Abstract
This article offers a new approach to thinking about the ethics and politics of the responsibility to protect (RtoP): It grounds the RtoP in an understanding of politics that recognises the specificity of the political, including its own internal sources of normativity, while also appreciating the plethora of ways in which morality features in political life. What emerges is a way of making sense of the RtoP in distinctively political terms – not as the attempt to put some universal moral project into practice, but as concrete responses to specifically political problems employing legitimate authority and power – but which must draw upon moral values (of humanity) in order to legitimate interventions. This view has the advantage of overcoming the realist/liberal dichotomy by enabling us to see morality as not prior to or having antecedent authority over the political yet as nevertheless an integral part of politics vital to achieving a complete understanding of the RtoP.
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Notes
This dichotomy of morality/politics can also be reflected in the central dichotomy of moral thinking about RtoP: human rights/sovereignty. Yet though the two are related, the latter is not simply a more concrete instance of the former. The modern notion of sovereignty is often taken by its detractors to simply be a post-Westphalian normative cover for non-interference cynically employed by state leaders to justify absolute authority within their territory. This overlooks the extent to which sovereignty as a concept is itself deeply embedded in moral (and specifically liberal) notions of self-determination and the right for individuals to determine their own collective ways of life (Welsh, 2013). This is not, therefore, best understood as morality set against politics but rather as one moral value (human rights) clashing with another (self-determination). That these moral values can clash, even within a single tradition of political thought, throws further doubt on the prospects of thinking about politics in terms of moral first principles.
This also means that the question is not primary in the sense that order and stability are the first goods a political association must address once established. An order becomes political insofar as it is able to address the first political question in a manner that those subject to it can recognise as legitimate. This allows us to make sense of Hume’s sensible observation that the origins of most states we now recognise as legitimate have their origins in conquest or usurpation rather than the free covenant between a people and its government.
It is worth remembering, however, that liberal accounts of sovereignty such as these are significantly more demanding in terms of the sort of rights that must be protected (e.g. to property, to freedom of speech and association, to equality before the law), and hence have more extensive conditions on sovereignty. Refraining from killing your population would be a necessary but not sufficient condition of all liberal theories of sovereignty.
I have purposefully left open the question whether states have a right to intervene in the affairs of another state in the event of a manifest failing to protect, or a duty to do so. This is a difference that makes a difference, though not one philosophy will ever resolve; it is a political dispute.
Bellamy (2013) reflects something of this thought when he writes (p. 342) that ‘Persuasive and consistent argumentation [regarding whether an issue requires urgent attention within the aegis of the RtoP] is more likely in less politicised and more insulated settings than in highly political settings, such as those relating to mass atrocities, where contextual variables exert greater effect’ (emphasis added).
Contrast the claim that the RtoP’s ‘just cause’ threshold includes genocide and ethnic cleansing because people fear cruelty with Roff’s Kantian (2011) explanation: ‘each of these crimes primarily involves fundamental violations of one’s innate right to external freedom’ (p. 164, emphasis in the original). Or that the wrong of crimes against humanity lies simply in the very act of cruelty and the fear that creates rather than being ‘the ultimate expression of injustice: violating a person’s external freedom by depriving her of her powers and means or using her powers and means without her consent’ (p. 165).
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Sleat, M. The politics and morality of the responsibility to protect: Beyond the realist/liberal impasse. Int Polit 53, 67–82 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2015.38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2015.38