The Responsibility to Protect and the Problem of Military Intervention
Author(s): Alex J. Bellamy
Source: International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 84, No.
4 (Jul., 2008), pp. 615-639
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
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The Responsibility to Protect
and the problem of military intervention
ALEX J. BELLAMY
From inauspicious beginnings, the 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) has come a
long way in a relatively short space of time. The principle was endorsed by the
United Nations General Assembly in 2005 and unanimously reaffirmed by the
Security Council in 2006 (Resolution 1674). * Ban Ki-moon has identified the
challenge of translating R2P 'from words into deeds' as one of the cornerstones
of his Secretary-Generalship.2 The principle has also become part of the working
language of international engagement with grave humanitarian crises: the head of
the Human Rights Council's mission to Darfur, Jodie Williams, used it to evaluate
the government of Sudan's performance, finding that it had 'manifestly failed'
in its responsibility to protect its citizens;3 the Security Council referred to the
principle in mandating the UN?African Union (AU) hybrid mission for Darfur
(UNAMID) (Resolution 1706, 2006); and both Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon used
R2P in relation to their diplomatic efforts to resolve the post-election conflict in
Kenya.4
Yet evidence of international disquiet with R2P abounds. The Williams Report
was denounced by Arab and Asian members of the Human Rights Council, and it
took six months to persuade the Security Council to reaffirm a principle to which
its members had given their assent in 2005 ;5 several governments have argued that
they did not in fact endorse the principle in 2005 and have committed themselves
only to further deliberation;6 and members of the Fifth Committee of the General
Assembly (Administrative and Budget) resisted the appointment of a special adviser
1 On a failed Canadian attempt to secure a technical General Assembly resolution on R2P in 2002, see Maria
Banda, 'The responsibility to protect: moving the agenda forward', paper prepared for the UN Association
of Canada, March 2007, p. 10; World Federalist Movement, 'Civil society meeting on the responsibility to
protect', final report, Geneva, 28 March 2003, p. 9. See also UN General Assembly, '2005 summit outcome',
A/60/L.1, 20 Sept. 2005, paras 138?9. On the impact of the war in Iraq, see Gareth Evans, 'When is it right to
fight?' Survival 46: 3, 2004, pp. 59?82; Alex J. Bellamy, 'A responsibility to protect or a Trojan horse? The crisis
in Darfur and humanitarian intervention after Iraq', Ethics and International Affairs 19: 2, 2005, pp. 31-54.
2 Ban Ki-moon, 'Annual address to the General Assembly', 25 Sept. 2007, SG/SM/11182.
3 The Williams Report, Report ofthe High-Level Mission on the situation of human rights in Darfur pursuant to Human
Rights Council decision S-4/101, A/HRC/4/80, 7 March 2007, paras 19-20.
4 See Roger Cohen, 'African genocide averted', New York Times, 3 March 2008.
5 These cases are examined at length in Alex J. Bellamy, 'Realizing the responsibility to protect', International
Studies Perspectives, forthcoming 2009.
See the positions of Algeria and Egypt, S/PV.5319 (Resumption 1), 9 Dec. 2005, pp. 3 and 6. See also Gareth
Evans, 'The responsibility to protect: an idea whose time has come . . . and gone?', lecture to the David Davies
Memorial Institute, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 23 April 2008.
International Affairs 84: 4 (2008) 615-639
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Alex J. Bellamy
mandated only to develop the 'concept' of R2P and build consensus around it.7 In
the end, the committee agreed to the appointment of Edward Luck, but insisted
that the phrase R2P be removed from his job title. Luck will be paid $1 a year for
his services and still has neither a telephone nor an email account at the UN.8 So
difficult has it proved to forge consensus on R2P that the principle's supporters are
concerned lest its inclusion on the agenda of the 2008 General Assembly damage
rather than advance its prospects.9 For very different reasons, some advocates of
R2P have themselves taken to criticizing the principle that emerged from the 2005
World Summit, labelling it 'R2P lite'.10
These problems originate from a common source: confusion about the
relationship between R2P and non-consensual military intervention. On the one
hand, there is a common belief among governments (especially members of the
Non-Aligned Movement) that R2P is simply a more sophisticated way of concep
tualizing and hence legitimizing humanitarian intervention.11 These concerns have
been expressed by governments for as long as the concept has been around but have
been fuelled by events.12 For instance, since 2005 it has been widely suggested that
R2P 'legalizes' or 'legitimizes' non-consensual intervention potentially without
the sanction of the UN Security Council.13 Stephen Stedman, a senior adviser
to Kofi Annan on UN reform, argued that Annan's agenda had included 'a new
norm, the responsibility to protect, to legalize humanitarian intervention' and then
claimed that the 2005 World Summit had succeeded in establishing 'a new norm to
7 See Fifth Committee of the General Assembly, GA/AB/3837, 4 March 2008. It should be noted that Edward
Luck was not obliged to seek the support of the Fifth Committee because his is not a salaried position. Luck
wisely chose to expose himself to scrutiny in the committee in order to win crucial political support for his
mandate.
See Gareth Evans, 'The responsibility to protect'; Fifth Committee of the General Assembly, GA/AB/3837, 4
March 2008.
9 This sentiment has been expressed to the author by foreign affairs officials from two member states that are
prominent supporters of R2P.
10 This phrase was first suggested to the author by Thomas Weiss, who served as director of the ICISS research
directorate. Weiss argued that the R2P concept emerged from the World Summit 'relatively intact' but that
because the summit closed off the possibility of intervention not authorized by the Security Council it could be
considered 'R2P lite'. See Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian intervention: ideas in action (Cambridge: Polity, 2007),
pp. 116?17. The term is also used by Don Hubert, who worked with Weiss in the ICISS research directorate.
11 This position has been very commonly expressed by governments. When the Security Council first discussed
R2P, at its 2002 retreat, the Chinese insisted that all questions relating to the use of force defer to the
Security Council and Russian diplomats argued that by countenancing unilateral intervention, R2P risked
undermining the UN Charter. See Yevgeny Primakov, 'UN process, not humanitarian intervention, is world's
best hope', New Perspectives Quarterly, 2 Sept. 2004, wwwdigitalnpq.org/global_services%20viewpoint/02-09
04Primakov.html; Jennifer M. Welsh, 'Conclusion: humanitarian intervention after 11 September', in Jennifer
M. Welsh, ed., Humanitarian intervention and international relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.
176?88. Likewise, in 2005 India's ambassador to the UN insisted that 'we do not believe that discussions on
the question [of R2P] should be used as a cover for conferring any legitimacy on the so-called "right of
humanitarian intervention" or making it the ideology of some kind of "military humanism'": statement by
Mr Nirupam Sen, permanent representative, at the informal thematic consultations of the General Assembly
on the Report of the Secretary-General entitled In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights
for all (A/59/2005) (on Cluster III issues: 'Freedom to live in dignity'), 20 April 2005.
12 See the reports on 'Regional roundtables and national consultations' in Thomas G. Weiss and Don Hubert, The
responsibility to protect: research, bibliography, background (supplementary volume) (Ottawa: International Development
Research Centre, 2001), pp. 349?98.
13 Examples of this include Alicia L. Bannon, 'The responsibility to protect: the UN World Summit and the
question of unilateralism', Yale Law fournal 115: 5, 2006, pp. 1156?65.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
legalize humanitarian intervention'.14 Governments have themselves tried to use
R2P to win support for coercive interference since 2005. The most obvious recent
example was the French attempt to use R2P to persuade the Security Council
to authorize the forcible distribution of humanitarian assistance in the wake of
Cyclone Nargis in May 2008. This prompted discussion about the potential for
humanitarian intervention in Myanmar/Burma and attracted criticism from China,
Indonesia, Vietnam and South Africa.15 In addition, several prominent figures
associated with R2P argue forcefully that the principle is primarily concerned
with non-consensual intervention and that its other elements (such as the preven
tion of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity) are
secondary.1
Given all of this, it is not hard to see why many governments continue to suspect
that R2P is simply a 'Trojan horse' for the legitimization of unilateral interven
tion. On the other hand, some supporters of R2P argue that the principle that
emerged from the 2005 World Summit was inadequate because it did not provide
clear guidance about the circumstances in which coercive military intervention
might be justified or about the appropriate decision-making process in situations
where the Security Council is deadlocked. They argue that the set of criteria
proposed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS) in 2001 to guide international decision-making in times of major humani
tarian emergencies was an important casualty of pre-summit diplomacy in 2005
and should be put back on the international agenda.17
Achieving a deeper consensus on R2P and making progress towards the Secre
tary-General's goal of translating it from 'words into deeds' is unlikely while confu
sion remains about what the principle's implications are for military intervention.
