Introduction

The somewhat diminishing potential for legal novelty embodied in the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) doctrine – through its long journey from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) Report's implied challenge to the Security Council's monopoly over the use of force, to the rather narrow endorsement of the doctrine in the 2005 World Outcome Document (WSO Document) – has understandingly given rise to scepticism regarding the doctrine's legal significance. However, the underlying notion guiding RtoP, even in its narrow interpretation, according to which sovereignty entails responsibility rather than merely the power to control territory, can contribute to a better understanding of contemporary international law.

Indeed, the concept of sovereignty as responsibility is not entirely new, and can be deduced from various well-established instruments of international law. However, the RtoP doctrine can serve to consolidate and aggregate these instruments under a common theoretical wing, where the concept of sovereignty as responsibility can be looked upon as a basic principle to which major interpretational value should be attributed.

As such, the perception of sovereignty as responsibility has possible legal implications in areas of international law that, traditionally, assessed the rights and powers of actors on counts of their effective control over territory (territorial effectiveness). One of these fields of traditional law is the law of internal armed conflict, in which the status of parties to an internal armed conflict was determined through the largely value-neutral prism of territorial effective control. This approach conformed to the predominant theories of recognition of states and governments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which recognition was granted upon the fulfilment of certain conditions of effectiveness.

However, over the decades, territorial effectiveness lost its status as the sole factor in recognition. The RtoP doctrine, which stresses that one of the basic characteristics of ‘sovereignty’ is the responsibility to protect populations, can be viewed as yet another development in international law where the principle of territorial effectiveness is losing ground. It is reasonable to argue, in this context, that the maxim according to which sovereignty is a source of responsibility is also valid inversely – and accordingly, responsibility is also a source of sovereignty.