Humanity and the Responsibility to Protect: Rethinking a Complex Relationship

Dr Samuel Jarvis sets up a normative conversation about R2P and the motivational power of ‘humanity’.

For scholars and activists supportive of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the moral obligations for responding to “conscious-shocking” crimes generated by the principle are often deemed to be so obvious as to be incontestable – quite simply, our common humanity demands that we act. Consequently, the need to prevent and respond to mass atrocity crimes is presumed to be self-evident, in which the crimes recognised under the R2P are those which should not only concern individual governments but must be of concern to all states across the globe.

Yet this moral certainty regarding what must drive states and other actors to respond is so often taken on face value, with only limited attempts to interrogate whom humanity encompasses, how these crimes impact on humanity and to what extent the very idea of humanity’s existence provides sufficient motivation to drive effective responses.

One of the most significant consequences of this apparent moral certainty is the tendency to argue that it must be the practical challenges of implementing the R2P that should now concern us and thus be the central focus of scholarship. As Luke Glanville wrestled with in his ECR2P Fresh Perspectives blog post, this focus on execution has often left scholars predominantly searching for new reform initiatives that will avert previous failures and seek to finally clarify mandates for effective intervention initiatives.

Whilst there is value in these endeavours, one must also question the extent to which the very framing and philosophical underpinning of the R2P principle also requires further interrogation in order to begin addressing such challenges.

My forthcoming book looks to provide an important counterpoint to recent R2P scholarship that has focused predominantly on the role of global institutional reform, often at the expense of further theorising how national actors weigh up competing domestic and international pressures to act in response to mass atrocities.

Those supportive of the R2P have often relied too heavily on the supposed power of humanity and empathy to drive change and reform at an institutional level. One only has to look at the conflicting nature of a state’s own circle of empathy, in that support for the R2P principle does not instantly correlate with a willingness to accept responsibilities for protection in a national context. This points to an increasingly weak relationship between empathy and moral sacrifice.

Addressing this weak relationship requires greater reflection on how empathy functions at the global level and the extent to which states are willing to expend resources and political capital to offer protection to those beyond their borders. While empathy and emotions remain central to influencing how certain humanitarian situations initially draw our concern, persuading state actors to respond has often required making a clear connection to their self-interest as well.

Critical to beginning to rethink this relationship between humanity and the R2P is thus the need to move beyond the idea of the R2P as an attempt to live up to or put into practice the universal value of humanity. One must instead interrogate the complex dual function of humanity, understood both as a moral demand for ethical reflection and a moral imperative to motivate action and response in the name of humanity.

As I discuss in the book, when it comes to the idea of humanity as a motivational push factor, the concept remains much more fundamentally contested, particularly in relation to other demands and pressures that shape state interests. Exploring these dynamics provides a much clearer analysis of the way appeals to humanity interact with competing moral, legal, and political pressures at the global level.

Consequently, when we talk about motivation and political will in terms of the R2P and atrocity crimes, it is critical not to separate these out from broader discussions concerning how states approach the protection of human beings in a variety of contexts.

The responses by intervening powers to mass atrocity crimes from Kosovo to Libya suggest that moral sacrifice has always encountered clear political limits, particularly when it comes to the value of national lives when those being protected are not nationals. For example, the exclusive use of air power instead of ground troops, potentially weakening the effectiveness of the intervention, can be viewed as a tactic to reduce the casualties of the intervener. Acknowledging the clear human wrongs created by mass atrocity crimes has therefore not prevented state actors from setting clear parameters regarding what sacrifices and expenses are valid for the sake of protecting other populations.

In this sense, by generally ignoring the influence of moral dilemmas and pressures in the later stages of decision-making, advocates have often downplayed the complexity of the interaction between morality and politics in mass atrocity situations. There is often a presumed ease from which moral claims should translate into sufficient political responses in such cases.

Consequently, when R2P debates take the shape of a simple dichotomy between the influence of politics and the protection of humanity, this masks the critical interaction between the two normative pressures and thus reinforces the idea of political decision-making as an apparent restriction on the goals of humanity. It is vital to reject this arbitrary separation and examine in more detail the politics of humanity itself in order to fully question the overall limits of humanity as a motivating force.

In this regard, any approach to conceptualizing how to address the current R2P implementation gap must be careful not to rely too heavily on political, legal or moral arguments alone; they must at the same time recognise how each works to generate constraints and opportunities in the process of addressing mass atrocity crimes.

As Bohm and Brown have recently argued, in the long term, states will need to think systematically beyond just the “de-escalation of risk within already present cycles of violence” and aim to build toward addressing the more structural determinants of violence. This will require long-term motivation beyond the immediate moral threat generated by mass atrocity crimes.

Critical to the path forward for the R2P principle is thus a recognition that there can be no easy fixes and that the continuation of mass atrocity crimes occurring globally is a reflection of the complexity of state decision-making when it comes to setting national priorities and the moral limits of political life. My book therefore aims to provide an important theoretical reset of current R2P debates, in order to raise challenging and provocative questions about the future of the principle as it is currently conceived.

In a rapidly changing global order, one in which rising powers are pushing an increasingly pluralist agenda, it is more vital than ever to reappraise the core moral idea of humanity that is deemed to underpin the R2P principle, and to continue assessing what value the R2P does hold in the overall goal of ending mass atrocity crimes.

Samuel Jarvis is a lecturer in international relations at York St John University. His first book The Limits of Common Humanity: Motivating the Responsibility to Protect in a Changing Global Order (Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press) will be published in June 2022.

If you are interested in submitting a blog post for the ECR2P’s Fresh Perspectives series, then please contact Dr Richard Illingworth by Email (r.illingworth@leeds.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RJI95).

Image credit: PxHere.