Understanding Humanitarian Protection

Noele Crossley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000547788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Paix et développement mondial

This new textbook provides an introduction to humanitarian protection, a field of study concerned with international responses to armed conflict, political violence, and humanitarian crisis.

The book engages with a wide range of empirical and normative questions, providing an overview of the academic literature whilst simultaneously discussing the policies and practices associated with protective responses to conflict and humanitarian emergencies that put the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable populations, including civilians, refugees, and minority groups, at risk. Divided into three parts, covering the origins of the humanitarian protection regime, the range of actors involved, and the responsibilities of these actors, the book offers an accessible entry point into the major contemporary debates, providing readers with the conceptual tools for understanding core issues. Key points are reinforced and illustrated through the deployment of selected case studies, and a comprehensive glossary is provided for key terms. Each chapter ends with a summary of key points, questions for further reflection, and a list of recommended reading.

This book will be of much interest to students of human protection, humanitarianism, the Responsibility to Protect, human security, peacekeeping, and International Relations in general.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003006671-1

The words ‘response’ and ‘responsibility’ are related, and for good reason. What responsibility do we as individuals, citizens, and members of civil society have towards people affected by armed conflict and political violence? The idea that individuals and states should protect people in other states is not new, but the language of responsibility in this context is a fairly recent development. Historically, even minimal and elemental responses to egregious violations of human rights and dignity were perceived as a discretionary right, rather than a duty. This meant that while states could act if they wanted to, they were under no obligation to do so. The ‘international community’ existed as an idea about a society of states with a shared interest in preventing war, but states did not perceive a collective duty for responding to internal crises threatening human rights. Throughout the Cold War years, the protection of state sovereignty was a chief concern for post-colonial states, and the politics of the Cold War prevented strong multilateralism. And, in the absence of an international humanitarian response infrastructure the likes of which we have witnessed in recent decades, a true norm of humanitarian protection was, quite simply, regarded as unattainable idealism.

Determined and persistent campaigning by a coalition of dedicated advocates, the end of the Cold War, and an increasingly developed humanitarian response network has, however, been successful in bringing about significant change. Ideas about humanitarianism and protective intervention and public perceptions about appropriate international responses to conflict and humanitarian emergency have developed very substantially over time, particularly since the turn of the millennium. Several policy milestones, as we shall see, have been significant in this regard, and while there continues to be disagreement about the distribution of responsibilities and the best means of protection, undoubtedly the idea that there ought to be a response, and that there is a collective Responsibility to Protect, now shapes the way most people think about conflict and the role of international actors.

This chapter prepares the conceptual groundwork for this book, describing the development of the field of humanitarian protection, in substantive and theoretical terms. We will cover some key concepts and terms that will be useful in subsequent chapters and describe a range of methodological approaches used in the field. The field, as we shall see, draws on a range of traditions, and a wide range of questions can be addressed, including empirical questions that seek to use observation for explanation (e.g. ‘Why does conflict happen?’ or ‘Why are some responses more successful than others?’) and normative questions that seek to distinguish between good, and bad (such as, ‘Is a system of sovereign states a good thing?’ and ‘Is it better if states share protection responsibilities?’). Throughout the course of this book, you will become familiar with a wide range of such questions, in many cases, addressing very specific problems, in a very detailed, systematic kind of way. In what follows below, we will explore the academic traditions out of which these questions have emerged, and some key terminology.

Humanitarian Protection as a Field of Study

How do international actors respond to conflict and political crises that put the lives of innocents at risk? Humanitarian protection as a field of study describes protective responses by third parties and engages with both empirical and normative questions about the policies and practices associated with protective responses to conflict and humanitarian emergencies that put the lives and livelihoods of vulnerable populations, including civilians in armed conflict, refugees and displaced people, and minority groups, at risk. ‘Humanitarian protection’ as a field of study encompasses several academic sub-fields, surveying the origins of ideas, the roles and responsibilities of protection agents (including states but also humanitarian organisation and other non-state actors), and the efficacy and legitimacy of protection practices. To begin with, it makes sense to survey a range of definitions of terms that are related, but that do have distinct meanings that are also politically salient. Humanitarian protection as a field of study thus is the product of thinking originating from several issue areas.

One of the strands out thinking that informs humanitarian protection as a field of study is the scholarly literature on ‘humanitarian intervention’, itself originating from the policy and practitioner debates on the legitimacy of multilateral and unilateral interventions of the 1990s (see Box 1.1). ‘Humanitarian intervention’ emerged during the Cold War, when interventions into internal armed conflicts increased. After the end of the Cold War, intervention became a common practice. The end of the Cold War allowed for greater international cooperation on humanitarian crises.

