Introduction

Contemporary discourses and practices of humanitarianism have increasingly sought to transcend the politically contentious debate between perspectives that embrace and legitimise external intervention as necessary to prevent human rights violations, and those that view it as a version of paternalistic liberal internationalism and liberal imperialism. To mediate this split, the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has gained considerable prominence in theory, analysis and policy. Unanimously adopted by United Nations member states at the 2005 World Summit, R2P is premised on the moral advocacy that prevention of mass atrocities is a shared responsibility and a matter of collaboration between states and the international community. Further, the mechanism for executing this shared responsibility necessitates that some constraints are placed upon the meaning and practice of sovereignty.

Thus, under the principle of sovereignty as responsibility, it is argued that states have a primary duty to protect their citizens from war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and ethnic cleansing. However, if states are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens from such atrocities, the responsibility is transferred to the international community. On this account, R2P emerges as a doctrine that seeks to transform how we conceive of humanitarianism in relation to state sovereignty. Responses to gross and systematic violations of human rights will henceforth begin by an articulation of state sovereignty as responsibility. This, it was argued, represented a departure from humanitarian intervention that was condemned as an affront to sovereignty (ICISS 2001; Evans 2006; Cramer-Flood 2008). A decade has passed since the idea of R2P was introduced to the world of humanitarianism. Over that period, R2P has done exceedingly well in mobilising global public interest and concern about human rights violations and, in the process, has helped establish the principles of civilian protection. However, its emergence and international presence has been accompanied by the persistence of the very dilemma it was expected to resolve: how to justify intervention on the basis of principle rather than political expediency (Hopgood 2014: 182).