There are two conflicting goals of the emerging Responsibility to Protect doctrine. The first is that States have the responsibility to protect their own citizens from human rights abuses either domestically or internationally. The second is that States have a responsibility to aid other States in developing the capacity to protect their own citizens from human rights abuses. While it does not appear that these goals conflict, I will argue that in some cases they do, or that they could do so. The most basic reason for this, as this chapter will attempt to show, is that States have scarce resources available for human rights protection. Most dramatically, if a State has the responsibility to wage war to aid a weak State in defending itself from aggression, then to do so it may be required to jeopardize the protection of the human rights of its own citizens, most especially those who would be called into military service to protect the rights of those in other States, or those who would otherwise get welfare assistance from their own State. I will argue that a State’s soldiers and other citizens have human rights that may, and sometimes should, be taken into account in deciding whether to wage humanitarian war. I do not argue that the lives of soldiers are an overriding concern, but only that they should count. And if they do, there is a generally unrecognized conflict of responsibilities concerning human rights. Especially in debates about human rights, the lives and basic human rights of soldiers should not be discounted.

This issue sits at the intersection of the set of concerns that reconciliation addresses and the set of concerns that involve rebuilding, especially the part of the Responsibility to Protect that concerns rebuilding. As we saw in the previous chapters, how returning troops are viewed was one of the key considerations in achieving reconciliation after war ends. People will not come to respect the rule of law if they believe that their sons and daughters have been sacrificed unnecessarily, or where the lives of their fellow citizens were disvalued vis-à-vis the lives of foreign nationals. Such considerations will haunt the jus post bellum reflections and make reconciliation and rebuilding efforts all that much harder. The Responsibility to Protect is a noble doctrine but in its practical effects there are problems and conflicts that need to be given more attention than they have so far.