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Wrestling with R2P’s Colonial Parallels

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Fresh Perspectives
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Luke Glanville (Australian National University) uses this ECR2P Fresh Perspectives blog to write on R2P and its colonial parallels.

 

While many scholars of international relations and international law have been busily researching contemporary ideas and practices pertaining to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and related notions of international human protection in recent decades, scholars of international history have been producing a range of excellent studies of international protection’s imperial roots. These studies, including Alan Lester and Fae Dussart’s Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow, and Bain Attwood’s Protection and Empire: A Global History, and Christina Twomey and Katherine Ellinghaus’s Protection: Global Genealogies, Local Practices, which variously show how the idea of protection was routinely invoked to justify European colonial rule and some of the brutal violence that attended such rule, make for sobering reading for anyone advocating for international efforts to protect vulnerable people today.

Reading these works while researching for my new book, Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities, I came across a line by the nineteenth-century Oxford political economist Herman Merivale that I found particularly confronting (I found the line in Duncan Bell’s excellent Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire). Merivale, who would go on to become permanent under-secretary at Britain’s Colonial Office, delivered a series lectures on colonization in 1839-41. The eighteenth lecture contemplated the duty of colonial governments to protect and civilize indigenous people.

Merivale began the lecture by lamenting “the ferocity and treachery” that had marked the conduct of colonial powers in their relations with indigenous people across South Africa, Australia, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and the United States’ interior. “Desolation goes before us,” he declared, “and civilization lags slowly and lamely behind.” And yet he refused to give up on the settler-colonial project. He insisted instead that “our errors are not of conception so much as of execution,” and proceeded to outline a range of new laws and measures that might better ensure the protection of indigenous peoples.

As I read that line by Merivale – his insistence that the errors, treacheries, and grave injustices of colonial powers “are not of conception so much as of execution” – I was troubled by how much it sounded like how I, and I suspect others too, have often thought about R2P.

We look at the horrors that have befallen Libya over the decade since NATO’s 2011 military intervention. Perhaps we nod our heads in solemn agreement with US President Barack Obama as he reflects that “We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.” And so we respond to this failure by thinking hard about how the R2P principle might be reformed, or better understood, so as to avoid such negative results in the future.

Perhaps we need to clarify the justifications and mandates of military interventions so that intervening powers are made answerable for the conduct and progress of their interventions, we think. Or perhaps we need to emphasize once more the importance of working with states rather than against them, wherever possible, to help prevent atrocities before they begin, so as to avoid the terrible need to consider resorting to military intervention. That is, we tell ourselves, as Merivale did, that “our errors are not of conception so much as of execution.”

But what if those of us who, more than a century and a half after Merivale said these words, continue to hope for the possibility of responsible and effective international efforts to protect vulnerable populations, despite failure after failure – what if we are simply fooling ourselves, as I think Merivale probably was? What if our errors really are of conception after all? What if the problem isn’t how states implement R2P, but the problem is simply R2P?

Upon reading Merivale’s mid-nineteenth-century lecture, I realized that one of the necessary tasks of my book would be to wrestle with these questions and to try to respond to the insightful criticisms of R2P offered along similar lines in recent years by scholars such as Adom Getachew and Jessica Whyte.

I offer some answers to these questions in the book. But I suspect that my answers at best serve to clarify important tensions rather than fully resolve them. I argue, for example, that for all its troubling ideational and practical resonances that critics have noted, R2P does not mirror past European imperial-protectionist projects as straightforwardly as some people suggest. The differences are significant.

For starters, in contrast to nineteenth-century European norms of imperial rule, R2P does not justify annexation, the extinguishment of sovereignty, and the subjection of peoples to foreign rule. Those who are subjected to international protection measures are supposed to remain sovereign. Protection efforts are supposed to defend and uphold their sovereign will.

Further, in contrast to nineteenth-century agreements such as the General Act of the Conference of Berlin (1885), in which an exclusive club of imperial powers claimed a duty to protect and civilize those outside the club, R2P was endorsed by all states at the UN World Summit in 2005.

Non-consensual interference in sovereign affairs for the purpose of protecting populations from atrocities, moreover, today requires the assent of the UN Security Council – a body which, for all its many faults, probably cannot be accused of authorizing military intervention too regularly and too recklessly. Indeed, the Security Council has only once authorized the resort to force against the wishes of the functioning government of a sovereign state for purposes of human protection. That was in the case of Libya. As disastrous as the outcomes of that intervention have been, Libya should not be carelessly framed as yet another R2P-intervention gone wrong.

R2P shouldn’t be reduced to military intervention, and it certainly shouldn’t be reduced to the Libyan intervention. A growing body of evidence suggests that international efforts do frequently make a positive contribution to protecting people from atrocities. Not only does the resort to force not always go wrong – think for example of the successful US intervention to forcibly rescue tens of thousands of Yazidis under attack from Islamic State and trapped on Mount Sinjar in Iraq in 2014, and think of the overall positive record of UN peacekeeping operations, notwithstanding some notable and lamentable failures – but there are also a range of non-forcible measures available to the international community, from the application of diplomatic pressure and targeted sanctions to the provision of relief and refuge to victims, which, when carefully and appropriately applied, can contribute meaningfully to protecting populations from atrocities.

If we look broadly at the practice of R2P over the last two decades, in the midst of grave failures not least of which has been the deplorable refusal of states to do more to protect millions of suffering Syrians since 2011, it has had some real successes in helping prompt the prevention of atrocities and the protection of victims.

Nevertheless, there is a need to keep wrestling with R2P’s colonial parallels. The lures of civilizational self-confidence and narratives of progress that so captured nineteenth-century imperial-humanitarians and so often compromised their desires and efforts to protect vulnerable people are still with us. We cannot write off the ills of the aftermath of the Libyan intervention as merely a problematic data point. It is a tragic example of protection gone wrong. The legacies of European colonialism and the all-too-easy solutions to colonialism’s ills that those like Merivale proposed haunt R2P. Recognition of this should give pause to anyone contemplating the imposition of international protection measures for the sake of vulnerable people today.

Luke Glanville is associate professor of international relations at Australian National University. His most recent book is Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).

 

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