Alex J. Bellamy

Libya and the Responsibility to Protect: The Exception and the Norm

The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) played an important role in shaping the worlds response to actual and threatened atrocities in Libya. Not least, the adoption of Resolution 1973 by the UN Security Council on May 17, 2011, approving a no-fly zone over Libya and calling for “all necessary measures” to protect civilians, reflected a change in the Councils attitude toward the use of force for human protection purposes; and the role played by the UNs new Joint Office on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect points toward the potential for this new capacity to identify threats of mass atrocities and to focus the UNs attention on preventing them. Given the reluctance of both the Security Council and the wider UN membership even to discuss RtoP in the years immediately following the 2005 World Summit—the High-level Plenary Meeting of the 60th Session of the General Assembly that gave birth to RtoP—these two facts suggest that significant progress has been made thanks to the astute stewardship of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is personally committed to the principle. Where it was once a term of art employed by a handful of like-minded countries, activists, and scholars, but regarded with suspicion by much of the rest of the world, RtoP has become a commonly accepted frame of reference for preventing and responding to mass atrocities.

Who's Keeping the Peace? Regionalization and Contemporary Peace Operations

volve the dispatch of expeditionary forces, with or without a United Nations (UN) mandate, to implement an agreement between warring states or factions, which may (or may not) include enforcing that agreement in the face of willful deaance. Although the UN has the most experience in authorizing and conducting such operations, the organization has never possessed a monopoly on them. This situation has become more obvious in recent years as a variety of non-UN actors have conducted peace operations, often without the Security Council’s authorization. In Africa, for instance, since 1990 regional organizations have conducted ten peace operations: ave by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), two under the mantle of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), one by the Economic and Monetary Community of Central African States (CEMAC), and two by the African Union (AU).1 Africans have also witnessed British operations in Sierra Leone; French operations in Central African Republic and Côte d’Ivoire; a South African detachment deployed to Burundi; and a French-led force dispatched to the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In Europe, Italy led a peace operation in Albania in 1997; Russian troops—often under the umbrella of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—have deployed to Moldova, Georgia, and Tajikistan; and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) continues to lead a large peace operation in Kosovo and in December 2004 handed control of its Bosnia operation over to the European Union (EU). In addition, in 2003 NATO took command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. In the same year, following NATO’s departure, the EU conducted Operation Concordia in Macedonia and followed it

The Responsibility To Protect and the Crisis in Darfur

Governments that have endorsed the ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ approach have shown little inclination to protect civilians suffering at the hands of their own government in the Sudanese province of Darfur. After providing an overview of Darfur’s crisis and international society’s feeble response, we explore why the strongest advocates of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, the NATO and EU states, failed to seriously contemplate military intervention. We suggest that three main factors help explain the West’s unwillingness to intervene in Darfur: increased scepticism about the West’s humanitarian interventionism, especially after the invasion of Iraq; Western strategic interests in Sudan; and the relationship between the crisis in Darfur and Sudan’s other civil wars. We conclude that the emerging norm of humanitarian intervention remains weak and strongly contested, and that advocates of the ‘responsibility to protect’ approach have yet to persuade their governments to help save populations in danger.

Introduction: Thinking Anew about Peace Operations

In his address to the UNGeneral Assembly in September 1999, Kofi Annan insisted that ‘state sovereignty . . . is being redefined by the forces of globalisation and international cooperation. These developments demand of us a willingness to think anew about how the United Nations responds to the political, human rights and humanitarian crises affecting so much of the world’. International responses to these challenges have varied. The Canadian government, for example, has spoken at length about ‘human security’ and supported an international commission to develop a more reconciliatory approach to the relationship between sovereignty and human rights. In Britain, the then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, proposed a set of criteria to guide future humanitarian interventions. The Secretary-General himself commissioned the so-called Brahimi Report. This was to conduct a thorough investigation of past and current peace operations, question the conceptual assumptions behind them and suggest how the UN Secretariat and its decision-making bodies might improve their responses to political and human rights crises. The Brahimi Report was officially launched at the UN’s Millennium Summit in September 2000. Far from challenging first principles, however, the Report focused upon how the UN Secretariat’s staff working on peacekeeping might better manage personnel in the field to produce more effective results. To promote better management of peace operations the Report made four major recommendations:

International society and its critics

Attempts to draw together the ideas presented in the book and to question the continuing relevance of the approach of the English School of International Relations to international relations. Argues that although the School has made a significant contribution to the discipline, more work needs to be done if it is to maintain its relevance. In particular, the School needs to address the relationship between international society and world society in more detail, identify and explore the many structures that underpin international society, rethink the pluralism-solidarism debate, and shed more light on the drivers and dynamics of change in world politics.

