by on the other.

WHITHER HUMANITARIAN PROTECTION?

In 2018 the General Assembly held its first formal debate on R2P since 2009. Last year the UN adopted R2P---albeit not uncontroversially---as an annual agenda item. Yet R2P’s recent contestation needs to be understood on the level of its conceptual development, and in relation to international mechanisms of authority redistribution, which have a longer and complicated history that predates 2001. True, a very small number of states have rejected R2P outrightly, as if were easily reducible to a new type of trusteeship or ideology in the service of empire.[43] But frequently mischaracterized are those states---at least a dozen members of the Non-Aligned Movement and G77---that explicitly assert the nature of the problem to be more interpretive: in the practice of statespeople themselves, the meaning of the concept remains “unclear,” “without consensus,” in light of “profound gaps” and components on which there are “deep differences between Member States’ views.”[44]

Where is the South in the international humanitarian protection debate? Where is Asia and Southeast Asia? The answer must no longer concentrate on “dissent” or some undifferentiated sovereigntism, as if a vote against a particular logic of sovereign responsibility were a vote against humanitarian duty generally, or indeed paragraphs 138 and 139 of the WSOD itself. There is an alternative practice of sovereignty as responsibility, one that accounts for the international dimensions of humanitarian duty, including in relation to collective action of the UN Security Council, and that, from the view of its practitioners, curtails the worst excesses of the liberal-interventionist form. It is not as if solidarity around the international protection of universal human rights constitutes a compromise of essential non-aligned principles. To understand, we need to look again at the ICISS report and what has been variously intended by the emerging and enduring vocabulary of a responsibility to protect.

The single most important achievement of the New-Interventionism of the ICISS report and early post-Cold War period was its re-framing of the relationship between human rights and sovereignty. In just a few decades these concepts took on, politically, new meanings, and distinctions of historical importance---the existing obligations of international humanitarian law, for example---were erased by theories and grand histories of a “sovereign right to genocide.” These narratives crowded out arguments like the following: that what was needed to avert another Rwanda was not the suspension of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the principle of sovereign equality, but the will to uphold commitments already made. If R2P embraced responsible as distinct from absolute sovereignty, what was left was to insist upon the difference between responsible sovereignty as qualified and as defeasible. The international responsibility to protect must never become a right to control.

It is not that members of the G77 have sought to retract paragraphs 138 and 139 (to the contrary, these paragraphs have been referenced and reaffirmed in multiple UN resolutions) or that annual meetings and reports have failed to assist the General Assembly in continuing its consideration of the principle (reports of the UN Secretary-General since 2009 have often clarified a range of operational issues). But on the core issue of sovereignty’s defeasibility for higher purposes, profound disagreement persists, and this is what underlies previous General Assembly debates and is likely to challenge upcoming ones. The divide to be overcome now is not so much between those who are for and against R2P, but rather between those states who consider its definition settled, and those states---including some members of the UN-based Group of Friends of R2P---who hold otherwise. Non-aligned and Southeast Asian states, for their part, might further develop the multiple interpretations argument by detailing what an alternative logic of sovereign responsibility and international assistance looks like.

In particular it is worth recalling the historically Asian (as well as ASEAN) argument that respect for the line between essentially domestic and international affairs is a necessary component of the promotion and protection of human rights. That line, in global-political discourse, has recently been abandoned. While crimes against humanity and gross and systematic violations of human rights are matters of such international concern as to be outside the exclusive domestic jurisdiction of states, neither the UN nor its members have a right to interfere in internal affairs such as choice of government. This argument might be considered in relation to various forms of emergency collective action through the Security Council, including UN peace operations with plausibly robust mandates, in accordance with international law, and in the context of an overarching framework of development.

There is ominous talk today of the “return of sovereignty,” as if renewed emphasis on sovereignty in world politics presages the end of international human rights promotion and related UN-based institutions. But of course this sort of story depends on a very particular meaning of sovereignty as responsibility. 2021 marks both the 20^th anniversary of the ICISS report as well as the 60^th anniversary of the Non-Aligned Movement as launched at Belgrade. In revising the recent history of political debate among states, particularly in the context of an increasingly contested global order, we should come to see that the problem of international humanitarian protection is not “sovereignty vs. human rights” or “sovereignty vs. intervention,” at least in the ordinary and straightforward sense of either standing by or stepping in. All agree that the international community shares a responsibility to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter. It is instead “which R2P,” which model of a shared sovereign and international humanitarian responsibility---Northern or Southern?

