Theresa Reinold

The responsibility to protect – much ado about nothing?

Despite its newness, the concept of the responsibility to protect (R2P) looks back at a stellar career. It has been the subject of numerous conferences and academic publications and has been affirmed by the major UN bodies. Indeed, if one were to assess the development of an international norm by the amount of academic attention and general rhetorical support it enjoys, one could be inclined to believe that the responsibility to protect is rapidly evolving into a norm of customary international law. This article subjects the R2P hype to critical scrutiny and asks probing questions about R2Ps viability as a norm. Beneath the thin veneer of rhetorical acceptance of R2P lies a range of hotly disputed issues – in particular but not exclusively regarding the concepts implications for the use of force – which are unlikely to be resolved in the near future. In this article I examine R2Ps potential to ‘ripen’ into an international norm. I argue that in the absence of an intersubjective consensus about what R2P actually means , the concepts chances to ‘harden’ into a norm of customary international law are remote. I posit that R2P cannot be considered a ‘new norm’ or an ‘emerging norm’ as it is frequently called, because the vast majority of states simply does not want to be legally bound to save strangers in remote regions of the world.

State weakness, irregular warfare, and the right to self-defense post-9/11

Sovereign states have a responsibility not only to protect their own citizens, but also to protect— within their own territory—the rights and fundamental security interests of other states. Many states around the world, however, lack the resources to do so. Unable to exercise effective territorial control, these weak states frequently become safe havens for terrorist networks and other irregular groups. Yet the lack of such control is not the only reason for the existence of safe havens around the world; in some cases, the problem is not the host states inability, but rather its unwillingness, to prevent irregular activity on its territory. The present article analyzes the challenges posed to the jus ad bellum resulting from both types of safe-haven scenarios: states that are unable, and those that are unwilling, to exercise control.

The United States and the Responsibility to Protect: Impediment, Bystander, or Norm Leader?

The US has always reserved the right to use military force to save strangers – unilaterally, if necessary. Yet successive US Administrations have perceived this right as an option to intervene, and not as a general duty toward endangered civilians that is exercised in a more or less consistent fashion. The responsibility to protect is thus a double-edged sword for the United States: on the one hand, it legitimises the use of military means as a last resort to protect civilians from the worst human rights abuses. On the other hand, however, it limits US freedom of action by establishing clear guidelines for the use of force and by creating an expectation to act when human rights are being violated on a massive scale and all other non-military means have been exhausted. Unsurprisingly then, US engagement with the responsibility to protect has been rather ambivalent. This article reviews the Bush Administrations position on R2P in theory and practice, taking the Darfur crisis as a showcase of the Bush Administrations wavering commitment to atrocity prevention. The second part of the article discusses whether the Obama Presidency has departed from the Bush Administrations approach and assesses to what extent it will provide new impetus to the development of R2P.

The ‘Responsibility Not to Veto’, Secondary Rules, and the Rule of Law

In this article I argue that the concept of secondary rules provides a useful tool for analysing the interplay of politics and law in the evolution of the ‘responsibility not to veto’, which represents an attempt to subject the Security Council to the rule of law. Secondary rules help to maintain the law’s overall coherence, thereby bolstering its legitimacy and hence its ability to effectively govern human conduct. Most accounts of secondary rule-making overstate the role of power while underestimating the need for powerful states to argue within the parameters set by the law itself. This contribution, by contrast, explores the interaction of power and law, and the role of secondary rules therein. It shows that the international legal order currently lacks coherence as there is no consensus on overarching principles. Hence, the legitimacy crisis of the Security Council is at the same time a legitimacy crisis of international law.

Africa’s Emerging Regional Security Culture and the Intervention in Libya

Just as nation-states are imagined communities (Anderson 1983), so are regions. A hitherto under-researched dimension of imagining regions as communities is the construction of regional security cultures. These are dynamic artifacts of human practice that are constantly evolving as the local, national, regional and global normative contexts change. Consequently, with the concept of ‘security’ itself currently undergoing reinterpretation — with global discourses about the moral purpose of the state increasingly pointing to the protection of human security as the state’s primary raison d’etre — regional security cultures are expected to mirror this normative shift in their own constitutive norms and practices.