The Responsibility to Protect in Darfur

From Forgotten Conflict to Global Cause and Back

David Lanz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367183707
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429590290
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in the context of the conflict in Darfur, using detailed empirical evidence.

The volume traces Darfur's evolution from forgotten conflict to a major global cause and back to obscurity. The emergence of a far-reaching international response to the war in Darfur began in 2004 and included the most influential international advocacy movement since the anti-apartheid campaign and one of the world's largest peacekeeping missions. The book analyzes how Darfur slid back into international obscurity after 2011, despite ongoing violence against civilians and the continued risk of conflict escalation following Omar al-Bashir's ousting in April 2019. Based on an analysis of more than 100 interviews and over 1,000 media reports, the book examines one of the most pressing questions related to the R2P: why do some situations of mass atrocities cause an international outcry, while others are met with complacency and silence? It argues that the presence or absence of a compelling narrative, which frames a situation in moral terms and unambiguously conveys who is responsible, who suffers, and what should be done, facilitates whether or not sufficient traction will be gained to beget a robust R2P response.

This book will be of much interest to students of the Responsibility to Protect, human rights, peacekeeping, conflict resolution, African politics and International Relations in general.

1 Understanding R2P

Saving strangers in a messy world

R2P: An idea whose time has come … and gone?¹

The origins and development of R2P

The end of the Cold War freed the United Nations (UN) of its paralysis and led to an intensification of collective security efforts, including military interventions and peace operations with enforcement elements (Seybolt 2007). This shift reinvigorated the long-standing discussion about humanitarian intervention, whose roots go back to the just war doctrine. Proponents of the doctrine argue that, under certain circumstances, the use of force can serve a good moral purpose (Walzer 1977). Thus, jus ad bellum (the right to wage war), materializes under certain conditions, for example, when innocent life is in imminent danger, when force is used to protect populations in danger, and when interveners have exhausted all peaceful means. The intervention also needs a reasonable prospect of success, and its anticipated benefits should be proportional to the expected harms of war (Boyle 2006).

Three cases came to dominate the debate about humanitarian intervention. The first was the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, during which around 800,000 people—primarily Tutsis—were killed over a few months. International actors failed to react, and when the genocide began, the UN Security Council (UNSC) even withdrew the peacekeepers it had deployed the previous year to oversee a ceasefire (Barnett 2002). The second case was Srebrenica, where Serbian forces killed more than 8,000 Bosnians despite the presence of UN peacekeepers (United Nations 1999). With Rwanda and Srebrenica, inaction in the face of mass atrocities came to be identified with moral failure, which added weight to the idea of humanitarian intervention as just and necessary.²

The third case was NATO’s controversial military intervention in Kosovo, which triggered debates among policymakers and scholars about the nature and merits of humanitarian intervention (Schnabel and Thakur 2000). Liberal internationalists (Ignatieff 2000; Tesòn 2003; Weiss 2016) supported humanitarian intervention, seeing in it a potential to realize the intrinsic values of human rights and to achieve progress towards a Kantian cosmopolitan society. Solidarists equally promoted it, seeing in it a pathway to fulfill the idea of justice in international society (Wheeler 2000). Conversely, some scholars argued that interventions not authorized by the UN Security Council, such as the Kosovo intervention, were illegal and undermined international legal order (Chesterman 2001). Others raised objections, claiming that humanitarian arguments for war conceal the hegemonic interests of big powers (Chomsky 1999). English School pluralists opposed humanitarian intervention because it subverts sovereignty, jeopardizing the legitimacy of international society (Ayoob 2002) and even the stability of world order, which could lead to an increase in war (Jackson 2000).

In any case, the Kosovo intervention brought a dilemma to the fore. NATO responded to a situation of grave danger for civilian populations, but, due to the opposition of Russia and China, it was unable to get UN Security Council authorization for its action (Johnstone 2003). The finding of a commission of inquiry got to the heart of the problem. It qualified NATO’s intervention as “illegal but legitimate” (Independent International Commission on Kosovo 2000, 4). The discrepancy between a morally justified but legally questionable course of action created a significant impasse for the UN.³ In response, the Canadian government established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) and tasked it to clarify the scope of humanitarian intervention (Johnstone 2011, 71). Composed of a diverse mix of scholars and politicians,⁴ the ICISS published its final report in December 2001. It proposed a new doctrine to resolve the dilemma: the Responsibility to Protect. R2P’s core premise is “that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe … but when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states” (ICISS 2001, viii).

