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Notes
1 This extends and develops reflections presented elsewhere. See Hobson (Citation2016; Citation2017); Davies and Hobson (Citation2023), as well as writing on my Substack: https://imperfectnotes.substack.com/
2 This is Slavoj Žižek’s (Citation2010) paraphrasing of Antonio Gramsci’s much quoted, ‘in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.
3 See Mastroianni (Citation2022) for the costs that come with the peer review model.
4 Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer (Citation1985, 124) explain the psychology of sunk cost: ‘This effect is manifested in a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. The prior investment, which is motivating the present decision to continue, does so despite the fact that it objectively should not influence the decision.’
5 These conditions have led to difficult discussions in related fields, such as a forum in the Journal of Genocide Research (2024) on ‘Israel-Palestine: Atrocity Crimes and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies’, an example of the kind of engagement that Moses (Citation2024) argues has been largely absent in relation to R2P.
6 ‘The current state of affairs gives reason to question whether R2P as a concept can be revived. The cost of not doing so, however, is too high – states must step up.’ (Jacob Citation2023).
7 James Pattison’s (Citation2021) article on what a post-liberal order might mean for R2P is carefully cited and suitably theorised, but offers no great revelations by concluding, ‘in sum, the post-liberal order could be severely detrimental to the R2P’s international responsibility to protect’ (Pattison Citation2021, 901). More interesting are Thomas Peak’s (Citation2023) explorations of whether such conditions might lead to genocide prevention motivated by a logic of realpolitik. Teitt (Citation2024) also points to Jason Ralph’s (Citation2023) work within a wider context of developing pragmatic constructivism in reference to other major security challenges such as nuclear weapons and climate change. Another valuable avenue of scholarship is returning to the direct aversion for suffering found in humanitarianism by directly engaging with pacifism. On this see Dexter (Citation2019) and Moses (Citation2020).
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Christopher Hobson
Christopher Hobson is an Associate Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and holds positions as a Visiting Associate Professor in the College of Global Liberal Arts, Ritsumeikan University.