Skip to main content

The Responsibility to Protect: A Faltering Cosmopolitan Aspiration

Category
Fresh Perspectives
Date

ECR2P post-graduate researcher, Richard Illingworth, reflects on the relationship between R2P and cosmopolitan demands of human protection.

 

Recently, we marked 15 years since the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was unanimously adopted by heads of state at the 2005 UN World Summit. In light of this landmark, I use this ECR2P Fresh Perspectives blog to briefly reflect on the relationship between R2P and a cosmopolitan commitment to uphold fundamental human rights. This relationship is an important one, as cosmopolitanism should underpin R2P as a mechanism aimed at protecting human beings from the four mass crimes of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.

The short discussion that follows argues that R2P does have a theoretically relevant connection with cosmopolitan ideals, if only an imperfect one. However, it also argues that the mechanisms for enforcing R2P are weak, meaning its practical implementation is often left wanting when judged by cosmopolitan standards.

 

Cosmopolitan Demands of R2P

Cosmopolitanism is the view that human beings are bound by a shared sense of moral value. Its foundations are rooted in an appreciation for individuals as the ultimate units of moral worth, and it sees ‘a common humanity beyond ethnic, religious, class, or gender particularities’.

Three fundamental criteria underpin all cosmopolitan thinking: individualism, egalitarianism, and universalism. Individualism views individuals as possessing fundamental needs to autonomously lead their lives separate from the pressures of un-warranted coercion. Egalitarianism takes all human beings as equal. Whilst universalism promotes the idea that there are demands to be fulfilled towards all others.

Taken together, these three criteria facilitate the cosmopolitan’s concern for justice on a global scale. At the very least, cosmopolitan justice demands that the fundamental needs of all the world’s peoples are met. This principle of justice calls for a system of rights and obligations, fostering duties towards the protection of others. These duties exist in both a positive and negative form. Positive duties are those which call for active support in protecting individual’s rights. Negative duties are those that demand actions are not taken which may undermine the rights of others. It is important to note that both positive and negative duties should not be viewed as entirely separate. As Pogge argues, if negative duties are to be successfully met, then they impose a requirement not just to omit certain actions which facilitate harm, but also to take action to end harms which currently exist.

If taken seriously, cosmopolitan positive and negative duties of human protection demand three core elements from the R2P norm. R2P should promote a positive duty to react to atrocity cases, a positive duty to prevent crises from occurring, and a negative duty to avoid acting in ways that undermine atrocity prevention.

In its reactive aspect, R2P ought to be about generating the will and conditions in which an appropriate international response for every atrocity crimes case is possible. This goes beyond simply demanding a responsibility for the international community to ‘try’ and do something in the face of some cases of mass violence, to demand that it be possible for all avenues of response under the R2P toolkit to be considered in every relevant case. In its preventive aspect, R2P should require states to take meaningful commitments to prevent crises from occurring in the first instance, and also that they should not act in ways which may contribute to the outbreak of atrocity crimes.

 

Is R2P Cosmopolitan?

At the fundamental level, R2P is a cosmopolitan norm. It aims to protect against four mass atrocity crimes which clearly threaten the fundamental rights of human beings to live their lives. It connects with basic cosmopolitan criteria of individualism, egalitarianism, and universalism as an attempt at promoting the protection of all the world’s populations via duties which exist on both a domestic and international level.

But does R2P and its three pillar structure have a deep connection with cosmopolitan positive and negative duties of protection? In Pillar One and Pillar Two, R2P appears to correlate with positive and negative duties of atrocity prevention. Pillar One is a clear duty for domestic rulers to not inflict harms against their own population. Pillar Two connects with a positive duty to assist other states and prevent atrocities from occurring, and in this sense, R2P is conceptually linked with cosmopolitan aims of global socio-economic justice and the prevention of mass harm. R2P is understood as a narrow but deep doctrine and does not view mass atrocity crimes in isolation from wider human rights issues. These preventive aspects of R2P also hint at a cosmopolitan understanding of the need to secure the rights of others by preventing what Linklater refers to as ‘abstract’ harms that facilitate conditions which perpetuate mass violence. Although, importantly, R2P fails to link cosmopolitan negative duties explicitly within the international aspect of its responsibilities.

