Communication, reflexivity and harm principle: what might an ideal speech situation look like in responsibility to protect?

ABSTRACT

Previous accounts of International Relations research have extensively focused on deontological ethics in analysing Responsibility to Protect (R2P). At the same time, discourse ethics – along with Jürgen Habermas’ theory of ideal speech situation – has been overlooked. This article argues that the R2P process has gradually moved toward the Habermasian ideal speech situation. The Habermasian approach also provides a useful theoretical framework to understand the new, more inclusive and critical, forums of communication and initiatives set in motion by emerging non-Western norm-entrepreneurs in the R2P process, notably the Responsibility while Protecting (RwP) initiated by Brazil in 2011. From the perspective of discourse ethics, RwP could be understood as a cosmopolitan harm principle designed to manage the potentially harmful side-effects of the application of R2P. The article further argues that, despite the current paradigm shift of norm-entrepreneurship on R2P from deontological ethics to discourse ethics, it has thus far only partially fulfilled the criteria of an ideal speech situation.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse ethics
• responsibility to protect
• humanitarian intervention
• ideal speech situation
• communicative action
• cosmopolitan theory
• harm principle

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 R2P has been described as a principle (e.g. by Alex Bellamy), as a norm (e.g. by Gareth Evans) and as an idea (e.g. by Thomas Weiss). See Bellamy (2009, 4–7); Evans (2008, 293); Weiss (2007, 1).

2 The UN Security Council has for decades authorised peace operations to use all necessary means, including the use of force, to protect civilians, including the cases of Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, Liberia and the Côte d’Ivoire. However, in all of these cases the peace operations received the consent of the host state despite their authorisation under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. See Bellamy and Williams (2011, 825); Bellamy (2011b, 263–269).

3 The term ‘norm-entrepreneur’ applied here is derived from Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink’s social constructivist IR account: ‘The characteristic mechanism of the first stage [of a norm’s life cycle], norm emergence, is persuasion by norm entrepreneurs. Norm entrepreneurs attempt to convince a critical mass of states (norm leaders) to embrace new norms’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 895).

4 One of the most significant categorical imperatives outlined by Kant is the requirement that one should act only according to that maxim by which he/she can also will that it would become a universal law.

5 The numbering of the principles of an ideal speech situation here differs from the one applied in Habermas’s original account, but their order remains the same. See Habermas (1990, 87–89).

6 Notes of the author taken at the UN General Assembly’s general debate on R2P organised in New York on 23–28 July 2009.

7 On the distinction between critical theory and problem-solving approach, see Cox (1981, 126–55).