Sceptics will continue to see R2P as a 'Trojan horse' for unilateral intervention and
supporters will focus on finessing and applying criteria to guide intervention. The
principal aim of this article, therefore, is to clarify what R2P says about military
intervention and what it can contribute in practice. To do this, I proceed in three
stages. The first seeks to clarify the meaning of R2P. It identifies the principle's
roots in two related but quite different contexts: the notion of sovereignty as
responsibility, as developed by Francis Deng and Roberta Cohen in the 1990s,
and the debate about unilateral humanitarian intervention sparked by NATO's
1999 intervention in Kosovo.1 The tensions between these two distinct roots
14 Stephen John Stedman, 'UN transformation in an era of soft balancing', International Affairs 83: 5, Sept. 2007,
PP-933, 938.
15 'World fears for plight of Myanmar cyclone victims', New York Times, 13 May 2008.
1 See Weiss, Humanitarian intervention, p. 106.
17 One of the principal aims of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, created in February 2008, is
to clarify the circumstances in which non-consensual military force might be legitimate. See also Gareth Evans,
'Responsibility to protect in 2007: five thoughts for policy makers', presentation at a panel discussion at the
UN, New York, 13 April 2007; Marc Saxer, 'The politics of responsibility to protect', Friedrich Ehert Stiftung
briefing paper, Berlin, April 2008, pp. 5-6.
1 A third root, recently invoked by France in relation to the cyclone in Myanmar/Burma, is the 'right to interfere'
developed by Bernard Kouchner from the late 1980s. See B. Kouchner and M. Betatti, Le Devoir d'ingerence:
peut-on laisser mourir? (Paris: Denoel, 1987). Although Kouchner's ideas are innovative and interesting, there is
little evidence to suggest that they influenced either Deng and Cohen or the ICISS.
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Alexf. Bellamy
go some way towards explaining the confusion about the relationship between
R2P and military intervention. I then set out what world leaders signed up to
in 2005?2006 and what this means for military intervention. The second section
focuses on criteria for decision-making and argues that R2P should be dissociated
from the criteria put forward by the ICISS. Although they undoubtedly consti
tuted an innovative proposal, there is little likelihood of international consensus
on criteria, and its proponents overstate their practical and political utility. The
final part of the essay explores what R2P can contribute to the practice of military
intervention. R2P is well placed to make at least three important contributions,
I argue. First, it can help minimize the problem of 'moral hazard' identified by
Alan Kuperman.19 Second, it can reduce the temptation for policy-makers to focus
exclusively on military responses to grave humanitarian problems.20 Finally, by
establishing a political commitment to protection it creates a mandate for progress
in thinking about the capacities and doctrines needed to increase the effectiveness
of protective forces once deployed.
R2P and military intervention
In order to clarify what R2P has to say about military intervention and understand
the tensions described above, we need to understand its roots and to grasp what the
General Assembly and Security Council agreed and why they agreed to it.
Sovereignty as responsibility
In 1993, the then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed Francis
Deng, a well-respected former Sudanese diplomat, as his Special Representative
on Internally Displaced People (IDPs).21 In appointing Deng and highlighting the
problem of IDPs, Boutros-Ghali was responding to both urgent humanitarian
need and a vexing political dilemma. As wars became less a matter of conflict
between states and more a struggle between forces within states, so the number
of internally displaced expanded. When Deng was appointed there were some
25 million IDPs globally, compared to a little over 1 million a decade earlier.22
Remaining within national borders, IDPs were afforded no special international
protection of the kind offered to refugees and so they remained critically vulner
able to the whims or failings of their home state. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a
combination of violence, disease and deprivation contrived to make mortality
rates among IDPs higher than among the general population, sometimes by as
much as 50 times.23
19 Alan J. Kuperman, 'The moral hazard of humanitarian intervention: lessons from the Balkans', International
Studies Quarterly 52: i, 2008, pp. 49?80.
20 A problem identified by Alex de Waal in relation to Darfur. See Alex de Waal, 'Darfur and the failure of the
responsibility to protect', International Affairs 83: 6, Nov. 2007, PP- J039-54
21 For an excellent account of the IDP problem and the work of Deng and Cohen, see Thomas G. Weiss and
David A. Korn, Internal displacement: conceptualization and its consequences (New York: Routledge, 2006).
22 Weiss, Humanitarian intervention, p. 90.
23 Francis M. Deng, 'The impact of state failure on migration', Mediterranean Quarterly 1514, Fall 2004, p. 18.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
The principal challenges confronting Deng and his colleague, Roberta Cohen
from the Brookings Institution, were how to persuade host governments to
improve protection for IDPs and how to work around the denial of assistance
by sovereign authorities.24 As Deng himself put it, 'the internally displaced are
paradoxically assumed to be under the care of their own governments despite the
fact that their displacement is often caused by the same state authorities'.25 To
argue their way around the use of sovereignty to deny international assistance
for IDPs, Deng and Cohen devised the notion of 'sovereignty as responsibility'.
The concept's starting point was recognition that the primary responsibility for
protecting and assisting IDPs lay with the host government.2 No legitimate state,
they argued, could quarrel with the claim that it was responsible for the well
being of its citizens?and in practice no government did in fact quarrel with this
proposition. Where a state was unable to fulfil its responsibilities, they went on
to assert, it should invite and welcome international assistance.27 Such assistance
helped the state by enabling it to discharge its sovereign responsibilities and take
its place as a legitimate member of international society.2 During major crises,
troubled states faced a choice: they could work with international organizations
and other interested outsiders to realize their sovereign responsibilities; or they
could obstruct those efforts, and thereby sacrifice their good standing and sover
eign legitimacy.29
To translate 'sovereignty as responsibility' into protection for IDPs, Deng and
Cohen worked with legal experts to define IDPs, identify the rights they already
enjoyed under existing human rights instruments and place those rights into the
context of displacement, presenting the results of this work in the form of 'guiding
principles', which were set out in 1998.3? The principles recognized that primary
responsibility for displaced people rested with the local authorities but asserted that
consent to international aid should not be 'arbitrarily withheld', especially when
the local authorities were unable or unwilling to provide the necessary assistance.31
The principles were adopted by the UN's Inter-Agency Standing Committee
(IASC), the OSCE and the AU. ECOWAS called upon its members to disseminate
and apply them. In addition, several countries (Burundi, Colombia, the Philip
pines and Sri Lanka) have incorporated the principles into national law and others
24 Deng, 'Impact of state failure on migration', p. 20.
25 Francis M. Deng, 'Divided nations: the paradox of national protection', Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 603, Jan. 2006, p. 218.
2 Roberta Cohen and Francis M. Deng, Masses inflight: the global crisis of internal displacement (Washington DC:
Brookings Institution, 1998), p. 275.
27 Deng, 'Impact of state failure on migration' , p. 20.
2 Francis M. Deng, Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, Donald Rothchild and I. William Zartman, Sovereignty as
responsibility: conflict management in Africa (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1996), p. 1.
29 Deng et al., Sovereignty as responsibility, p. 28.
30 See Roberta Cohen, 'The guiding principles on internal displacement: an innovation in international standard
setting', Global Governance 10: 3, 2004, pp. 459?80; Roberta Cohen, 'Developing an international system for
internally displaced persons', International Studies Perspectives 7:1, 2006, pp. 87?101.
31 Principles 3 and 25 of the 'Guiding principles on internal displacement'. For a detailed explanation and
commentary, see Walter Kalin, 'Guiding principles on internal displacement: annotations', American Society of
International Law Studies in Transnational Legal Policy, 32, 2000.
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Alexf. Bellamy
are looking at following suit.32 But at what point could a state be judged to have
forfeited its sovereignty, and what body has the right to make that decision? Deng
and his collaborators were sketchy on these points, but suggested that sovereignty
as responsibility implied the existence of a 'higher authority capable of holding
supposed sovereigns accountable' and that this higher authority should place the
common good ahead of the national interests of its members. Clearly, the UN
Security Council comes closest to fitting the bill.
'Sovereignty as responsibility' focused on the responsibilities of host govern
ments and maintained that vulnerable populations were best protected by effective
and legitimate states. In practice, Deng's approach to assisting IDPs required an
invitation from the host state and focused on the use of diplomacy in those cases
where the host state refused assistance (especially Turkey, Myanmar/Burma and
Algeria). Sometimes, persistent diplomacy paid dividends (for instance, Turkey
relented in 2002).33 In other situations, however, the doctrine would point to the
referral of cases to a 'higher authority'?namely, the UN Security Council.
