The Responsibility to Protect: A Critique

Following the controversy over humanitarian interventions during the 1990s, the doctrine of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ offered in the 2001 Responsibility to Protect Report has been widely ratified and lauded as a means of reconciling the rights of sovereign states with the human rights of individuals. If states are unable to guarantee a certain level of human rights for their citizens, the Report sets out criteria by which the sovereignty of states can be suspended in favour of the international community.

This paper criticizes the reconciliation offered in the new doctrine, suggesting that the doctrine extends the rights of war-making available to powerful states. These new rights of war do not constitute a formalized new hierarchy, nor do they explicitly encroach on the rights of states. Instead, the rights of war are extended under the terms of humanitarian emergency. I argue that this minimal attempt to formalize extreme or emergency scenarios nonetheless warps the whole structure of international law. I conclude that the extension of ‘emergency politics’ strengthens existing relations of power, because the invocation of emergency obviates the need to positively justify power relations, effectively making power its own justification. By enshrining the unaccountable exercise of power, the perverse consequence of the new doctrine is to make the exercise of power less responsible.