Philip Cunliffe

Dangerous Duties: Power, Paternalism and the Responsibility to Protect

This article provides a critique of Louise Arbours article ‘The responsibility to protect as a duty of care in international law and practice’. Proceeding through criticisms of Arbours specific propositions, the thesis is advanced that the perverse effect of the ‘duty of care’ is to undermine political accountability and by extension, political responsibility. It is argued that this is an imperfect duty that no specific agent is obliged to fulfil. This poses insuperable problems of agency that are exposed in Arbours efforts to actualise the doctrine. As there is no mechanism for enacting the ‘duty of care’, I argue that it will be powerful states that will determine the conditions under which the ‘responsibility to protect’ is discharged. This means that the ‘duty’ will remain tied to the prerogatives of states. In order to resolve this problem of agency, it will be shown how Arbour is forced to replace the idea of law with the principle of ‘might makes right’. The ‘duty of care’ is also shown to have regressive effects on the domestic sphere: the demand that states be made accountable to the international community ends up making states responsible for their people rather than to their people.

The Politics of Global Governance in UN Peacekeeping

This article examines the allocation of roles and responsibilities in the construction of UN peacekeeping. The case is made that decision making in UN peacekeeping is not only fragmented between various states and institutional actors, but also critically lopsided, with an uneven distribution of responsibilities and the majority of political, military and strategic risks falling upon those countries least able to bear them – poor and weak states. States that hold decision-making power are not the states that have to implement those decisions. The article concludes by arguing that this governance structure is not a symptom of organizational dysfunction, but that it serves a political function by allowing influence to be wielded without risk.

Still the Spectre at the Feast: Comparisons between Peacekeeping and Imperialism in Peacekeeping Studies Today

The sheer ambition and scale of UN peacebuilding today inevitably invokes comparison with historic practices of colonialism and imperialism, from critics and supporters of peacebuilding alike. The legitimacy of post-settlement peacebuilding is often seen to hinge on the question of the extent to which it transcends historic practices of imperialism. This article offers a critique of how these comparisons are made in the extant scholarship, and argues that supporters of peacekeeping deploy an under-theorized and historically one-sided view of imperialism. The article argues that the attempt to flatter peacebuilding by comparison with imperialism fails, and that the theory and history of imperialism still provide a rich resource for both the critique and conceptualization of peacekeeping practice. The article concludes by suggesting how new forms of imperial power can be projected through peacebuilding.

From ISIS to ICISS: A critical return to the Responsibility to Protect report

In light of the post-intervention crisis in Libya, this article revisits critically the vision of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) offered in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) – frequently taken as the conceptual bedrock for R2P doctrine. It is argued that the perverse effect of ICISS doctrine is to replace political responsibility with paternalism. The demand that states be made accountable to the international community ends by making states accountable for their people rather than to their people. The argument is developed across five critical theses. These include claims that R2P changes the burden of justification for intervention, that it usurps popular sovereignty in favour of state power, and that it diffuses post-conflict responsibilities. The article concludes that pre-emptive ‘human protection’ efforts risk crowding out questions of systemic transformation, i.e. what kind of an international order we want to live in.

The doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ as a practice of political exceptionalism

The consensus on the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ has replaced ideas of humanitarian intervention with a new vision of the responsibilities that states have to protect their peoples from the most egregious suffering. The contention of this article is that this is a politics of exceptionalism, whereby power is legitimated by reference to its effectiveness in responding to emergency or crisis. By analysing the doctrine in this way, new light is shed on the debate surrounding the responsibility to protect. First, understanding the doctrine in terms of exceptionalism helps explain the paradox of how the doctrine has been assimilated so readily into institutional and state practice without manifesting any greater commitment to international intervention. Second, understanding these new security practices in terms of exceptionalism allows us to move beyond questions of imperialism. Once understood in terms of exceptionalism, it can be shown that the stakes in the debate on the responsibility to protect are restricted not only to relations between states, but also to relations within them: principles of representative government are to be substituted with paternalist and authoritarian visions of state power.

