Human Protection and the Return of Imperial Orders
As we move into 2023, Professor Alex Bellamy (University of Queensland) reflects on the state of R2P. Professor Bellamy argues that while the recidivism of powerful states has damaged efforts to curb atrocity, R2P remains an important commitment.
The R2P Bargain
That the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is in crisis is both an important and banal thing to say. It is important because it recognizes the gap between aspiration and outcome as atrocities increase and protection focused engagement declines. Recognizing the gap forces us to try to understand the causes and identify potential remedies. But declaring R2P to be in crisis is simultaneously banal for it is in the principle’s very nature to be in a condition of perpetual crisis. Its very subject matter – atrocity crimes -- concerns moments of intense crisis to which responses are always impacted by contingency, uncertainty, and risk. But more than that, as Ramesh Thakur explained, R2P is a “demand-driven” norm. Were R2P not in crisis, there would be no need for an R2P at all.
By calling R2P “demand-driven”, I mean to say that the principle came into existence precisely because international society was failing to do something peoples and states thought important: protect populations from the most egregious of crimes. For as long as there are atrocities, peoples will demand protection from them; concerned outsiders moved by compassion for the victims will demand collective action.
The international consensus on R2P revealed a ‘silent majority’ of states who wanted better answers to the question of what to do to stop atrocities. Some were reluctant interveners wanting to defray the costs and risks associated with protecting foreigners from atrocities. Others were concerned sovereigntists appalled by atrocities but worried about licensing unilateralism with all that meant. International order made paradoxical demands. Too much unilateralism might produce global disorder. Too much inaction in the face of conscience shocking inhumanity might add new incentives for violence adding to disorder in a different way.
It was the genius of R2P that it was able to find a middle ground and we should understand 2005 as a grand bargain. To understand the contours of that bargain we must revisit the world as it was that year. The ghosts of Rwanda, Timor, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Darfur voiced an urgent demand for protection. States and UN officials were only too aware of recent failures and the terrible tolls. In response, a creeping interventionism. NATO and the West, but also ECOWAS and the AU too, were moving towards a new position which held that when the UN Security Council was blocked by veto, states and groups of states might act outside the Council to protect human life.
The Global War on Terror and US invasion of Iraq seemed only to confirm for Moscow and Beijing that they should expect unilateral interventions whenever they blocked collective action through the Council. So the bargain they made was to head off unilateralism by bringing the ‘demand’ for protection into the UN Security Council where they could influence its practice. This meant sometimes saying yes in order to protect their right to say no when it mattered most.
Darfur was a good early example of the bargain in action. China and Russia allowed the UN Security Council to take the lead which, among other things, took wind out of the push for unilateral Western or African intervention. But that also meant the Council assuming responsibility for what happened, which pushed it, eventually, to mandate a large Chapter VII peace operation to, among other things, protect Darfuri civilians from atrocities. It was a slow and imperfect response, but it was a response, and it came through the UN Security Council.
The Erosion of the Bargain
The key though was that the R2P bargain itself, and its application in the hardest cases, was contingent upon uncertainty about whether the West (or others) would intervene unilaterally if the Council was blocked. If that uncertainty were to diminish, so too would R2P’s pull on the Security Council.
That bargain has been steadily eroded since its birth. R2P developed in the shadow of the War on Terror, a war in which the US and its allies shed the cloak of responsible international managers and routinely violated international law. The War on Terror challenged key rules governing the use of force (unlawful invasion of Iraq) and the conduct of war (targeted killings, rendition etc.) which had two principal effects on the politics of R2P. On the one hand, it cast further doubt on the legitimacy of military intervention, particularly by the West. On the other, the war consumed Western political attention and military resources and diminished Western commitment to multilateral conflict management and atrocity prevention.
Realists like Mearsheimer, Walt, and Bacevich and critical leftists like Moyn tend to elide the War on Terror and humanitarian intervention under the rubric of liberal intervention. This is both misleading and unhelpful. It’s misleading because the inspiration for the War on Terror was very different to that which lay behind R2P. It’s also unhelpful because it obscured the impact the former was having upon the latter. Western, and especially US, interventionism after 2001 was dominated by the War on Terror. Intervention in Libya was constrained by it, while responses to the bloodbath in Syria was skewed by it. This had devastating effects on civilian populations in those two countries.
But it was not just the US and its War on Terror that challenged the bargain made in 2005. Russia and China did too. Putin’s recidivism was not a reaction to US unilateralism. Russia’s imperial sense of it itself survived the end of the Cold War. The Soviets used force in Lithuania in a failed attempt to keep the union together. Then, in the 1990s, Russian troops fought wars in Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia (on both sides), and Tajikistan. Before Putin came to power, Russian forces held territory in two foreign states – Georgia and Moldova – without the willing consent of the host state. Putin turbocharged Russian neo-imperialism and with the West distracted by the War on Terror incrementally expanded its use of force against neighbouring states. Russia also expanded its military support for state terror in other countries, whether through direct intervention or its Wagner mercenaries.