R2P remained faithful to the core idea of humanitarian intervention to determine permissibility for the use of force based on the well-known criteria of the just war doctrine (ICISS 2001, xii–xiii). However, it re-conceptualized the doctrine in two ways. First, R2P redefined the relationship between humanitarian intervention and sovereignty in terms of complementarity rather than antagonism. Thus, the ICISS referred to Deng et al.’s (1996) idea of “sovereignty as responsibility,” according to which states have a duty to shield their citizens from massive abuses (Cohen 2012). Only when states are unable or unwilling to fulfill this obligation does the onus of protection fall on international actors—a transfer of responsibility that, according to the ICISS, safeguards a country’s sovereignty, rather than undermining it.⁵ The second innovation of R2P is that it embedded atrocity prevention in a broader framework to protect vulnerable populations. Thus, R2P proposed a broad range of diplomatic, political, economic, and security measures to prevent conflict, to react when it breaks out, and to rebuild communities in its aftermath (Evans 2008b). In this context, the use of military force is an option of last resort (Arbour 2008).

These innovations intended to differentiate R2P from the controversial idea of humanitarian intervention. The success of this strategy was demonstrated by states’ unanimous endorsement of R2P at the 2005 World Summit. Yet, to reach this level of consensus, a refinement and clarification of R2P was necessary, attenuating some of the more controversial aspects of the ICISS’s proposition (Bellamy 2006; Strauss 2009). Whereas the ICISS emphasized protection in a broad range of situations ranging from civil war, insurgency, and state collapse, the scope of R2P in the World Summit Outcome Document was reduced to four specific atrocity crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing (Scheffer 2008). The Outcome Document also raised the bar for international intervention, clarifying that protection is the primary responsibility of states and that R2P only applies when a government is “manifestly failing” to protect its population (United Nations 2005, para 139). Finally, the Outcome Document made it clear that coercive measures under R2P required UN Security Council approval (Welsh 2013, 376). This differed from the ICISS’s proposition. It had suggested that if the Council would reject a proposal meeting the criteria for an R2P intervention, military action could be taken “by regional or sub-regional organizations under Chapter VIII of the Charter, subject to their seeking subsequent authorization from the Security Council” (ICISS 2001, xiii).

In 2008, UN Secretary-General (UNSG) Ban Ki-moon appointed Columbia University professor Edward Luck as his special adviser on R2P and, the following year, presented a report to the UN General Assembly. Drafted by Luck, the report confirmed the relatively narrow scope of R2P, based on the four crimes set out in the Outcome Document, and outlined a broad range of measures to implement R2P, with an emphasis on prevention and international assistance (United Nations 2009). Luck’s “narrow, but deep” approach (Bellamy 2010, 146) proposed to operationalize R2P across three pillars. The first outlined the state’s protection responsibilities for populations in its care. The second focused on international assistance to strengthen a state’s capacity to offer protection. The third pillar focused on “timely and decisive response” if states failed to protect populations against atrocity crimes. The last pillar proposed mostly non-military measures, but also noted that “no strategy for fulfilling the responsibility to protect would be complete without the possibility of collective enforcement measures, including through sanctions and coercive military action in extreme cases” (United Nations 2009, para 56).

One such case emerged in Libya in early 2011 after protests broke out against the government of Muammar Gaddafi. When the government threatened to use mass violence against protesters in the city of Benghazi, the UN Security Council authorized the use of force to protect civilians. Therefore, “the UN mandated, for the first time in its history, military intervention in a sovereign state against the express will of that state’s government” (Morris 2013, 1271). A coalition led by France, the UK, and the US started an airborne military operation, quickly rolling back Gaddafi’s forces and preventing them from taking over Benghazi. In the words of ICISS co-chair Gareth Evans, the Libya intervention “seemed at the outset a textbook example of R2P working as it was supposed to.”⁶ However, the military campaign did not stop there, but continued in support of the Benghazi-based rebels until they had toppled the Gadhafi government. This drew strong criticism from emerging powers, in particular Russia and China, and accusations that the coalition had exceeded its mandate (Thakur 2013). These countries “were appalled by what they saw as the abuse of the humanitarian argument of protecting civilians for the political goal of regime change” (Brockmeier et al. 2016, 121).