From peacekeepers to praetorians – how participating in peacekeeping operations may subvert democracy:

This article provides a heuristic study of three cases where participation in peacekeeping operations prompted military rule in the peacekeeper-contributing state. These three atypical cases contradict the theory of diversionary peace, which claims that contributing to peacekeeping operations abroad should stimulate democracy at home. The experience of these three countries also calls into question the conventional wisdom that strongly associates peacekeeping with liberal democratic institutions, outcomes and practices. Via triangulation across literature, reports, elite interviews and WikiLeaks cables, these cases are examined in order to identify more generalisable observations regarding how participation in peacekeeping may enhance the role of the military at the expense of democratic order and civilian rule in the contributing state. The theory of diversionary peace is shown to suffer from serious conceptual flaws. Some preliminary efforts are made to generalise the findings, with Ghana and Uruguay identified as warranting further investigation. A number of variables are identified as offering scope for generalisation, namely, revenue, leadership and military size. Several promising areas for further research are also identified: how military dependence on peacekeeping may make political systems more permeable to outside influence, how far the United Nations (UN) can politically influence its contributor states and how peacebuilding may affect peacekeepers’ understanding of their role in their own countries. By examining the feedback effects of peacekeeping on peacekeeper-contributing states, the article reverses the conventional focus of peacekeeping scholarship and contributes to the growing literature examining the wider ramifications and unintended consequences of liberal conflict management.

Rising powers and intervention: contested norms and shifts in global order

The papers in this special section are the results of two workshops that were held in 2014, both organized by the editors of this special section. The first workshop was financed by a Venture Research Grant from the International Studies Association and held at that organization’s Annual Convention in Toronto in March 2014. The second was held in Rio de Janeiro in September of that year, under the auspices of the Institute of International Relations of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (IRI/PUC-Rio). Both workshops were concerned with mapping out in both conceptual and empirical terms how a new generation of emerging powers were attempting to reshape the international order. Much has changed over the last two years since those workshops took place. While there were storm clouds on the horizon even back then, at the time of writing virtually all the emerging powers find themselves mired in significant difficulties that will weigh down and perhaps in some cases even snap their upwards ascent. Only a few years back the emerging powers whose core were the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) were still assertive and self-confident, openly seeking greater prestige and international status as they sought to boost themselves from the regional cockpit of power politics into the global arena. In 2009, one year into the global financial crisis, Brazilian president Luiz Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva boasted that Brazil would only feel the crash as an uma marolinha—a ripple, and Brazilian fiscal policy would be able to stave off economic damage (Rathbone 2013). Today the situation is grim. Brazil’s entire political elite is imploding, as a result of a metastasizing corruption scandal. Lula’s successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, is in a desperate struggle for political survival, while the Brazilian economy has seen among the sharpest falls in the world over the last two years (Anderson 2016). Russia remains locked in an authoritarian freeze that grows colder and harder. The Russian economy is staggering under the impact of a collapsing oil price and Western sanctions imposed as punishment for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s civil war since 2014. India’s current government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is rapidly losing political momentum after losing a major election in Bihar, one of India’s most populous states, in November

Third World Revolutions Left to Smoulder

On 15 May 2011*known to Palestinians as Nakba Day, the annual commemoration of their displacement during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948* extraordinary scenes were witnessed at Israel’s borders. Thousands of (mostly young) Palestinian refugees marched to it, some even tried to climb over border fences*they were ‘going home’ armed with deeds to properties in Israel and photographs of their grandparents’ houses more than six decades after they had been displaced. Encouraged by the ‘Arab Spring’, these demonstrations showed that Palestinian refugees wanted their voices to be heard*at a time when the world had chosen to forget about them or regard them as potential ‘spoilers’ in a peace deal between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Palestinian refugees have the unenviable position of constituting the oldest and largest single refugee group in the world. As of 1 January 2011, nearly 5 million were registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)*the UN agency established specifically to provide assistance to those displaced in 1948. While statistics on the refugees are not always reliable, according to the PLO Department of Refugee Affairs, almost 83 per cent live in historic Palestine and the countries that border it, 10 per cent live in the Arab region, and only 7 per cent in the rest of the world (Abu-Libdeh in Brynen and El-Rifai, p. 16).The Declarations of Havana by Fidel Castro. Introduction by Tariq Ali. London, New York: Verso, 2008. Pp. 120+notes. £7.99 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-84467-156-4. On Practice and Contradiction by Mao Tse-Tung. Introduction by Slavoj Žižek. London, New York: Verso, 2007. Pp. 186+notes. £8.99 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-844467-587-6. Down with Colonialism! by Ho Chi Minh. Introduction by Walden Bello. London, New York: Verso, 2007. Pp. 216+notes. £7.19 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-84467-177-9.