Kosovo and the ICISS
The second?and more obvious?of R2P's roots is the international commission
(ICISS) that produced the eponymous report. The ICISS report Responsibility to
protect was primarily concerned with reconceptualizing humanitarian intervention
in the wake of the Kosovo crisis and the Secretary-General's challenge to the 1999
General Assembly to resolve the tension between sovereignty and fundamental
human rights.34 The commission had its genesis in early 2000, when Canadian
foreign affairs officials Don Hubert, Heidi Hulan and Jill Sinclair began advocating
an 'International Commission on Humanitarian Intervention' in response to events
in Kosovo and Annan's challenge. Canada's foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy,
persuaded Annan to endorse the commission, though its title was revised to omit
the controversial 'humanitarian intervention' label.35 Nonetheless, the alterna
tive adopted?'Intervention and State Sovereignty'?indicated the body's main
aim: to reconcile the occasional need for armed intervention to protect vulnerable
populations with the principles of state sovereignty.
The commission's recommendations are well known. They were premised
on the notion that when states are unwilling or unable to protect their citizens
from grave harm, the principle of non-interference 'yields to the responsibility to
protect'. The report aimed to escape the irresolvable logic of 'sovereignty versus
human rights' by focusing not on what interveners are entitled to do ('a right
of intervention') but on what is necessary to protect people in dire need and the
responsibilities of various actors to afford such protection. These responsibilities
32 Cohen, 'The guiding principles', p. 470.
33 Weiss and Korn, Internal displacement, pp. 74?5.
34 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The responsibility to protect (Ottawa:
International Development Research Centre, 2001), p. 9; Kofi Annan, 'Annual Report of the Secretary
General to the General Assembly', 20 Sept. 1999.
35 Lloyd Axworthy, 'Human rights and humanitarian intervention', address, Washington DC, 16 June 2000;
Lloyd Axworthy, Navigating a new world: Canada's global future (Toronto: Knopf, 2003), p. 191.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
were about much more thanjust armed intervention. In addition to a 'responsibility
to react' to massive human suffering, international society also had responsibilities
to use non-violent tools to prevent such suffering from happening, and, where it
did happen, to rebuild polities and societies afterwards. Indeed, the commission
argued that prevention was the most important aspect of R2P.3
Despite stressing the critical importance of prevention, the commission's main
focus was on intervention. It dedicated only 9 of its 85 pages to prevention, and
only 16 to the responsibilities to prevent and rebuild, whereas 32 pages were
devoted to intervention. The commission's discussion of intervention centred on
two questions: In what circumstances is intervention legitimate? And what insti
tutions are entitled to authorize intervention? In relation to the first question,
the commission proposed just cause thresholds ('large scale loss of life' and 'large
scale ethnic cleansing') and precautionary principles ('right intention', 'last resort',
'proportional means' and 'reasonable prospects'), arguing that if states committed
themselves to these principles, it would be easier to build consensus on how to
respond to humanitarian emergencies. In addition, it would be harder for states
like China and Russia to oppose genuine humanitarian intervention because they
would have committed themselves to a responsibility to protect in cases of large
scale loss of life and ethnic cleansing (just cause thresholds). On the other hand,
it would be harder for states to abuse humanitarian justifications because it would
be very difficult to satisfy all the criteria in non-genuine cases. In relation to
the question of authority, the commission argued that the Security Council had
the primary responsibility to act when a host state was unwilling or unable to
protect its citizens. To improve the Council's decision-making, the commission
suggested that the permanent members (P5) agree to refrain from casting their
veto in threshold-crossing situations where no vital national interests were at stake
and where a majority of the Council supported collective action. If the Council
nevertheless failed to act in the face of threshold-crossing crises where the precau
tionary principles indicated that intervention was appropriate, concerned states
could approach the General Assembly and, failing that, relevant regional organi
zations. Thus the commission outlined a hierarchy of responsibility, starting with
the host state and rising through the Security Council to the General Assembly,
regional organizations and coalitions of the willing to, finally, individual states.
The ICISS succeeded in refraining the humanitarian intervention debate by
stressing the primary responsibility that states had towards their own citizens,
situating non-consensual intervention within a wider continuum of measures
including prevention, rebuilding and non-forcible means of reaction, and identi
fying a range of practices other than armed intervention that could contribute
to the prevention and mitigation of genocide and mass atrocities. However, the
commission's own regional round tables, as well as post-report consultations
with NGOs and governments organized by the Canadian government and civil
society organizations, all highlighted widespread hostility to 'humanitarian
intervention' and a broad consensus against the idea of a so-called 'right of
3 ICISS, Responsibility to protect, p. xi.
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Alexf. Bellamy
intervenion', especially where that right was associated with unilateralism.37 But
this deep-seated scepticism towards intervention did not necessarily translate into
a rejection of the underlying purpose of R2P?the prevention of genocide and
mass atrocities, and the protection of vulnerable populations. The adoption of
language focusing on the rights of endangered populations rather than the rights
of interveners helped illuminate a broad constituency of states and civil society
actors prepared to acknowledge that sovereignty entailed responsibilities and that
international engagement might be legitimate in certain circumstances. However,
the commission's focus on non-consensual intervention and apparent openness to
intervention not authorized by the Security Council meant that R2P was unlikely
to command consensus among world leaders without some important revisions.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the R2P principle that emerged from the 2005
World Summit was different in many respects from the doctrine espoused by the
ICISS, even if the name and the central idea remained the same. The key to under
standing what R2P has to say about military intervention lies in recognizing that
R2P as an international principle is different from the concept proposed by the
ICISS and from the doctrine espoused by Deng and Cohen, even though it draws
on both.
International consensus on R2P
When governments, regional organizations and the UN talk about R2P they mean
not the concept put forward by the ICISS but the principle endorsed by world
leaders at the 2005 World Summit and reaffirmed by the Security Council in 2006.3
That principle was informed by the commission's work, by Deng and Cohen's
work on IDPs, and by the UN's work on the protection of civilians (including
the Security Council's interest in this theme, which predates the ICISS), but is
different from all of them in important respects. Although lengthy, paragraphs
138 and 139 ofthe World Summit outcome document are worth repeating in full:
138. Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide,
war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the
prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary
means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international
community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsi
bility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.
139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility
to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with
Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter of the United Nations, to help protect populations
from war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are
prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security
37 See World Federalist Movement and International Policy Group, Civil society perspectives on the responsibility
to protect, final report, 30 April 2003; Noel M. Morada, 'R2P roadmap in southeast Asia: challenges and
prospects', UNISCI (Research Unit on International Security and Cooperation, Universidad Complutense,
Madrid) discussion papers 11, May 2006.
38 UN Security Council Resolution 1674 (2007).
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis
and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful
means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations
from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the
need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect
populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity
and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law.
We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to helping States build
capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and
crimes against humanity and to assisting those which are under stress before crises and
conflicts break out.39
These two paragraphs can be boiled down to four basic commitments. First, all
states acknowledge that they have a responsibility to protect their citizens from
genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Second, they
agree to provide assistance to help other states to build the capacity they need to
discharge this responsibility. Third, in situations where the host state is 'manifestly
failing' in its responsibility, they agree to use all peaceful means to protect vulner
able populations. Fourth, should those measures fail or be deemed inappro
priate, the Security Council stands ready to use all necessary means, including
non-consensual force.
What are the principal differences between the concept as espoused by the
ICISS and the principle as agreed by world leaders? In the latter form, R2P no
longer proposed criteria to guide decision-making about when to intervene; there
is no code of conduct for the use of the veto; and there is no opening for coercive
measures not authorized by the Security Council. The threshold on when R2P is
transferred from the host state to international society was raised from the point at
which the host state proved itself 'unable and unwilling' to protect its own citizens
to that at which the state was 'manifestly failing' in its responsibility to do so.
Finally, the idea that R2P implied responsibilities?even obligations?on the part
of international society and especially the Security Council was all but removed,
with the Council committed only to 'standing ready' to act when necessary. Of
course, prudence dictates a 'case-by-case' approach; but the insertion of words to
that effect was a deliberate attempt to water down the Security Council's respon
sibility to protect.40
We should not, however, succumb to the view that the R2P principle that
emerged from the 2005 World Summit was too weak or insubstantial to contribute
to the practice of non-consensual intervention for humanitarian purposes. First,
the World Summit clarified the principle's scope. R2P applies to genocide, war
crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, all of which have fairly
precise legal meanings grounded in the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute
of the International Criminal Court, and the practice of the international criminal
39 United Nations General Assembly, '2005 summit outcome', A/60/L.1, 20 Sept. 2005, paras 138-9.
40 I develop this point in more detail and relate it to US Ambassador John Bolton's position on R2P in Alex
J. Bellamy, Responsibility to protect: the global effort to end mass atrocities (Cambridge: Polity, forthcoming 2009),
ch. 3.
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Alexf. Bellamy
tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. This is a much clearer formulation
than that offered by the ICISS. Second, the World Summit has clarified relevant
roles and responsibilities. In line with the doctrine put forth by Deng and Cohen,
all states have a primary responsibility towards their own citizens. All other states
have a responsibility to assist their peers in fulfilling this primary responsibility.
