ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, genocide in Rwanda (1994) killed at least 800,000 people, and war in the former Yugoslavia (1992-95) left at least 250,000 dead and forced thousands more to flee. Protracted conflicts in Sierra Leone, Sudan, Haiti, Somalia, Liberia, East Timor, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and elsewhere killed millions more. As of 2008, conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan has cost the lives of around 250,000 people and has forced more than three million people from their homes (Coebergh 2005). Significantly, approximately 90 per cent of the victims in these conflicts were civilians. In what Mary Kaldor famously described as ‘new wars’ (1999), civilian deaths are a direct war aim, not an unfortunate by-product. Although most of these slaughters involved non-state militia groups, typically, the worst perpetrators of crimes against civilians are states. Although the precise figures are contested, according to R. J. Rummel, in the twentieth century, around 40 million people were killed in wars between states, whilst 170 million were killed by their own governments (Rummel 1994: 21). Historically, genocides have ended in one of two ways: either the genocidaires succeed in destroying their target group, or they are defeated in battle. This cold fact is borne out by recent cases. The Rwandan genocide ended with the defeat of the Rwandan government and interahamwe militia at the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF); the carnage in Bosnia came to an end when the military balance turned in favour of a Croat-Muslim coalition backed by NATO airpower; and the bloodshed in Darfur has declined primarily because the Janjaweed militia and their government backers have succeeded in forcing their civilian victims into exile. Facts like these pose a major challenge to world politics. Contemporary international
order is based on a society of states that enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over a particular piece of territory and have rights to non-interference and non-intervention that are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. This system is in turn prefaced on the assumption – drawn from the famous Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ analogy – that states exist primarily to protect the security of their citizens. In other words, the security of the state is considered important, and worth protecting, because states provide security to individuals. It should be clear from the proceeding paragraph that this assumption is wrong. In the past century, threats to individual security have tended to come more from one’s
own state than from other states. This raises the question of whether there are circumstances in which the security of individuals should be privileged over the security of states? Should a state’s right to be secure and free from armed attack be dependent on its fulfilment of certain responsibilities to its citizens, not least a responsibility to protect them from mass killing? Or, should the imperative of maintaining an international order with a basic degree of harmony between states override concerns about human security? It is these questions that animate the contemporary debate about humanitarian intervention. This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of the debate between those who
believe that the protection of civilians from genocide and mass atrocities ought to trump the principle of non-intervention in certain circumstances and those who oppose this proposition. I argue that since the end of the Cold War, a broad international consensus has emerged around a principle called ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), first developed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001 (ICISS 2001). R2P holds that states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide and mass atrocities and, when they fail to do so, that responsibility transfers to the international community, primarily as represented by the Security Council. This leaves unresolved the thorny question of what should happen when the Security Council chooses not to intervene in cases of genocide and mass atrocities – a theme discussed in detail by the ICISS in 2001, but omitted entirely from the international commitment to R2P in 2005 (United Nations General Assembly 2005). It is one thing to recognize the Security Council’s responsibility and right to act in such cases, it is quite another thing to persuade it to do so. This chapter begins by evaluating the arguments put forward by both sides of the debate before focusing on the debate about the NATO intervention in Kosovo, which acted as a catalyst for the development of R2P. The chapter ends by examining the extent to which R2P has succeeded in finding a middle road between these different positions.