The ‘next stage’ in peace operations theory?

To date, peace operations have been under-theorized. Where they have been studied conceptually, this essay argues, peace operations have been viewed through the lens of problem-solving theory. Although such approaches are useful and important, particularly because they help to guide future action, they provide only partial explanations and limit the scope of creative thinking and practice. This essay calls for a new stage of theoretical thought informed by critical perspectives. It argues that problem-solving and critical approaches to peace operations can be distinguished along three lines: their purpose, their understanding of the social world and their position on the relationship between theory and practice. It argues that only a broadening and deepening of the study of peace operations can move the study and practice of peace operations beyond its current, problematic, state.

Ethics and intervention: The 'humanitarian exception' and the problem of abuse in the case of Iraq

This article investigates the ethics of intervention and explores the decision to invade Iraq. It begins by arguing that while positive international law provides an important framework for understanding and debating the legitimacy of war, it does not cover the full spectrum of moral reasoning on issues of war and peace. To that end, after briefly discussing the two primary legal justifications for war (implied UN authorization and pre-emptive self-defence), and finding them wanting, it asks whether there is a moral ‘humanitarian exception’ to this rule grounded in the ‘just war’ tradition. The article argues that two aspects of the broad tradition could be used to make a humanitarian case for war: the ‘holy war’ tradition and classical just war thinking based on natural law. The former it finds problematic, while the latter it argues provides a moral space to justify the use of force to halt gross breaches of natural law. Although such an approach may provide a moral justification for war, it also opens the door to abuse. It was this very problem that legal positivism from Vattel onwards was designed to address. As a result, the article argues that natural law and legal positivist arguments should be understood as complementary sets of ideas whose sometimes competing claims must be balanced in relation to particular cases. Therefore, although natural law may open a space for justifying the invasion of Iraq on humanitarian terms, legal positivism strictly limits that right. Ignoring this latter fact, as happened in the Iraq case, opens the door to abuse.

Motives, outcomes, intent and the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention

During the 1990s, international society increasingly recognised that states who abuse their citizens in the most egregious ways ought to lose their sovereign inviolability and be subject to humanitarian intervention. The emergence of this norm has given renewed significance to the debate concerning what it is about humanitarian intervention that makes it legitimate. The most popular view is that it is humanitarian motivations that legitimise intervention. Others insist that humanitarian outcomes are more important that an actors motivations, pointing for instance to the ousting of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnam. Given the centrality of this debate, this article reinvestigates the ‘motives versus outcomes’ debate and suggests an alternative reading based on the classic Just War tradition. It argues that an actors intentions are vital to assessing the legitimacy of an intervention.

Pragmatic Solidarism and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Intervention

The theory and practice of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s has produced a series of seemingly intractable dilemmas. Why do states act in some cases and not others? How are we to evaluate the legitimacy of particular acts? This article introduces a new perspective on these questions informed by a combination of pragmatism and solidarism. It argues that although the search for criteria that may be used to judge the legitimacy and efficacy of humanitarian intervention may be a futile one, it is possible to think about a politics of legitimate humanitarian intervention. Such a politics may be based on three key insights drawn from pragmatism: the dialogic construction of moral knowledge, the fallibility of knowledge, and the priority of democracy over philosophy. The article discusses how such a pragmatic solidarism may be used to interrogate the quest for legitimising criteria and to build a new politics of humanitarian intervention.

The Responsibilities of Victory: Jus Post Bellum and the Just War

Recent years have seen a growing interest in questions about justice after war (jus post bellum), fuelled in large part by moral questions about coalition operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, it has become common to argue that jus post bellum is a third strand of Just War thinking. This article evaluates this position. It argues that that there are broadly two ways of understanding moral requirements after war: a minimalist position which holds that moral principles derived largely from jus ad bellum and jus in bello concerns should constrain what victors are entitled to do after war and a maximalist position which holds that victors acquire additional responsibilities that are grounded more in liberalism and international law than in Just War thinking. Finding problems with both approaches, the article argues that it is premature to include jus post bellum as a third element of Just War thinking and concludes by setting out six principles to guide future thinking in this area.