Should a state manifestly fail in its responsibility, the Security Council in partner
ship with relevant regional organizations has a responsibility to use whatever
means it determines necessary and appropriate. Finally, there is no such thing as
an 'R2P event or crisis', in that there is no moment at which something becomes
relevant to R2P. To suggest that such a thing exists is to revert to the old language
of intervener's rights. A state's responsibility to its citizens does not appear and
then evaporate; nor does the world's responsibility to assist and support that state,
or the Security Council's responsibility to take all necessary means when appro
priate. In other words, it is not the nature of the responsibility that changes, but
the most appropriate means of preventing genocide, war crimes, crimes against
humanity and ethnic cleansing, and of protecting vulnerable populations in any
given situation.
R2P on military intervention
As Edward Luck has argued, it is important not to confuse what we would like
the R2P principle to be with what it actually is.41 R2P sets out responsibilities that
states have to their own citizens (the primary responsibility to protect), responsi
bilities that all states have as members of the international community (responsi
bilities to help build capacity and use peaceful means to prevent and protect) and
responsibilities that certain institutions have (the Security Council's responsibility
to use all appropriate means when necessary, in partnership with relevant inter
national organizations). Contrary to much contemporary writing on the subject,
R2P does not set out criteria for the use of force, suggest that there are 'just causes
that justify the use of force beyond the two exemptions ofthe UN Charter', offer
pathways for intervention not authorized by the Security Council, amend the way
the Council does business, apply more widely than to the four specific crimes listed
in the extract reproduced above, or promise intervention in every case.42
My task in the remainder of this article is twofold. In the next section I seek
to show that the rejection of criteria was politically inevitable and practically
inconsequential. Then, in the final section, I will set out three ways in which R2P
can make an important contribution to the prevention of genocide, war crimes,
crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and the protection of vulnerable
populations.
41 See Edward C. Luck, 'The responsible sovereign and the responsibility to protect', Annual review of United
Nations affairs 2006/2007 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), vol. 1, pp. xxxiii?xliv.
42 The quote is from Saxer, 'The politics of responsibility to protect', p. 6.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
The limits of criteria
The ICISS criteria (just cause thresholds and precautionary principles) to guide
decisions about military intervention were intended to fulfil three primary
functions. First, in an attempt to avoid any future cases like that of Rwanda, where
the world stood aside as 800,000 people were butchered in genocidal violence, the
just cause thresholds were intended to create expectations about the circumstances
in which the international community?primarily the UN Security Council?
should become engaged in major humanitarian catastrophes, consider intervening
with force and constrain permanent members from casting pernicious vetoes for
selfish reasons.43 Second, responding to a need to avoid future situations like that
of Kosovo, where the Security Council was blocked by veto, the criteria provided
a pathway for legitimizing intervention not authorized by the Security Council.44
Finally, Ramesh Thakur, one of the most prominent commissioners, argued that
criteria should be viewed as constraining governments' ability to 'abuse' R2P and
limiting the scope of potential Security Council interventionism.45 According to
Thakur, the criteria would both 'make it more difficult for coalitions of the willing
to appropriate the language of humanitarianism for geopolitical and unilateral
interventions' and make the Security Council's deliberations more transparent.4
Consensus on criteria, he insisted, would make it more, not less, difficult for states
to claim a humanitarian mantle for armed intervention.47
Before we assess the extent to which the criteria would be able to fulfil these
functions, it is important to begin by stressing how little political support they
received. Most of the P5 were sceptical about them from the outset. At the Security
Council's annual retreat in May 2002 the United States rejected them outright on
the grounds that permanent members should not constrain their right to cast their
veto whenever they saw fit.4 Russia and China expressed concern that the criteria
could be used to bypass the Security Council.49 Although the British government
had earlier presented its own version of criteria to guide decision-making and
circumvent a Security Council veto, along with France it worried that agreement
on criteria would not necessarily deliver the political will and consensus required for
effective responses to humanitarian crises.50 Negative attitudes towards criteria were
43 Nicholas J. Wheeler, 'Legitimating humanitarian intervention: principles and procedures', Melbourne fournal of
International Law 2: 2, 2001, p. 566.
44 See e.g. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo report: conflict, international response, lessons
learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), opening summary. This line of reasoning is also developed
later in the report.
45 Ramesh Thakur, The United Nations, peace and security: from collective security to the Responsibility to Protect
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 260.
4 Ramesh Thakur, 'A shared responsibility for a more secure world', Global Governance 11: 3, 2005, p. 284.
47 Ramesh Thakur, 'Iraq and the responsibility to protect', Behind the Headlines 62: 1, 2004, pp. 1?16.
4 Welsh, 'Conclusion', p. 180. This led prominent observers to write in 2004 that 'the Bush administration does
not and will not accept the substance of the report or support any formal declaration or resolution about it':
S. Neil Macfarlane, CarolinJ. Thiekling and Thomas G. Weiss, 'The responsibility to protect: is anyone interested
in humanitarian intervention?', Third World Quarterly 25: 5, 2004, p. 983. The United States did not change its
position on criteria. See Sir Adam Roberts, 'The United Nations and humanitarian intervention', in Welsh,
ed., Humanitarian intervention, p. 90.
49 Primakov, 'UN process, not humanitarian intervention, is world's best hope'.
50 Welsh, 'Conclusion', p. 204, n. 4.
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Alexf. Bellamy
only hardened by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Fearing that criteria might
be used to justify the invasion, a forum of social democratic governments rejected
a British proposal to endorse the idea.51 In the post-invasion context, the Canadian
government recognized that a full-scale effort to persuade the General Assembly to
endorse criteria could 'backfire terribly', destroying potential consensus on R2P.52
To be fair, there was some international support for a limited role for criteria.
The proposal was endorsed by the UN's High Level Panel, convened by Kofi
Annan, and in Annan's personal blueprint for reform.53 Significantly, however,
Annan separated the cornmitment to R2P from the proposed criteria, placing the
former in a section on the rule of law and leaving the latter in a section on the use
of force. He did this to reinforce the view that R2P was not only about the use
of force and to protect R2P from the almost inevitable rejection of criteria.54 The
AU's 'Ezulwini Consensus' on UN reform endorsed the High Level Panel's criteria
for guiding the Security Council but, at the insistence of South Africa, observed
that these guidelines 'should not undermine the responsibility of the international
community to protect'.55
It was clear from the outset of the negotiations preceding the 2005 World
Summit that there would be no consensus on criteria. Whereas several African
states endorsed the view that criteria were essential to making the Security
Council's decisions more transparent, accountable (to the wider membership) and
hence legitimate, the United States, China and Russia opposed them?though for
very different reasons: the United States because it believed that criteria would
limit its freedom of action, the others because they feared that criteria might
be used to circumvent the Council. Many other influential states, most notably
India, shared this latter view; although it was publicly expressed by only a few
states, Canada's regional consultations had revealed that it was a significant under
lying concern in many parts of the world, especially Asia. In consequence, the
recommendation for criteria was watered down into a commitment to continue
discussing criteria, in order to keep the Americans, Chinese, Russians and Indians
on board.5 Ultimately, however, the diplomats charged with selling R2P to the
world recognized that criteria would be a 'bridge too far' for the Americans and
the proposal was never seriously put on the table.57
From this brief overview it is clear that it was always unlikely that members of
the General Assembly or Security Council would be persuaded to adopt criteria,
and that there was a real danger that persisting with the linkage of criteria to R2P
would have prevented the endorsement of R2P in 2005 and its reaffirmation the
51 See 'British PM urges tougher stance against brutal regimes', Agence France-Presse, 14 July 2003; Kevin Ward,
'Process needed so countries know when to intervene to protect human rights', CBS (Canada), 13 July 2003.
52 'Civil society meeting on the responsibility to protect', final report, Ottawa, 8 April 2003, p. 9.
53 UN High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility, A/59/565,
2 Dec. 2004, para. 203; Kofi Annan, 'In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for
all', A/59/2005, 21 March 2005, para. 126.
54 William R. Pace and Nicole Deller, 'Preventing future genocides: an international responsibility to protect',
World Order 36: 4, 2005, p. 25.
55 African Union Executive Council, 'The common African position on the proposed reform of the United
Nations', ext/EX.CL/2(VII), Addis Ababa, 7-8 March 2005, sec. B (i).
5 Pace and Deller, 'Preventing future genocides', p. 28.
57 Memo from Allan Rock to the author, 12 Nov. 2007.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
following year.58 Moreover, a diplomatic effort to persuade states to adopt criteria
in the future would require the investment of a significant amount of political
capital with little chance of success and a heightened likelihood that such advocacy
would create a backlash resulting in a retreat from the principle endorsed in 2005.59
Finally, it is not at all clear that the R2P principle itself would be strengthened by
the addition of criteria. In what remains of this section, I will examine the three
putative functions of criteria.