As a result, Russia and China became highly reluctant about authorizing coercive action for humanitarian protection purposes—a factor that contributed to the UN Security Council’s timid response to the war in Syria (Morris 2013). The Libya controversy also shaped the debate about R2P. In November 2011, Brazil proposed a concept called Responsibility while Protecting (RwP) to address what many countries perceived as a flawed implementation of R2P in Libya (Kenkel 2012). The Brazilian proposal called for a stronger emphasis on preventive diplomacy and other non-coercive measures, clearer criteria for the use of force under R2P, and an increase in the accountability of intervening countries vis-à-vis the Security Council (United Nations 2011). According to Tourinho et al. (2016, 138), RwP helped de-polarize the debate about R2P in the aftermath of Libya, giving skeptics an outlet to voice concerns without attacking the R2P principle itself.

While Libya-type interventions have not occurred since, efforts to institutionalize R2P have advanced, in particular within the UN system. The function of the UNSG’s special adviser has been formalized, and the UN General Assembly discusses the topic annually. By 2018, the Security Council had reaffirmed the R2P principle in its entirety four times and referred to it over 60 times in resolutions. More than 60 governments established national R2P focal points and several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to R2P advocacy emerged (Bellamy and Luck 2018). Therefore, according to scholar and former UNSG special adviser on R2P Jennifer Welsh (2013, 378), “R2P became part of the world’s diplomatic language.” Crossley (2018, 415–16) likewise found “it is no longer possible to discuss atrocity prevention and intervention on humanitarian grounds without reference to the principle or without terminology associated with R2P jargon.”

Four debates about R2P …

Despite its proliferation, different aspects of the R2P doctrine and its implementation in specific cases have remained subject to debate (Welsh 2013). At the same time, R2P has become the subject of a growing body of literature, including countless publications, research projects, a dedicated journal, a book series, and two handbooks.⁷ Scholars covered new ground, looking at the various political, legal, and ethical aspects of R2P, and providing new empirical analyses. They also participated in the debate, sometimes re-producing and sometimes shaping political discussions about R2P (Crossley 2018). The following section highlights four debates in particular.

The first debate concerns the criticism that R2P constitutes a Trojan horse (Bellamy 2005) aimed at justifying neo-colonial interventions by the world’s most powerful states. Thus, Mamdani (2009, 300) dismissed R2P as “a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.” One reason for this is that R2P allows “for the legal normalization of certain types of violence (such as Western counterinsurgency efforts), while arbitrarily criminalizing the violence of other states as ‘genocide’ ” (Mamdani 2010, 53). In the words of Chandler (2004, 60),

Opponents of intervention, mainly non-Western states, have been skeptical of the grounds for privileging a moral justification for interventionist practices and have expressed concern that this shift could undermine their rights of sovereignty and possibly usher in a more coercive, Western-dominated, international order.

This argument received a boost when the US used humanitarian arguments to justify the 2003 war in Iraq, fostering the perception that R2P works as a “smokescreen for bullies” on the world stage (Weiss 2004, 142).

Countering the Trojan horse critique, Bellamy (2014, Chapter 6) argued that R2P has inbuilt checks and balances in the form of specific criteria and a high threshold for intervention. These criteria help to safeguard against big power interventionism, rather than fostering it (Evans 2008b). Looking at the empirical record since the 1990s, other scholars likewise argued that there were no indications that big powers had an appetite for imperialism and use R2P for this purpose (Goodman 2006; Peters 2009, 532).

A second related debate revolves around a critique that R2P subverts international law. For pluralist scholars, the idea of sovereign equality—the recognition that all states are equal subjects in international law—and the associated principles of non-intervention and domestic jurisdiction—the idea that interference in the internal affairs of a state is impermissible—constitute a wall of protection for small states against hegemonic interventions (Kirsch 2005). According to Cohen (2004, 3), by replacing existing international law grounded in sovereign equality with the cosmopolitan order that R2P artic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Darfur and the responsibility to protect
• 1 Understanding R2P: saving strangers in a messy world
• 2 Activating R2P: the social construction of Darfur as a test case for saving strangers
• 3 Implementing R2P: the international response to the Darfur conflict
• 4 Appropriating R2P: the ramifications of saving strangers on the Darfur opposition
• 5 Defying R2P: Sudanese government reactions to the international push to save strangers in Darfur
• 6 Deactivating R2P: the deconstruction of Darfur as a case for saving strangers
• Conclusion: lessons from Darfur as a test case for saving strangers
• Index