 

Notes

[1] ‘The Responsibility to Protect and the Prevention of Genocide, War Crimes, Ethnic Cleansing, and Crimes Against Humanity,’ A/RES/75/277, 18 May 2021.

[2] ‘Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: Report of the Secretary-General,’ A/63/677, 12 January 2009, 30.

[3] See e.g. Tony Blair, ‘The Doctrine of International Community’, speech to the Economic Club, Chicago, IL, 22 April 1999, available at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/ international-jan-june99-blair_doctrine4-23/.

[4] See e.g. Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, ‘Somalia and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention,’ Foreign Affairs 75/2 (1996), 70-85.

[5] See e.g. Michael Glennon, ‘The New Interventionism: The Search for a Just International Law,’ Foreign Affairs 78/3 (1999), 2-7.

[6] Poland, A/54/PV.17, 29 September 1999, 5; Italy, A/54/PV.8, 22 September 1999, 20; Poland, A/54/PV.17, 29 September 1999, 6.

[7] ‘Final Document of the Thirteenth Ministerial Conference of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries’ in A/54/917, 16 June 2000, 49.

[8] See e.g. Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 11.

[9] Indonesia, A/54/PV.33, 11 October 1999, 7.

[10] Ibid.; see also e.g. India, A/54/PV.27, 6 October 1999, 20.

[11] See ‘Text of NAM Draft (13 April 1994)’ in Michael Dobbs, ed. National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 472 (Washington, DC: National Security Archive, 2014).

[12] See e.g. Pakistan, A/59/PV.86, 6 April 2005, 5.

[13] ‘Final Document of the Twelfth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries’ in A/53/667, 13 November 1998, 11.

[14] ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001).

[15] Ibid., 2.

[16] Ibid., 17.

[17] Ibid., viii.

[18] Ibid., 15. Emphasis added.

[19] Ibid., 17.

[20] Ibid., 44.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid., 45.

[23] ‘2005 World Summit Outcome,’ A/RES/60/1, 16 September 2005, 30; A/63/677; ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, 59, 53.

[24] See e.g. Alex Bellamy, ‘The Responsibility to Protect and the Problem of Military Intervention,’ International Affairs 84/4 (2008), 616.

[25] A/RES/60/1, 31.

[26] Iraq, A/55/PV.5, 7 September 2000, 43; Barbados, A/55/PV.13, 13 September 2000, 25.

[27] Malaysia, A/60/PV.4, 14 September 2005, 40.

[28] Ibid., 41.

[29] ‘The Common African Position on the Proposed Reform of the United Nations: The Ezulwini Consensus,’ Ext/EX.CL/2(VII), 6.

[30] Malaysia, A/60/PV.4, 41.

[31] A/RES/60/1, 31.

[32] China, A/63/PV.98, 24 July 2009, 23; Ecuador, ibid., 9; Brazil, A/63/PV.97, 23 July 2009, 13.

[33] Singapore, ibid., 7.

[34] For a discussion see Jennifer Welsh, ‘Norm Contestation and the Responsibility to Protect,’ Global Responsibility to Protect 5/4 (2013), 365-396.

[35] David Rieff, ‘R2P, RIP,’ The New York Times, 7 November 2011.

[36] Alan Bloomfield, ‘Norm Antipreneurs and Theorising Resistance to Normative Change,’ Review of International Studies 42/2 (2016), 310-333.

[37] ‘The Lessons of Libya,’ The Economist, 19 May 2011.

[38] South Africa, S/PV.6650, 9 November 2011, 22.

[39] Quoted in Jo Becker and Scott Shane, ‘Hillary Clinton, “Smart Power” and a Dictator’s Fall,’ New York Times, 27 February 2016.

[40] S/RES/1973 (2011), 17 March 2011, 2.

[41] India, S/PV.6650, 9 November 2011, 18.

[42] ‘Responsibility while Protecting: Elements for the Development and Promotion of a Concept,’ A/66/551-S/2011/701, 11 November 2011

[43] See e.g. North Korea and Venezuela in A/75/PV.65, 9, 65.

[44] See e.g. the Philippines, Malaysia, Cuba, Ghana, China, Iran, Sri Lanka, Equatorial Guinea, Egypt, Kiribati, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Singapore, and Pakistan in A/75/PV.64, 11; A/75/PV.65, 3, 13, 19, 22, 23, 29; A/75/PV.66, 5, 6, 7, 12, 21.

 

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