The first function of criteria?creating expectations?is most easily dispensed
with, because although the 2005 World Summit did not endorse criteria, it did
identify the crimes from which governments had a responsibility to protect
populations and the circumstances in which that responsibility ought to be taken
up by international society. The summit, it will be recalled, insisted that states have
a responsibility to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes
against humanity and ethnic cleansing, and that this responsibility should be taken
up by the Security Council in cases where a government was 'manifestly failing'
to provide such protection. There is broad agreement that the Security Council
should be engaged in such circumstances. For example, the Chinese government's
2005 position paper on UN reform agreed that 'massive humanitarian' crises were
'the legitimate concern of the international community'. ?
It is important to recognize, however, that agreement on thresholds does not
guarantee agreement on whether the thresholds have been breached or on what is
the most appropriate response in actual cases. This problem was raised throughout
the ICISS consultation process and has been aired many times since.61 It has also
been evident in practice: in relation to Kosovo, the disagreement between NATO
and Russia boiled down to judgements about whether the conflict there was
sufficiently grave to warrant armed intervention; 2 more recently, in relation to
Darfur, governments more or less agreed on the gravity of the threat but disagreed
about the most appropriate course of action and the responsibility of the Sudanese
government. 3 Indeed, even advocates of R2P disagreed on whether the just cause
thresholds and precautionary principles justified armed intervention in this case.64
On the other hand, agreement has been reached in less high-profile cases, such as
those of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Burundi, without the
need for thresholds.65
58 This is a good example of a 'moral limit' in international politics. For a thorough investigation of moral limits,
see Richard M. Price, ed., Moral limit and possibility in world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008).
59 On the post-2005 'revolt against R2P' see Bellamy, 'Realizing the responsibility to protect'.
0 'Position paper of the People's Republic of China on the United Nations reforms', 8 June 2005.
1 See Jeffrey Boutwell, 'Report on the Pugwash Study Group on Intervention, Sovereignty and International
Security meeting', Venice, Italy, 10?11 Dec. 1999; Weiss and Hubert, The responsibility to protect, supplementary
volume, pp. 351?2; Welsh, 'Conclusion'; Wheeler, 'Legitimating humanitarian intervention'.
2 See Simon Chesterman, fust war or just peace? Humanitarian intervention and international law (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), p. 221.
3 Alex J. Bellamy, 'A responsibility to protect or a Trojan horse?'
4 Gareth Evans's International Crisis Group argued not. See International Crisis Group, 'Getting the UN into
Darfur', Africa Briefing 43, 12 Oct. 2006, pp. 15-17. Others, such as Eric Reeves and Samantha Power, disagree
with this perspective.
5 Susan C. Breau, 'The impact of responsibility to protect on peacekeeping', fournal of Conflict and Security Law
11: 3, 2007, pp. 450?52; Victoria K. Holt and Tobias C. Berkman, The impossible mandate? Military preparedness,
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Alexf. Bellamy
Nor is there much evidence to suggest that the thresholds could constrain the
use of the veto. It has been suggested, for example, that Russia and China might
have been 'compelled' into abstaining on a vote authorizing intervention in Darfur
had such a resolution been tabled in the Council and backed by the argument that
intervention would be the only means of relieving the humanitarian catastrophe.
But China's actual performance in the Council suggests that it would be more than
willing to use its veto in such cases. In relation to Darfur, China threatened vetoes
on measures far less intrusive than non-consensual military intervention, such as
comprehensive targeted sanctions and no-fly zones. 7 Given that China's position on
Darfur enjoyed the support of a significant chunk of the Non-Aligned Movement,
the League of Arab States and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, it is not
clear where the pressure to abstain in such a vote would have come from.
What, then, of the second function of criteria?to provide a way of legitimizing
armed intervention without Security Council authorization? We should note at the
outset that this has been the most oft-cited function of criteria since they were first
mooted in the 1970s.6 Interest in criteria was reignited by the Security Council's
failure to reach a consensus over Kosovo. In the wake of the storm over Kosovo,
Tony Blair called for five tests to guide decisions on intervention and the Foreign
Office circulated a draft paper on the subject among the P5. 9 Blair's view that
criteria would provide guidelines for when regional organizations and coalitions
of the willing might legitimately intervene without the sanction of the Security
Council was endorsed by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo
(IICK). Working towards its finding that the intervention in Kosovo was 'illegal
but legitimate', the IICK lent support to the idea of using criteria as thresholds for
determining whether or not to use force to alleviate humanitarian emergencies. It
recognized that while the UN Charter's restrictions on the use of force contributed
to international peace and security by prohibiting aggressive war, there might be
circumstances?as in Kosovo?where intervention was needed as a last resort but
was not likely to be authorized by the Security Council because of a threatened veto.
Criteria, the commission reasoned, might create pathways for states to intervene
legitimately in the most extreme emergencies without Council authorization.70
There was never much likelihood that the UN membership would endorse
guidelines providing a pathway to intervention not authorized by the Council.
Moreover, it is not altogether clear what such a pathway would contribute. After
the responsibility to protect and modern peace operations (Washington DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2006), pp.
201?224.
Nicholas J. Wheeler and Justin Morris, 'Justifying the Iraq War as a humanitarian intervention: the cure is
worse than the disease', in Ramesh Thakur and Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, eds, The Iraq crisis and world order
(Tokyo: UN University Press, 2006), p. 460.
7 Bellamy, 'A responsibility to protect or a Trojan horse?'; Paul D. Williams and Alex J. Bellamy, 'The
responsibility to protect and the crisis in Darfur', Security Dialogue 36: 1, 2005, pp. 27?47.
See e.g. Richard B. Lillich, ed., Humanitarian intervention and the United Nations (Charlottesville, VA: University
Press of Virginia, 1973).
9 Tony Blair, 'Doctrine of the international community', speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Hilton
Hotel, Chicago, 22 April 1999. See John Kampfner, Blair's wars (London: Free Press, 2003), pp. 50-53; Wheeler,
'Legitimating humanitarian intervention', p. 564 and n. 51.
70 IICK, Kosovo report, opening summary.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
all, states already have moral arguments for armed intervention in the worst cases.
For example, the US used moral rather than legal language to justify its partici
pation in Operation Allied Force, arguing simply that the moral imperative to
protect people?in this case, the Albanian population of Kosovo?from ethnic
cleansing overrode the legal ban on the use of force.71 Critics did not argue in
response that massive ethnic cleansing did not, in some circumstances, provide
grounds for intervention. Instead, as mentioned earlier, they quibbled over the
gravity of the threat, the prudence of intervention and the appropriate source of
authority for it.72 It is difficult to see how criteria would help in a case like this.
Interveners would argue that the criteria were satisfied and that their actions were
thus legitimate; critics would argue that they were not. In the end, international
society is left with borderline judgements about the legitimacy of armed inter
vention and individual states are left making up their own minds on the basis of
their perception of the facts of the case and the relative importance of sovereignty,
non-intervention, the protection of human rights and prudential calculations.73
International law relating to the use of force and crimes such as genocide already
provides a common language for this debate. It is not clear what criteria would
contribute in addition.
This brings us to the third putative function of criteria: restricting abuse. This
concern has become somewhat redundant in the wake of the World Summit's
adoption of R2P. The danger of abuse is raised whenever there is a pathway to
legitimate intervention that circumvents a deadlocked Security Council. Paragraph
139 of the outcome document, reproduced above, clearly declares that it is for the
Security Council to determine whether enforcement measures are necessary in
the event of states manifestly failing to protect their citizens. Consequently, the
constraining function of criteria would apply only to Security Council decision
making, and the Council already contains mechanisms for guarding against
abuse?not least the requirement for a majority vote and the veto.74 The closest
historical case we have of Council-sanctioned 'abuse' was its endorsement of the
French Operation Turquoise at the end of the Rwandan genocide. The French
intervention was widely regarded as 'abusive' because France's primary aim was
not humanitarian and the intervention could have done more to save lives.75 The
problem in that case was not that France intervened, but that it did not do enough
to protect Rwandans. Given that this is the best case we have of Council 'abuse', it
seems safe to conclude that the Council's own operating procedures are sufficient
guard against potential future 'abuse'.
71 Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving strangers: humanitarian intervention in international society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), p. 279; Michael Byers, War law: international law and armed conflict (London: Atlantic Books, 2005),
p. 101.
72 For the full range of views on Kosovo, see Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur, eds, Kosovo and the challenge
of humanitarian intervention: selective indignation, collective action and international citizenship (Tokyo: UN University
Press, 2000).