Russian Recidivism and its Damage to R2P
Russian recidivism has had four principal effects on R2P. First, it has further undermined core international norms, including principles of sovereignty and the protection of civilians. The Russian ‘way of war’ is increasingly connected to atrocities. This was evident in the Chechen wars in the 1990s, but indiscriminate killing has also been the calling card of Russia’s recent wars in Syria and Ukraine. Much hinges on whether Russia prevails in Ukraine. Where states win by using atrocities (e.g. Syria) and that victory is ratified by international society, the power of civilian immunity to shape practice is diminished. If Russia walks away from Ukraine vindicated, the very idea of civilian immunity will be sorely undermined.
Armed actors commit atrocities by and large because it helps them to win. The side that wins gets to determine the political outcome. When those charged with preserving common norms prevail by violating those norms, the rule itself might be undermined. Should Russia prevail in Ukraine, one might ask why would any dictator not kill and torture civilians to stay in power?
Second, Russian recidivism is undermining the epistemology of UN multilateralism. When Russia claims it has not invaded a foreign country when it patently has, when it says evidence of atrocities are faked, when it denies use of chemical weapons, when it does all of this in the face of detailed UN reports to the contrary, it undermines the very capacity of multilateral institutions to broker bargains since parties cannot bargain with one another if they do not have a shared understanding of what truth is.
The problem has become more insidious since Iraq. Then, most of the world’s governments trusted Hans Blix and the UN inspectors to determine the veracity of US claims. A decade later, in Syria, Russia rejected the very idea that states might turn to the UN to ascertain basic facts. This threatens the possibility of ever getting multilateral UN action on atrocities since states might simply choose their own truths. If the Security Council can’t agree on what a fact is, let alone what particular facts mean, then there is little possibility of common ground and collective action.
Third, with respect to crisis management, great power bargaining is replacing multilateralism. The management of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict serves as a useful example. Since 1992, Russia’s principal ambition in that conflict was to secure the deployment of Russian peacekeepers. Back then, the conflict was seen as the first test case for CSCE multilateralism. In the three decades that followed, multilateralism was replaced by a great power model until we arrived at the 2020 war which was terminated by great power diplomacy between Russia and Turkey, cutting out the OSCE and the UN. We saw the same slide in Syria, where UN multilateralism gave way to a US-Russia axis, and then Russia-Turkey-Iran. The effect: a further diminished multilateralism.
Fourth, the global is being further displaced by the regional. The three effects already mentioned are further weakening the propensity of great powers to cooperate on international peace and security. It is not coincidental that peacekeeping is on the decline. As great powers become more focused on their own security concerns, their capacity to focus on wider human security and humanitarian issues is reduced. Problems of will and capacity that always challenged R2P are thus magnified. An additional problem here is that regionalism in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are also in retreat.
The compound effect of these four issues is system disruption. As the UN system becomes less capable of fulfilling its purposes so questions will mount about the legitimacy of the system. As that happens, some actors will be encouraged to directly challenge the system whilst others will look for solutions beyond the UN.
R2P Will Endure
But there are important countercurrents. The downward slides mentioned earlier are not exponential. Indeed, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, atrocities had begun to decline from a peak around 2015, levelling out at global levels not dissimilar to those of the mid-2000s and well below the mid-1990s level.
Despite the aforementioned challenges, R2P and UN multilateralism have demonstrated a capacity to endure. For example, peacekeeping has declined but not collapsed, the protection of civilians has remained central, and states do continue to contribute and pursue multilateral endeavours. Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly has demonstrated a will and capacity to innovate when the Security Council falls short, for example with respect to the questions of credentials (Myanmar), investigations (Syria), and the performance of the Council (Ukraine and Syria). Civil society activism too has continued to develop and grow, evidenced by the fact that the Asia Pacific Partnership for Atrocity Prevention has more than forty members orgs and work surrounding the recent ‘Queering Atrocity Prevention’ report.
Nor has demand for R2P diminished. Recurrent challenges to authoritarianism, recurrent demands for core rights, imperial aggression, and recurrent atrocities mean the protection question will keep being asked. The challenge is to think about what answers can be offered when the demand for protection is made, to better understand the impact of geopolitics on protection politics, and to better articulate how states, international institutions, and civil society might better respond to the challenges just identified.
It may be that R2P is not the right answer, but although far from perfect, it is still the best answer we have available right now precisely because it was forged as a bargain. It holds different principles, interests, and institutions in tension in way no other concept or norm has thus far been able to do. Above all else, R2P frames the way the question is posed by those most imperilled. Populations don’t want instruction from the outside world, they want the freedom to forge their own politics, to make their own communities, and to tread their own path, without fear of death, torture, and rape. That is what states agreed to facilitate when they adopted R2P in 2005 and that ambition remains as pertinent today as it was then.
Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at The University of Queensland, Australia. A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, he has served as a consultant to the United Nations and Senior Adviser at the International Peace Institute (New York). His recent books include ‘Syria Betrayed: War, Atrocities, and the Failure of International Diplomacy’ (Columbia, 2022) and ‘Warmonger: Vladimir Putin’s Imperial Wars’ (Agenda, 2023).
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