Responsibility to Protect: Research, bibliography, background. Supplementary volume to the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

This proposes a new framework for atrocity prevention, featuring scholars from around the globe including three former UN special advisers.

This book revisits and interrogates the evolution of the Responsibility to Protect in search of the root cause of R2P’s failure to date. Employing a critical constructivist lens throughout, the book locates the origin of that apparent failure in the close association of R2P with humanitarian intervention. In returning to the ideational underpinnings and broader ambitions of R2P’s architects, the analysis reveals that reducing R2P to little more than a “solution” to the long-standing problem(s) confronting humanitarian intervention betrayed its fundamental purpose: advancing a new norm of, and for, human security provision. Employing a modified version of the norm life-cycle model as a diagnostic tool, the author uncovers the underlying dynamics of R2P’s normative stagnation over the past two decades. The book concludes with a prescriptive remedy in the form of a two-part blueprint for reconstructing and reanimating R2P’s normative agenda for an international society confronted by mounting and existential threats to humanity. This book will be of much interest to scholars and students of the Responsibility to Protect, human rights, security studies, and international relations in general.

This book relates the Responsibility to Protect to existing bodies of theory on the nature and foundations of political and international order.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle is the international community's major response to the problem of genocide and mass atrocities - a problem seen in Bosnia, Rwanda and more recently in Syria. This book argues that although it is far from perfect R2P offers the best chance we have of building an international community that works to prevent these crimes and protect vulnerable populations. To make this argument, the book sets out the logic of R2P and its key ambitions, examines some of the critiques of the principle and its implementation in situations such as Libya, and sets out ways of overcoming some of the practical problems associated with moving this principle from words into deeds.

This book addresses conflicts involving different normative orders: what happens when international law prohibits behavior, but the same behavior is nonetheless morally justified or warranted? Can the actor concerned ignore international law under appeal to morality? Can soldiers escape legal liability by pointing to honor? Can accountants do so under reference to professional standards? How, in other words, does law relate to other normative orders? The assumption behind this book is that law no longer automatically claims supremacy, but that actors can pick and choose which code to follow. The novelty resides not so much in identifying conflicts, but in exploring if, when and how different orders can be used intentionally. In doing so, the book covers conflicts between legal orders and conflicts involving law and honor, self-regulation, lex mercatoria, local social practices, bureaucracy, religion, professional standards and morality.

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.