73 For a discussion of borderline legitimacy judgements in relation to intervention, see Ian Clark, Legitimacy in
international society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 199?205.
74 Thakur, The United Nations, peace and security, p. 260.
75 Wheeler, Saving strangers, pp. 208?41.
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Alexf. Bellamy
The argument that criteria are to be valued because they make it harder to put
forward humanitarian justifications for intervention is plausible only in either of
two circumstances: first, if criteria are connected to a pathway for legitimizing
intervention not authorized by the Security Council?and, by specifying that
coercive measures must be authorized by the Security Council, R2P clearly does
not offer such a pathway; second, if we believe that the Security Council has
become too proactive and requires limitation?an argument not often aired by
either academics or governments, and with good reason.
It is difficult to see, therefore, what the just cause thresholds and precautionary
principles would add to R2P or contribute to decision-making about armed inter
vention. As it stands, R2P clearly identifies its scope, its thresholds (genocide,
war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing) and the international
bodies responsible for discharging the responsibility. Although R2P thresholds
are unlikely to generate political will by themselves in relation to particular
cases, the endorsement of R2P by the General Assembly and Security Council
demonstrates a broad consensus that international society should be engaged in
protecting populations from grave harm. Beyond this basic admission of respon
sibility, criteria are unlikely to foster consensus on how to act, deter the use of
vetoes, provide anything other than a self-serving pathway to the legitimization
of intervention not authorized by the Security Council, or?although they may
be able to constrain interventions not authorized by the Council?add anything
to the Council's mechanisms for preventing 'abuse'.
If this analysis is correct, then advocates of R2P should not invest political capital
in persuading governments to endorse criteria. Endorsement in the medium term
is in any case highly unlikely; but my argument here is that even if the campaign
were successful, criteria would not actually improve decision-making about the
use of force. Rather than trying to amend R2P by the addition of criteria, there
fore, advocates should instead focus on operationalizing the principle as it is. In the
final part of this article, I will identify three practical ways in which R2P can make
a positive contribution to the problem of military intervention.
R2P's contribution to the problem of military intervention
This section identifies three important contributions that R2P can make to the
problem of military intervention. First, by replacing old debates about 'humani
tarian intervention' with a broad continuum of measures aimed first and foremost
at preventing genocide and mass atrocities and, if those fail, protecting vulnerable
populations, R2P can contribute to reducing the 'moral hazards' associated with
intervention. Second, by incorporating political and diplomatic strategies along
side legal, economic and military options, R2P points towards holistic strategies of
engagement that can overcome the temptation to visualize complex problems in
exclusively military terms.76 Third, by turning attention to the protection of civil
ians from genocide and mass atrocities, R2P provides a stimulus for new thinking
7 A problem identified by de Waal in 'Darfur and the failure of the responsibility to protect'.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
about the practicalities of protection. If translated 'from words into deeds', these
three contributions could deliver better protection to vulnerable populations.
Moral hazards
In the 2000 Millennium Report, Kofi Annan noted concerns that humanitarian
intervention 'might encourage secessionist movements deliberately to provoke
governments into committing gross violations of human rights in order to trigger
external interventions that would aid their cause'.77 This problem has been described
by Alan Kuperman as a 'moral hazard'. It refers to the phenomenon whereby the
provision of protection against risk encourages or enables risk-taking behaviour.
In this context, the promise of international intervention encourages groups to
use violence in order to provoke reprisals and attract international support for
their cause.7 For example, Kuperman argues that talk of military intervention
in Kosovo in 1998 emboldened the Kosovo Liberation Army, encouraging it to
use violence to provoke Serbian reprisals and take an uncompromising political
position to secure NATO intervention. The reality is often more tragic: in most
circumstances, having inadvertently encouraged violent rebellion by promises of
intervention, international society does not deliver on its promise, leaving civilian
populations more vulnerable to attack.79 While there is certainly room to quibble
about the explanatory power of this moral hazard, and more research is needed,
Kuperman has performed an important service in deepening our understanding of
the problem identified by Annan in 2000. ?
Kuperman proposes four sensible policy measures to reduce the threat of moral
hazard. First, there should be no foreign intervention unless a government's actions
are 'grossly disproportionate'. Second, external actors should 'expend substantial
resources' to persuade states to address the legitimate grievances of non-violent
movements. Third, there should be no intervention to force regime change or
'surrender of sovereignty' without robust military deployments to protect civil
ians against violent backlashes. Fourth, humanitarian relief should be delivered
in ways that minimize benefits to the rebels. l Bearing in mind the fact that the
promise of protection is often not backed up with the actual provision of protec
tion, we might add a fifth proposal: that governments should only promise to do
that which they are actually prepared to deliver on. While Kuperman describes his
position as a 'deviation' from R2P, his proposals actually help highlight an impor
tant contribution that the principle can make.
First of all, in relation to the threshold for intervention, rather than promising
intervention in many cases, R2P is reserved for only those cases involving genocide,
77 Kofi Annan, 'We the peoples': the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century, A/54/2000, 27 March 2000,
para. 216.
7 Kuperman, 'The moral hazard'.
79 See Roberto Belloni, 'The tragedy of Darfur and the limits of the "responsibility to protect'", Ethnopolitics 5:
4, 2004, pp. 327-46.
0 A call issued by Ramesh Thakur and Thomas G. Weiss, 'R2P: from idea to norm?and action?', Global
Responsibility to Protect 1:1, forthcoming 2009.
1 Kuperman, 'The moral hazard', p. 73.
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Alexf. Bellamy
crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, R2P sets the
bar substantially higher than the Security Council, which has proven willing to
authorize peace operations under Chapter VII in cases that do not cross the R2P
thresholds. 2 According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,
to count as a crime against humanity a particular crime must be committed on a
'widespread or systematic' basis and there must be evidence that links the perpe
trators' acts to a state or organizational policy. 3 While Kuperman's threshold of
'grossly disproportionate' action is not as clearly defined as R2P's 'crimes against
humanity', it is hard to see how crimes against humanity could be described as
anything but grossly disproportionate. Governments are given considerable leeway
to use force against rebels before triggering R2P. As such, rather than encour
aging rebels, R2P provides precisely the sort of disincentives to rebel action that
Kuperman is seeking.
Kuperman's other proposals are similarly consistent with R2P. The second calls
for governments to encourage their peers to address the legitimate grievances of
non-violent groups. This is precisely what is called for by R2P. Recall that in
paragraph 138 of the World Summit outcome document, member states pledged
to 'encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility [to protect]'. This is a
short phrase with heavy import that implies a policy agenda focusing on encour
aging (i.e. with incentives) and helping states to build the capacities they need to
prevent genocide and mass atrocities. 4 Chief among those capacities would be
the capacity to identify and resolve genuine political grievances. Kuperman's third
proposal calls for a commitment to the protection of civilians, which is a core
aspect of the operationalization of R2P and will be discussed at length below.
My main point here is that, far from encouraging rebellions and leaving endan
gered populations high and dry, R2P properly understood and translated into
practice would act as a damper on moral hazards which have the potential to
increase the risks to which civilian populations are exposed.
Overcoming the military focus
All too often, military intervention is the first port of call in international debates
about how to respond to massive humanitarian emergencies, irrespective of the
viability or utility of the military option. At least one commentator lays the blame
for this squarely at the door of R2P.85 Referring to the international response to
the crisis in Darfur, Alex de Waal argued that R2P contributed to a naive obsession
82 For instance, MINUSTAH and UNOCI in Haiti and Cote d'lvoire respectively. See Thomas Weiss, 'The
sunset of humanitarian intervention? The responsibility to protect in a unipolar era', Security Dialogue 35: 2,
2004, pp. 135?53; Michael Byers, 'High ground lost on UN's responsibility to protect', Winnipeg Free Press, 18
Sept. 2005, p. B3.
3 See Asia?Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, 'Burma briefing: Cyclone Nargis and the
responsibility to protect', 17 May 2008, p. 7.
4 Luck, 'The responsible sovereign'. Gareth Evans argues that the sorts of capacities needed are those that well
functioning states use as a matter of habit. See Gareth Evans, Cooperating for peace: the global agenda for the lggos
and beyond (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993).
5 De Waal, 'Darfur and the failure of the responsibility to protect'.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
with the deployment of military forces without much serious thinking about
what international forces would actually do once deployed or how, exactly, they
would contribute to building stable peace in the troubled Sudanese province. 6
This line of thinking created 'wildly inflated' expectations of what UN troops
would do?including disarming the Janjaweed and providing protection to both
displaced populations and those returning home. 7 According to de Waal, many
activists and some political leaders simply assumed that an international force could
succeed in the Herculean task of providing physical protection to Darfurian civil
ians in the middle of continuing hostilities'. In the crucial period between 2004
and 2006 international actors focused on four issues relating to the deployment of
peacekeepers (Who would command them? How many would be deployed? What
would their mandate be? Who would pay?) and ignored much more important
questions about the strategic purpose ofthe operation. This R2P-inspired focus on
military peacekeepers drew attention away from the political process, which?de
Waal argued?was a necessary precursor for the deployment of military forces.