Review essay of N. MacQueen's Peacekeeping and the International System, A.J. Bellamy et al.'s Understanding Peacekeeping, E. Aksu's The United Nations, intra-state peacekeeping and normative change, and M.W. Doyle and N. Sambanis' Making War and Building Peace

The book delves into an interesting aspect of Italian colonialism that has been largely overlooked in both Italian and international historiographies, namely Italy’s ‘culture of colonialism’ during the period of the First African War between 1880 and 1896. Based on neglected historical sources, Finaldi’s study seeks to fill this scholarly lacuna, by providing an analysis of the ‘culture of colonialism’, which developed in the Italian peninsula when the young nation-state was going through its first colonial experiences, and defeats, in East Africa. In particular, by focusing on a case study that has often been left out from academic discussions concerning ‘culture and empire’ in European perspective, this monographic work attempts to assign to the Italian experience its proper historical significance. To do so, Finaldi explains and discusses whether a ‘culture of colonialism’ took root in liberal Italy; how and where this culture spread and reached the Italian population at large; and what impact it may have had on the formation of Italy’s national identity. The study is divided into three asymmetrical sections, each with an introduction, and respectively, two, nine and four, chapters. At the organizational level, it is unfortunate that the author introduces each of these three sections while ‘omitting’ somehow to write a full introduction of the book, which, inexplicably absent, would have certainly improved the overall initial presentation of his research. Surely, many of the comments about the scholarship on colonialism and about the issue of debating the existence of a ‘colonial culture’ in liberal Italy (pp. 13–32) could well have been placed more effectively in the missing introduction of the book, rather than being all condensed in the introduction of the first section. In the first chapter of this part, the author provides a useful definition of ‘culture of colonialism’ by using, as a starting point, the unavoidable contributions of Edward Said and John MacKenzie – both suggesting, in different ways, that the historical process of elaborating and portraying ideas about European expansion was inherently linked with the consolidating of national identity in the metropole. So, the nationalization process at home operated symbiotically with colonialism abroad, strengthening the process of nation-formation (pp. 33–46). By drawing on this contemporary scholarship, which is mainly concerned with British and French imperialisms, Finaldi applies the above argument to the Italian case study, highlighting an interesting link between Italy’s ‘culture of colonialism’ in the 1880s–90s and its Risorgimento nationalism (pp. 45–47). Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16(2) 2011: 296–306

'Unilateralism "Lite"'. Review essay of A. Lang's (ed.) Just Intervention, F. Weissman's (ed.) In the Shadow of Just Wars and J. Welsh's (ed.) Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations

Humanitarian intervention is over. The conventional wisdom increasingly seems to be that the diplomatic controversy and UN fracas over the legality of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has gravely destabilized what had hitherto been a newly settled consensus on the use of force in international relations–namely, the ‘right of humanitarian intervention’. Simon Clark, an ex-special advisor to British foreign secretary Robin Cook during NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, argues that the invasion of Iraq has shattered what he terms the ‘liberal intervention consensus’–the idea that military intervention in defence of human rights was a legitimate enterprise. Discussing the ongoing conflict in Sudan’s Darfur province, another commentator recently inveighed against the dangers of ‘post-Iraq isolationism’ and what he termed the erosion of the ‘third pillar’ of Tony Blair’s ‘world view’–humanitarian intervention. What, then, do these three edited volumes on humanitarian intervention and humanitarianism have to offer us in this period of so-called post-Iraq isolationism? First, the questions central to scholars and students of humanitarian intervention (namely, the political and legal issues surrounding the use of force, the role of human rights and humanitarianism in post-cold war international relations) are also central to the war on terror. Indeed, one of the key questions confronting researchers grappling with these issues is the question of the continuity and discontinuity that links these two periods of ‘liberal interventionism’. How much has changed in international relations since the launch of the war on terror? Have human rights and humanitarianism been deprioritized since the invasion of Afghanistan? How has the war on terror impacted on the rules governing the use of force? To what extent did the so-called right of humanitarian intervention set the terrain for the current disorder in the rules governing the use of force in international relations? Written prior to the US-led war on Iraq, although published afterwards, these three volumes provide a sense of how the relevant issues surrounding