Box 1.1 Humanitarian Intervention

Humanitarian intervention emerged as a concept throughout the Cold War, where, despite the patronage of either the United States, or the Soviet Union, humanitarian justifications for third-party interventions in civil war became more frequent, until they became commonplace after the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War brought an end to Security Council deadlock and with it the opportunity for genuinely multilateral responses to conflict and humanitarian crisis. However, the fact that the UNAMIDUN Security Council could now act did not mean that states agreed on coordinated policies in every crisis situation. For example, in the case of Kosovo, although there were compelling reasons for decisive action on humanitarian grounds, international responses were not coordinated through the UN. Instead, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervened unilaterally – still, however, invoking humanitarian justifications and in this context, Tony Blair articulated a ‘doctrine of the international community’, which suggested that unilateral intervention, in the face of conscience-shocking crimes could be legitimate. In sum, therefore, humanitarian intervention can be defined as the use of force by a state, or by a coalition of states, with the intention of preventing, or responding to, humanitarian crisis.

‘Human security’ which was first mentioned in the 1992 report of the UN Secretary-General, ‘An Advocacy’, and referred to again in the UNDP reports of 1993 and 1994. ‘Human security’ promoted an approach to security that focused on the security of the individual and communities, rather than states. The push represented the interests of states of the Global South, for whom the traditional emphasis on civil and political rights did not go far enough in providing the conceptual requisites for policy-making geared at addressing the causes of insecurity in their entirety – causes spanning not just the insecurity deriving from civil conflict and state repression, but also from the structural violence and deprivation caused by global inequality and fewer opportunities for developing states to enjoy the benefits of global trade. In the world of academe, a whole new research agenda on the causes and consequences of human insecurity subsequently emerged. This new research agenda changed the field dramatically in that it promoted a departure from state-centric accounts of security, and a more comprehensive understanding of the meaning of security not limited merely to survival but also expanded to include access to opportunity, and all of those factors required for individual and communal flourishing. ‘Human security’ can thus be defined as the study of tcoordinated through the UN. In he causes and consequences of insecurity of individuals and the communities upon which individuals’ livelihoods depend, in the context of political and economic volatility.

The protection of civilians, in contrast, is a term associated with UN peacekeeping. It is a staple of common vocabulary in UN resolutions, reports, and national foreign policy documents. Civilians are the object of protection, which therefore presupposes a distinction between combatants on the one hand, and non-combatants on the other. This is because the term is used to denote the actions that states and peacekeepers authorised by the UN take to protect non-combatants – civilians – affected by political violence. As such, the concept is embedded in a broader regime of which international humanitarian law forms an integral part. International humanitarian law distinguishes between combatants and non-combatants – the protection of civilians builds on this distinction, permitting the UN, through peacekeeping missions, to intervene to protect individuals not engaged in armed hostilities.

Several big debates characterise the field of humanitarian protection. First, questions that are drawn from International Relations theory. Realist thinkers argue that states as key actors will only act where it is in their interest to do so, while liberal thinkers argue that institutions – the UN, and other collective security arrangements – can and do make a difference. Second, the field of humanitarian protection is characterised by questions that are drawn from political theory. What role should military intervention play in protecting vulnerable populations? While some thinkers are sceptical about the use of force in pursuit of humanitarian objectives, others argue that military intervention may be justified if other measures are unlikely to succeed. Third, a set of questions about the extent to which ideas and values and emerging norms of protection can compel and constrain states and other actors to respond reliably, and in ways that are in line with some key principles and rules underpinning the protection regime. Finally, a range of critical perspectives have discussed the extent to which the regime, like regimes in other fields, reflects unequal power relations, reproducing, and potentially reinforcing, the structures and practices that weaken developing states, empower protectors at the expense of the protectee, and marginalise the role of women. While these debates have been dynamic and have served to move thinking about these questions forward in productive ways, many of these questions are perennial and characterise the field. While the idea that sovereignty entails specific non-negotiable responsibilities and that the international community has a responsibility, at the very least, to assist states in meeting their primary protection responsibility has grown in influence, the precise conditions under which the principle of sovereignty cedes to an international responsibility to protect (see Box 1.2) are still unclear.¹

Box 1.2 The Responsibility to Protect

The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ is a term coined in a report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), published in 2001. The express objective of the Commission had been to forge an international consensus about how harm to vulnerable populations in conflict could be prevented or mitigated without, however, promoting interventionist norms threatening to undermine state sovereignty – a norm highly valued by many peoples subjected to colonial repression. The Commission developed a formula, ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ that sought to overco...