The well-chronicled suffering in Gaza evokes a human tragedy of staggering proportion. It also raises questions that have less to do with the atrocities being committed there, and more to do with the world’s seeming indifference to them.
Why has the UN Security Council failed to invoke an established doctrine — the Responsibility to Protect — designed to prevent mass atrocities?
And what does that failure say about the effectiveness of R2P, as it is commonly known — and about the so-called “international community”?
Once a powerful mechanism for atrocity prevention, R2P now teeters on the brink of irrelevance.
The UN Security Council’s unanimous endorsement of R2P in April 2006 was a watershed moment. Following the UN General Assembly’s endorsement of R2P the previous year, a robust international ethic of human security seemed — at long last — at hand.
By codifying the idea that a state’s claim to sovereignty depends on whether it attends to the well-being of its citizens, the Security Council and its five permanent members — among them the world’s great powers — made civilian protection a guiding principle for all subsequent deliberations over international peace and security.
This breakthrough was the result of decades of thinking, advocacy, compromise and, tragically, human suffering.
Indeed, a straight line can be drawn from R2P’s establishment back to the Holocaust and the sentiments of “never again” that inspired the 1948 Genocide Convention and the subsequent resurgence of international humanitarian law. However, the road to R2P that runs through the latter half of the 20th century was remarkably uneven.
Apparent gains in the form of legal constraints on head-of-state immunity or the establishment of the International Criminal Court were offset by catastrophic failures to stop genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Darfur region of Sudan.
These and numerous other tragedies exposed the inadequacy of the international security architecture for the challenges of the 21st century.
Following overtures from then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in 2000 the Canadian government established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.
This ad-hoc panel of experts took up the task of promoting civilian protection and humanitarian action without undermining the concept of state sovereignty. The fruits of their labour emerged in the form of the Responsibility to Protect.
The logic of R2P
R2P represents a remarkable threading of the needle between two concepts that are seemingly incompatible: state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention.
The ICISS managed this feat by reaffirming the centrality of state sovereignty while reframing it as contingent on a specific set of conditions.
Here the commission was greatly inspired by the concept of “sovereignty as responsibility”. The logic is simple but powerful: sovereignty is a privilege that states claim in return for their willingness to carry out the duty of caring for their citizens — part of the “social contract” between the government and the governed.
Conversely, when and where states and their leaders are unable or unwilling to live up to that obligation, the state’s right to non-intervention can be suspended in service of ensuring human well-being.
The blueprint for implementing R2P was elaborated in the UN’s 2005 World Summit Outcomes document, with what was called the “three pillars” approach.
While the first pillar reaffirmed that states retained primary responsibility for protecting civilians, the second and third pillars stipulated clear roles for the international community as either a support (second) or a surrogate (third) whenever states lacked the capacity or will to do it.
For the first time, the world accepted — even embraced — the idea of a collective duty to protect vulnerable civilians from harm.
A mixed record
R2P’s track record in delivering on that obligation has been decidedly mixed.
There were early, if modest, successes. R2P was used to endorse an African Union-led peace operation in Darfur in 2006 and to underwrite an international response to election-related violence in Kenya in 2007.
Soon, however, optimism over a potential transformation of international norms was dampened by the realities of power politics.
The litmus test for R2P came in Libya, amid the tumult of the Arab Spring. With the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime and the descent of the country into civil war in early 2011, the Security Council passed two controversial resolutions, UNSCR 1970 and 1973, which together effectively authorised military intervention on R2P grounds.
While proponents chalked up the Libya intervention as a win for civilian protection, the persistence of widespread human suffering despite NATO’s presence confirmed the suspicions of R2P’s opponents –most notably permanent Security Council members Russia and China – that R2P was little more than a pretext for Western liberal imperialism.
The reverberations from the Libya experience have persisted, explaining (among other things) the refusal of the Security Council to invoke R2P during the civil war in Syria, a war defined by gruesome mass atrocities perpetrated by the state against civilians.
The juxtaposition between a proliferation of complex humanitarian emergencies in which human rights are systematically violated and civilian protection desperately needed (including Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan and Venezuela) and the failure of the international community to effectively respond to them is stark.
The fact that political support for humanitarian action has evaporated in tandem with the institutionalisation of R2P is especially damning.
In the words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: “The world is failing to live up to its commitments to protect civilians; commitments enshrined in international humanitarian law.”
The triumph of atrocity politics
Part of the reason for R2P’s collapse lies in the unravelling of the liberal international order and the resurgence of authoritarianism, which have undermined the spirit and principles of R2P.
A second, more direct cause is the growing appeal of “the politics of atrocity”. This form of politics draws heavily on identity-based grievances, using competitive victimhood and weaponising memory and historical trauma in order to justify committing atrocities against any and all “enemies”.
The appeal of atrocity politics resides in its potential to mobilise domestic and international support for campaigns of unmitigated violence under the guise of “security”.
States and their leaders are emboldened to commit crimes against civilians that flagrantly violate international law, and to engage in the obstruction of justice when confronted about them.
The result is a total inversion of R2P’s aims.
Rather than promoting civilian protection out of a sense of collective duty, the security interests of the state are (once again) paramount, with civilians rendered inconsequential.
In Gaza, as in too many other situations around the world, we are witnessing a consolidation of coercion in the hands of the few through the strategic use of atrocity politics.
In the meantime, the principle of civilian protection lies in tatters. To the extent that the international community stands idle while this happens, we are all responsible.
Michael Butler is Chair of the Department of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. He has published extensively on the topic of international peace and security, including his newest book, Reconstructing the Responsibility to Protect: From Humanitarian Intervention to Human Security (Routledge, 2024).
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.
(Cover Photo: The appeal of atrocity politics resides in its potential to mobilise domestic and international support for campaigns of unmitigated violence under the guise of ‘security’. Al-Masry Tower, Gaza City, March 2024 by Emad El Byed via Unsplash https://tinyurl.com/3rr99eky)
GazaHuman Rightsinternational relationsIsraelPalestinePoliticsSecurity CouncilSyriaUnited Nations