De Waal is right to argue that in the mindset of diplomats and commentators
there remains a pervasive connection between R2P and military intervention. A
clearer example of this mindset in action was the recent debate about the interna
tional humanitarian response to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar/Burma. 9 On 2 May
2008 this storm devastated the Irrawaddy delta region, leaving much of the area
under water. Around 133,000 people were killed and approximately 2.5 million
were directly affected. Despite the massive scale of the humanitarian catastrophe
confronting Myanmar/Burma and the government's obvious inability to respond
in an effective and timely fashion, the country's military regime permitted only
very limited humanitarian access.90 Frustrated by this lack of progress, on 7 May
the French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner proposed that the UN Security
Council invoke the 'responsibility to protect' to secure the delivery of aid without
the consent of the Myanmar/Burma government. This proposal was reiterated
by the French ambassador to the UN and repeated by commentators, analysts
and politicians, primarily in Europe and North America. Wherever it was aired,
however, it tied R2P with proposals for the use of military force. As a model, some
pointed to the international relief efforts in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, when the UK,
France and United States established 'safe havens' to protect Kurds from Saddam's
army. One Australian academic went further, pointing to Kosovo as an example and
The principal example pointed to by de Waal was a report by the International Crisis Group: ICG, To save
Darfur, ICG report 105, 17 March 2006.
7 De Waal, 'Darfur and the failure of the responsibility to protect', p. 1043.
De Waal, 'Darfur and the failure of the responsibility to protect', p. 1044. In 2004 de Waal argued that foreign
troops could make a 'formidable difference' to the lives of Darfuri civilians, writing that 'The immediate life
and death needs of Darfur's people cannot wait for these negotiations to mature. A British brigade could make
a formidable difference to the situation. It could escort aid supplies into rebel-held areas, and provide aerial
surveillance, logistics and back-up to ceasefire monitoring, helping to give Darfurian villagers the confidence
to return to their homes and pick up their lives': Alex de Waal, 'Darfur's deep grievances defy all hopes for an
easy solution', Observer, 25 July 2004.
9 The following passage draws on Asia?Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, 'Burma briefing no. 2:
Cyclone Nargis and the responsibility to protect', 17 May 2008.
90 'World fears for plight of Myanmar cyclone victims', New York Times, 13 May 2008.
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Alex J. Bellamy
arguing that western countries should invoke R2P to bypass the Security Council
and fight their way into Myanmar/Burma, just as NATO had fought its way into
Kosovo.9I Unsurprisingly, Kouchner's proposal was rejected out of hand by China,
along with the two other Asian members of the Security Council (Indonesia and
Vietnam) and South Africa.92 John Holmes, the UN's Under-Secretary-General
for Humanitarian Affairs, described Kouchner's call as unnecessarily confronta
tional. The British minister for international development, Douglas Alexander,
rejected it as 'incendiary' and Britain's UN ambassador, John Sawers, agreed with
the Chinese view that R2P did not apply to natural disasters.93
The problem highlighted by both these cases?Darfur and Myanmar/Burma?
seems to be that there is something inherently militaristic about R2P that diverts
attention away from non-military solutions. On closer inspection, however, this is
a problem produced by serious misunderstandings about what R2P says (and does
not say) and about its potential to harness a wide range of measures?military and
non-military?to the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities and the protec
tion of populations from them. As noted earlier, the use of military intervention is
only one of four key commitments associated with R2P as conceived by the World
Summit. The other three?especially the commitments to encourage and help
states to fulfil their responsibility, and to use a range of non-coercive measures to
prevent and protect vulnerable populations?have not attracted the attention they
deserve and remain under-conceptualized. Indeed, as the UN Secretary-General's
special adviser commented, we have not yet begun to scratch the surface of the
immense policy agenda associated with these two commitments.94
A comprehensive global policy agenda based on the mandate handed down by
the General Assembly in 2005 would include (but not be limited to) measures to
improve the capacity of the UN and regional organizations to provide better early
warning of genocide and mass atrocities and better briefings for the UN's decision
makers ; measures to help states build the necessary capacity to prevent these crimes;
measures to improve international capacity to dispatch teams of peace negotiators
with adequate international support; measures to enhance human rights reporting
and capacity-building through the UN's Human Rights Council; measures to
improve the deterrence capability of the International Criminal Court; a more
systematic approach to implementing Kofi Annan's action plan for the preven
tion of genocide; the use of peacekeepers as preventers of, as well as reactors to,
genocide and mass atrocities; and a comprehensive system for implementing and
monitoring targeted sanctions.95 All of this, in addition to the other measures
described in this article, is necessary if R2P is to be properly operationalized. If
it were operationalized in this way, it is not difficult to see how it would actually
91 See Ivo Daalder and Paul Stares, 'The UN's responsibility to protect', International Herald Tribune, 13 May 2008.
The 'Kosovo proposal' was set out in Andrew O'Neil, 'Kosovo aid the model', The Australian, 14 May 2008.
92 See Security Council report, Update report: Myanmar, no. 4, 14 May 2008.
93 Julian Borger and Ian MacKinnon, 'Bypass junta's permission for aid, US and France urge', Guardian, 9 May
2008. Britain later backtracked somewhat, indicating that it would welcome 'discussion' of the responsibility
to protect: 'World fears for plight of Myanmar cyclone victims', New York Times, 13 May 2008.
94 Luck, 'The responsible sovereign'.
95 These, and other, measures are discussed in detail in Bellamy, Responsibility to protect.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
militate against the tendency to focus exclusively on the use of military force, and
instead place the use of force within a broader spectrum of measures that can be
used to prevent genocide and mass atrocities and to protect vulnerable popula
tions.
Operationalizing protection
The third contribution made by R2P is to foreground the need for practical
thinking about how international peacekeepers should go about protecting civil
ians. Although questions about legality, legitimacy and political will are important,
the ultimate test in the direst of situations is whether international engagement
succeeds in protecting vulnerable populations. Questions about the way a peace
operation is organized, configured, tasked and equipped are just as important as
broader political and legal questions when it comes to protecting vulnerable popula
tions. It should be recalled that the UN's Independent Inquiry on the Genocide
in Rwanda maintained that 'a force numbering 2,500 [UNAMIR's strength at the
time of the genocide] should have been able to stop or at least limit massacres of
the kind which began in Rwanda' at the start of the genocide.9 Despite this, the
question of how best to protect civilians from genocide and mass atrocities has
received comparatively little attention. Indeed, there is still no military doctrine
that provides guidance on how peacekeepers should go about protecting vulner
able citizens. By foregrounding the protection of potential victims, R2P provides
an important impetus for developing doctrine in this area and translating lessons
learned into action.
The development of R2P as an international principle has been accompanied
by a transformation of the place of civilian protection in peace operations and, as
noted earlier, the Security Council invoked R2P in relation to the UN?AU hybrid
mission for Darfur (Resolution 1706). Traditionally, it was thought that peace
keepers should remain impartial and neutral and not be proactive in the protection
of civilians. Although peacekeeping operations sometimes contained human rights
components, only very infrequently was the protection of civilians considered a
core part of the peacekeeper's mandate.97 The Security Council has begun to take
heed of R2P in its mandating of peace operations in two ways. Today's peace
operations tend to be larger and therefore better able to protect civilians than their
predecessors. The UN's missions in the DRC, Sudan and Darfur are all mandated
to comprise in excess of 20,000 peacekeepers. Furthermore, a combination of
better coordination between the Security Council and troop-contributing nations,
the UN's standby forces arrangements, and closer cooperation between the UN
and regional organizations has seen a progressive decline in the gap between the
number of troops mandated by the Security Council and the number actually
9 Independent Commission, Report of the independent inquiry into the actions of the United Nations during the 1994
genocide in Rwanda, 12 Dec. 1999, p. 2.
97 See K. Mansson, 'Integration of human rights in peace operations: is there an ideal model?', International Peace
keeping 13: 4, 2006, pp. 547?63.
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Alexf. Bellamy
deployed?the slow deployment of UNAMID notwithstanding.9 Despite
progress in this area, it still takes 18 months on average to deploy a peace operation
fully, with significant negative consequences for endangered civilians.99
Moreover, the Security Council has begun to create mandates for the protec
tion of civilians more frequently, and has gradually relaxed the early restrictions
it imposed on such mandates.100 Typically, the Council has demonstrated a prefer
ence for limiting the scope of civilian protection mandates by attaching caveats.
