Responsibility to Protect and Sovereignty

Notions of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ are often framed as radical departures from the ‘traditional’ conception of sovereignty. Many assume that sovereignty has, until recently, entailed only rights and not responsibilities. In contrast, this article argues that sovereign authority has been understood to involve varied and evolving responsibilities since it was first articulated in the 16th and 17th centuries. It then traces the historical emergence of the tension between the right of sovereign states to be self-governing and free from outside interference and their responsibility to secure the safety of their populations. It cautions against a simplified story of ‘traditional’ sovereignty which reifies supposedly concrete and ahistorical rights of sovereigns while casting sovereign responsibilities as a morally abstract and late-arriving challenge.

Journal of Politics and Law, 2018

This paper is an attempt at analysing the intricacies between international law, the concept of Responsibility to Protect and its implications for the sovereignty of modern states. The paper examines how the concept of responsibility to protect (as stipulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)) impacts on the sovereignty of states. It adopts the essay style of writing and reviews a number of documents on the subject of international law, sovereignty and the responsibility to protect. The paper consequently argues that though the ICISS claims that its " purpose is not to license aggression with fine words, or to provide strong states with new rationales for doubtful strategic designs " (ICISS, 2001, p. 35), the Commission's very attempt to exempt the permanent five and other so-called major powers from intervention does just that whether intentionally or unintentionally. It consequently recommends that much effort should be made to address the inequalities within the international system through the formulation of appropriate policies and international regulations that address the sovereign equality of states in the international system, especially on the question of intervention.

The Rise of Responsibility in World Politics, 2020

The aim of the chapter is to trace the history of responsibility in the field of security through the development of R2P. By using the idea of ‘responsibility’ as a lens through which to assess which and whose interests, objectives, and aims R2P was designed to advance, and how this was articulated in the inception of R2P, I show that in spite of claimed ancestry, R2P was a product of the late 1990s and aimed to address the lack of international response or intervention in the humanitarian crises of that decade. In so doing, the chapter contributes to broadening our historical account of R2P by linking and situating aspects of R2P to and alongside earlier initiatives of the 1980s, including Our Global Neighbourhood. It thus feeds into the overall objective of the book to follow the concept of discourse and to re-establish how it entered the policy discourse in one particular policy field, that of security.

Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2020

This Essay examines current and emerging threats to peace-social and political threats as well as military and technological. It argues that leading conceptions of State sovereignty cannot sustain a legal order capable of meeting those threats. The Essay proposes that recent efforts by international law scholars to reformulate State sovereignty as responsibility to humanity-what the Essay calls 'R2H' for short-offer a better hope. Under this reformulation, a State's decision-making must take into account the interests of those outside their sovereign territory as well as those of its own people-in particular, the shared interest in subduing dire threats to world peace. The Essay reviews the historical background of sovereignty as control and sovereignty as responsibility, the two leading current conceptions. The latter is a principle underlying the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) doctrine, but this Essay argues that R2P is both too narrow in scope and too focused on military interventions. R2H can be understood as a generalization of R2P. R2H raises distinctive philosophical issues about what "humanity" means, which the Essay addresses. Finally, it confronts the concern that in an age of resurgent nationalism, a strongly internationalist approach such as R2P is anachronistic. In reply, the Essay criticizes current reactionary nationalisms as both morally and practically misguided. An epilogue written during the COVID-19 pandemic offers preliminary thoughts about R2H in connection with the pandemic.

Constellations, 2015

In 2005 the General Assembly unanimously endorsed the Responsibility-to-Protect doctrine. This led to heated debates that suggest that principled commitments to human rights and sovereignty are on a collision course: if one values the international protection of human rights then one must accept that this may undermine the sovereign equality of states and vice versa. As a way out of this dilemma, several authors (e.g. Rawls, Habermas, Cohen) follow a strategy of minimizing and de-internationalizing human rights standards within their proposals for a new international order. These proposals suggest that we can have international enforcement of minimal standards and domestic enforcement of demanding standards, but that we cannot have international enforcement of demanding standards without simultaneously undermining the sovereign equality of states. To question this assumption I switch the focus of analysis from the context of military intervention to the global economic order and show how demanding international human rights standards can play an essential role in strengthening the sovereign equality of states within global institutions. On this basis, I offer an account of the international community’s responsibility to protect human rights that is more demanding than the currently acknowledged account and which avoids undermining the sovereign equality of states.

IR Scholars have frequently associated the impact of globalization with the threats of state’s sovereignty. As a result, the concept of state sovereignty has come under growing scrutiny. This essay is a description of a theoretical analysis of ongoing debates on the issue of state sovereignty in the study of world politics. For this reason, this essay shall contest on how threatened is the concept of state sovereignty in the modern world by identifying some conceivable modern threats based on scholar’s perspective. In order to demonstrate this, this essay is divided into several sections. First of all, the essay reviews a number of existing literature on the concept of state sovereignty. Secondly, the essay argues that there is a shifting conception of threat, from the idea of old ‘military’ threats to the notion of modern ‘asymmetric’ threats by defining the definition and addressing some evidence of its threats. The final part of the essay will discuss the role of state’s non-military components to response the asymmetric threats.

In my research essay I aim to analyse the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine: there is no guidance on when and how the intervention should be employed and, then, there are several thorny issues regarding the concrete implementation, namely the contrast between the Westphalian perspective of sovereignity and the "humanized sovereignity", the balance between the sovereignity doctrine and the protection of civilian, the relation between the R2P and the humanitarian intervention, and the key role of the United Nations Security Council (SC) due to the mechanism of the veto power. Finally, some proposals as a way out of the current impasse.

Tartu Ülikool, 2020

Peter S Clarke, 2016

This essay will examine the relationship between the human security (HS) paradigm and the traditional concept of state sovereignty (SS). The thesis is that adopting the HS paradigm, as a policy tool and international framework to solve global security issues, will lead to the expedition of the decline of the traditional Westphalian concept of SS which historically is at the cornerstone of international law and international relations. It is because of the concept's vastness and its imprecise definition, HS allows for the facilitation of collective international action, a modern feature of multilateralism, by various actors and participants on the global stage on almost every issue. This will result in the traditional doctrine of SS becoming much less relevant in the 21st century. Inevitably this means the concept of SS will gradually be redefined if not abandoned. In our globalised world interdependence of nations is practically a fact of life in pretty much all facets of life. Most if not all issues of concern of HS transcend national borders often making the rigid adherence to the doctrine of SS an obstacle to modern problem solutions and the prevention of problems in the international arena.