Meanwhile, Pillar Three seems aligned with a positive duty to react to atrocity crimes; a cosmopolitan ethos premised on the need to halt widescale harms to human populations which threaten their fundamental needs. Samuel Wyatt has argued that R2P aligns with cosmopolitan maxims for where intervention is legitimate; making sovereignty conditional on meeting responsibilities, promoting collective responsibility for the international community to act, and delineating criteria for when intervention can legitimately occur (when any of the four mass crimes are committed).

There is then at least a theoretical relevance between the demands of cosmopolitan human protection and the responsibilities laid out in R2P’s three pillars. R2P is an attempt to promote values largely aligned with cosmopolitan demands for upholding fundamental human rights.

 

R2P and the Implementation of Cosmopolitan Duties in Practice

Whilst R2P has undoubtedly made important normative, institutional, and preventive contributions to human protection, R2P’s relevance to cosmopolitan demands of human protection does not automatically translate into good practice. As a norm of appropriate behaviour, R2P is prone to contestation over what it demands from states. Pillar Two and Three are particularly vague, and provide permissibility as to whether they are actually met. The means of enforcing R2P responsibilities are also weak, as R2P does not compel compliance and state interests (particularly in the UN Security Council) can obstruct effective action.

This has led to scholars such as Aidan Hehir arguing that R2P is ‘hollow’ because it permits rhetoric that need not be backed up in state practice. Others such as Tacheva and Brown suggest R2P is ‘stalled’ because the means of implementing R2P’s third pillar are impinged upon by state interests. While those such as Bellamy and Luck speak positively of R2P as a ‘responsibility to try’; when viewed through a more demanding cosmopolitan lens, R2P’s permissibility of compliance and weakness in enforcement leaves the cosmopolitan demands of human protection too often unsatisfied.

Regarding the positive duty to react, it is evident that some clear R2P cases do not invoke a robust response from the international community. Atrocities against Myanmar’s Rohingya population have not made it onto the UN Security Council’s formal agenda. Over Syria, the Security Council has seen 16 tabled draft resolutions vetoed by one or more of the P5. Meanwhile, there has not yet even been a UN inquiry launched over the ongoing events in China’s Xinjiang province and genocidal actions against Uyghur Muslims.

Regarding the positive duty to prevent, while preventive action has consistently been emphasised as a core element of R2P, it is not clear that this translates into effective prevention. There are, at the time of writing, 11 ongoing country cases of atrocity crimes in the world. Operationally, warning of atrocities does not always translate into action. For example, the factors conducive to atrocities in Myanmar were known for decades prior to the events of 2017 and beyond. Structurally, some have argued that R2P remains focused on symptoms over causes, failing to adequately deal with underlying structures of violence, such as poverty and inequality.

Finally, regarding the negative duty to prevent, R2P fails to explicitly link a cosmopolitan negative duty into the international aspect of its responsibilities. This means that R2P charges states with protection, but fails to account for the fact that mass atrocities are at least partly caused by the effects of state actions at the international level. R2P fails to address, for instance, the issue of arms transfers to oppressive regimes. As an example, the UK has supplied £4.7bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since 2015. This is despite the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen and contribution to what has been described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

 

Going Forward

Cosmopolitanism gives us a yardstick to measure whether R2P satisfies duties of human protection. It also provides us with a normative compass to point us in the direction of progress. Despite failings in implementation, R2P provides us with a framework largely theoretically aligned with cosmopolitan demands to uphold fundamental human rights.

We should remember that, after just 15 years since its adoption, R2P is still a relatively new norm. Even in recent times of international moral regress, R2P language has continued to frame the issue of atrocity prevention. Yet we also cannot ignore failures. What is needed now is reform to improve both R2P’s conceptual links with cosmopolitan human protection, and perhaps more significantly, institutional reform to improve R2P’s implementation in practice. For R2P to succeed in the long-term, we need to find ways to better implement cosmopolitan positive and negative duties to protect fundamental human rights.

 

Richard Illingworth, University of Leeds, UK.

Richard Illingworth is a PhD candidate working at the European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. This ECR2P Fresh Perspectives blog is derived from two chapters of his upcoming PhD thesis: Towards a Responsibility to Act: Can Transitional Cosmopolitanism Save the Responsibility to Protect?

 

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