Examples of these limits can be found in the mandates for the missions in Sudan
(UNMIS), Liberia (UNMIL) and Cote d'lvoire (UNOCI). UNMIS was mandated
'to facilitate and coordinate, within its capabilities and in its areas of deployment,
the voluntary return of refugees and internally displaced persons, and humani
tarian assistance, inter alia, by helping to establish the necessary security'.101 The
civilian protection mandates handed down to UNMIL and UNOCI were identi
cal.102 By contrast, however, MONUC in the DRC was originally given a narrow
civilian protection mandate which was gradually extended over time. MONUC is
currently mandated to 'ensure the protection of civilians, including humanitarian
personnel, under irnrninent threat of physical violence' without any limiting
clause.103 The UN's mission in Burundi was also given a wide protection mandate
from the outset.104
Thanks in large part to the Security Council's interest in civilian protection
(into which its affirmation of R2P was incorporated) and the pioneering work
of researchers such as Victoria Holt and Tobias Berkman, we have a relatively
comprehensive understanding of what the protection of civilians by peacekeepers
entails in practice, though there remains little by way of doctrinal guidance.105 In
short, it entails 'coercive protection'?the positioning of military forces between
the civilian population and those who threaten them.10 This may involve military
measures to defeat and eliminate armed groups that threaten civilians. Since
2002, for instance, the UN's standing rules of engagement for peace operations
have authorized the use of force 'to defend any civilian person who is in need
of protection'.107 Sometimes, coercive protection may involve measures short of
force, such as erecting military barriers around civilian populations and the gradual
9 Briefing by Jean-Marie Guehenno, Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Affairs to the UN Security
Counci).
99 Citizens for Global Solutions, 'United Nations Emergency Peace Service: one step towards effective genocide
prevention' (New York: 2008), p. 68.
100 On the links between this mandating practice and R2P, see Breau, 'The impact of responsibility to protect on
peacekeeping', esp. pp. 450?2.
101 UN Security Council Resolution 1590, 24 March 2005.
102 UN Security Council Resolutions 1509, 19 Sept. 2003, and 1528, 27 Feb. 2004, respectively.
103 UN Security Council Resolution 1565, 1 Oct. 2004. For a discussion see K. Mansson, 'Use of force and civilian
protection: peace operations in the Congo', International Peacekeeping 12: 4, 2005, pp. 503?519.
104 Holt and Berkman, The impossible mandate?, pp. 201-224.
105 See Victoria K. Holt, The responsibility to protect: considering the operational capacity for civilian protection (Washington
DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2005); Holt and Berkman, The impossible mandate?.
106 Thomas G. Weiss, 'The humanitarian impulse', in David M. Malone, ed., The UN Security Council:from the Cold
War to the 21st century (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), p. 48.
107 D. S. Blocq, 'The fog of UN peacekeeping: ethical issues regarding the use of force to protect civilians in UN
operations', fournal of Military Ethics 5:3, 2006, p. 205.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
removal of threats through negotiated (and sometimes coerced) disarmament.10
In the absence of military doctrine, however, we lack a clear understanding of
how these tasks should be accomplished. The final version of the UN's capstone
doctrine for peace operations (rebadged 'principles and guidelines' for political
reasons) limited itself to simply observing that 'most. . . peacekeeping operations
are now mandated by the Security Council to protect civilians under imminent
threat' and noting that this task requires 'coordination with the UN's civilian
agencies and NGOs'.109 This raises difficult questions about the relative impor
tance of civilian protection and other important principles of peacekeeping such
as consent, impartiality and minimum force.110 Draft UN training modules report
edly insist that these other principles do not justify inactivity in the face of atroci
ties, but do not provide guidance on how these concerns should be reconciled.111
For more detailed guidance we have to make do with learning lessons from current
and past missions?at least for the time being.
One ofthe most important examples of coercive protection was the adoption of
a much more robust posture by MONUC in eastern DRC. In 2005 MONUC began
a process of compulsory disarmament in Ituri district around Bunia, disarming
around 15,000 combatants by June. Some groups opposed forcible disarmament,
and in February 2005 fighters from the Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI)
attacked and killed nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers. In response, Nepalese, Pakistani
and South African peacekeepers, supported by Indian attack helicopters, pursued
the FNI and killed between 50 and 60 belligerents, neutralizing the threat they
represented to civilians.112 For its part, the Security Council further strengthened
MONUC's mandate and explicitly authorized 'cordon-and-search' operations
against 'illegal armed groups' thought to be threatening the civilian population.113
MONUC's Pakistani contingent also adopted a robust civilian protection
posture in South Kivu. Alongside Guatemalan special forces, the Pakistanis rooted
out Hutu Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), members of a
militia associated with the 1994 Rwandan genocide and subsequent abuse of civil
ians in the DRC. In October 2005 MONUC issued a disarmament ultimatum to
the FDLR; when the rebels refused to cooperate, it used helicopter gunships to
destroy between 13 and 16 camps. Although the mission succeeded in weakening
the FDLR and restricting its freedom of movement, it neither destroyed the
militia nor forced it to disarm.114 As well as applying coercion to the perpetrators
of attacks on the civilian population, the Pakistanis also used innovative methods
to protect civilians. For example, they organized a community watch in villages
in Walungu territory and taught its members to bang pots and blow whistles
108 Holt and Berkman, The impossible mandate?, p. 52.
109 UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, United Nations peacekeeping operations: principles and guidelines, 18
Jan. 2008, para. 42.
110 The so-called holy trinity. See Alex J. Bellamy, Paul D. Williams and Stuart Griffin, Understanding peacekeeping
(Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
111 Holt and Berkman, The impossible mandate?, p. 190.
112 Holt and Berkman, The impossible mandate?, p. 165.
113 UN Security Council Resolution 1592, March 2005.
114 Holt and Berkman, The impossible mandate?, pp. 166?7.
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Alex J. Bellamy
when danger was imminent. Pakistani peacekeepers were kept on high alert in the
vicinity to respond to such warnings.
UN peacekeepers have therefore begun to operationalize R2P in a way that
incorporates the protection of civilians into their core business. To date, while the
Security Council hands down mandates for the protection of civilians with greater
regularity and fewer restrictions, operationalization has largely relied on impro
visation in the field, as the example of MONUC in Ituri district demonstrates.
Despite the evident limitations of this approach, the focus on civilian protection
has contributed to a marked decline in the overall number of civilians killed in
sub-Saharan African wars since 2003.II5 R2P can make an important contribu
tion to the further development of civilian protection by providing the core ratio
nale for such operations, marshalling the political will necessary to establish peace
operations and equip them with civilian protection mandates, and emphasizing the
need for long-term and multidimensional approaches to civilian protection which
incorporate the prevention of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and
ethnic cleansing, and the rebuilding of states and societies in the wake of such
suffering.
Conclusion
The first step along the road of translating R2P from words into deeds is a proper
understanding of what the principle does and does not say about the use of
non-consensual military force for humanitarian purposes. As agreed by world
leaders in 2005, R2P does not countenance non-consensual military force without
the authorization of the Security Council and does not set out criteria for the use
of force beyond the four threshold crimes and the idea that the Council should
assume responsibility in cases where the host state is 'manifestly failing' to protect.
Many advocates of R2P lament the loss of key elements of the recommenda
tions put forward by the ICISS, and it is appropriate and legitimate to call for
amendments to the R2P principle in the future to accommodate some of these
recommendations. But it is important to distinguish the R2P principle from ideas,
concepts and recommendations put forth by the ICISS, various governments, and
individuals such as Francis Deng. Continuing confusion about what R2P has to
say about military intervention helps neither the principle itself nor those charged
with making difficult decisions about how best to prevent genocide and mass
atrocities and protect potential victims.
It is also important not to overstate the capacity of those 'lost recommen
dations'?especially the proposed criteria to guide decisions about the use of
force?to resolve policy dilemmas or forge consensus in actual cases. Criteria
enjoyed little international support, would not generate additional political will,
would in all likelihood not constrain the use of the veto (if past practice is a good
guide) and would not provide an avenue for legitimately bypassing the Security
Council. For these reasons, although it is legitimate to press UN member states to
115 Human Security Report Project, Human Security Brief 2007, pp. 22?30.
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The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention
adopt criteria, the energies of R2P advocates would be better spent elsewhere. Not
least, they should focus on identifying and operationalizing those aspects of R2P
that could make an important difference to the way international society concep
tualizes and practises military intervention: mitigating moral hazards, building
multifaceted engagement strategies that reduced the tendency to focus exclusively
on military solutions, and developing the doctrine and capacity needed to enable
peacekeepers to protect civilians better once deployed. Focusing on these aspects
would help deliver on Ban Ki-moon's promise to translate R2P 'from words into
deeds' and lay the foundations for a deepening consensus on the new principle.
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