R2P in Uncertainty: A Response to Hobson

Christopher Hobson (2022), echoed by Aidan Hehir (2024) in this forum, levelled a fairly broadsided critique of the ‘moral untouchability’ of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The gist of this proposition is that the epistemic community that supports R2P equates the unimpeachable goals of the norm with the virtue of the norm itself, and thereby delegitimizes and disavows criticism in a debate that is cast as either ‘for R2P’ or ‘for mass atrocities’. Hobson touches on some well-grounded criticism, but his overarching conclusions do not comport with my observations or experience.

To me, the purported ‘moral untouchability’ of R2P seems more like good faith disagreement on what can and should be done to prevent and stop civilian slaughter. Indeed, the primary point of contention between prominent critics (e.g. Hehir, Cunliffe) and some of R2P’s most notable academic supporters (e.g. Bellamy, Ralph, Welsh) is, borrowing from Martti Koskenniemi’s (2006) famous framing of international law, between ‘apology and utopia’. R2P supporters appreciate the limitations of the doctrine, but view stronger, more enforceable, or more radical measures as utopian aspirations too divorced from the reality of global politics to forestall atrocities. As Gareth Evans (2015) has argued, ‘R2P was designed for pragmatists rather than purists … It was designed not to create new legal rules but rather a compelling new sense of moral and political obligation to apply existing ones’.

On the other hand, sceptics and critics, including feminist and post-colonial scholars, largely see R2P as too apologetic – little more than a morally charged expression of the status quo and beholden to powerful states and interests. How has R2P’s so-called pragmatism helped prompt more determined and effective action to stop the brutal bombings in Gaza, the bloody siege of Aleppo, massacres in Bucha and Darfur, persecution in Xinjiang, or the mass expulsion of the Rohingya of Rakhine state and the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh? What protection was there for civilians in Bahrain, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia? Rather than achieving its aim of reconciling the ‘competing impulses of human solidarity and political pluralism’ (Ralph 2018, 175), a common refrain among sceptics and critics is that R2P, and the scholarly community that supports it, has glossed over deep normative and political fissures in international society and championed a misplaced notion that global powers will prioritise atrocity prevention over their allies and interests. With ‘only an imagined constituency beyond activists and advocates’ (Hopgood 2015, 141), critics maintain that R2P is little more than ‘a partisan political doctrine that masquerades as a universal moral norm’ (Moses 2024, in this forum), and fault it for raising ‘completely outlandish expectations’ that are ‘not possible in the world as it actually exists’(Rieff 2018).

Hobson’s main contention is that, for ‘pro-R2P’ scholars, such criticism is not hearable and not heard. He takes issue, in particular, with the supposed dogged unwillingness of supporters to re-evaluate R2P in the aftermath of the Libya intervention by dismissing its failings as a problem of execution rather than doctrine. While Hobson makes a valid point about the rhetoric, the substance of his point is much weaker. Even some of the most vocal proponents of R2P were chastened by and tried to reckon with the awful political and humanitarian fallout. There is disagreement, however, on what such a reckoning should entail.

Hobson contends that the adverse impacts of the Libya intervention are proof of R2P’s irredeemable flaws. Gareth Evans (like Illingworth 2024, in this forum) has recognised R2P’s flaws, but ultimately sees R2P as salvageable and worth saving, precisely because of its capacity to evolve and change (as it did from 2001 to 2005, and again from 2009, and has and must again). Evans has called for, for example, greater support for proposals such as Brazil’s ‘Responsibility while Protecting’ initiative to improve oversight and accountability of UN Security Council protection mandates and to help bridge political cleavages. In the aftermath of the Libya intervention, the more mainstream view among R2P supporters, and the atrocity prevention field more broadly, aligns with Lawrence Woocher’s (2023) argument that the key challenge going forward is ‘to forge atrocity prevention strategies that do not rely on the threat or use of force’. Military intervention may sometimes be necessary but is both the least likely and least desirable emergency response: it is too costly and politically divisive, causes collateral harm and unintended consequences (criticism shared by Hobson), and is a blunt tool that reduces ‘complex crises in simplistic and militaristic terms’ (Morris 2013; Pattison 2018, 226).

Hobson’s most poignant, if perhaps misguided, criticism is that R2P supporters appear overwhelmingly concerned with the normative status of R2P (judged by the relative volume of constructivist academic publications) rather than the lived experience of mass atrocities. I share this frustration, and happily would never be asked to review another article or PhD narrowly focussed on the health or nature of the R2P norm. But in making this point he brushes aside more interesting, and I would argue more influential in terms of the field’s tenor and direction, R2P scholarship that tries to grapple with failures, backlash, and retreat (e.g. Bellamy 2022; Mennecke and Stensrud 2021; Staunton and Ralph 2020). Scholars have drawn on philosophical pragmatism (Donovan 2021; Gallagher 2021; Ralph 2018; Ralph and Gifkins 2017), non-ideal theory (Glanville and Pattison 2021; Pattison 2018; 2021), and transitional cosmopolitanism (Illingworth 2024) to focus attention more squarely on the dilemmas, practical impact, relevance, and efficacy of the R2P norm. This R2P scholarship echoes themes in the recent debate on the ‘pragmatic turn’ in peacekeeping and peacebuilding and shares its concern with what to ‘practically do while taking into account key critiques’ (Dunton, Laurence, and Vlavonou 2023, 219).

A notable example is Jason Ralph’s (formerly the director of the European Center for R2P at the University of Leeds) ‘pragmatic constructivist ethics’, which holds that a norm’s merit should be judged by the extent that it is able to ‘prompt practice that effectively ameliorates the lived social problem’ it is intended to address (2018, 188). At its most basic, Ralph’s argument is that R2P is not an ‘absolute value’ but a ‘hypothesis’ about how best to ‘protect populations from inhuman acts in a pluralist society of states’ (2018, 175, 188). Ralph frames R2P, and any response under it, as no better or more legitimate than that which is most likely to offer threatened civilians some succour. The appropriate course of action under the international responsibility to protect (e.g. sanctions, embargoes, incentives, asylum, assistance, peace efforts) should be determined by judging the likely impact on imperilled populations against the likelihood of ‘creating new unmanageable problems’ in international society (Ralph 2018, 196). Ralph’s emphasis on humility, fallibility, reflexivity, and learning in implementing R2P resonates with Hobson’s (2016) previous writing on the subject – though Ralph takes guidance from philosophical pragmatism, and Hobson from Reinhold Niebuhr’s strand of classical realism.

The point being, many of the academic supporters of R2P do so with a conviction that is no less shakeable than it is staunch – viewing R2P as a norm that can and must be moulded and informed by failure and criticism, and that is answerable to the lives lost by action taken and not taken in Libya, Syria, Myanmar, Gaza, and elsewhere. This is seen as well, for example, in the work of Outi Donovan (2021; 2023), formerly a senior research fellow at the European Center for R2P, who has argued that the Libya intervention evinces how efforts to implement R2P must be more critically attuned to the impact of ‘protection’ interventions on local populations and to the ‘responsibility to rebuild’. (Quite the opposite, Hobson criticises R2P supporters for a lack of concern for the impact of the 2011 intervention on Libyans, and points to Donovan’s work as an example of centreing the lived experiences of people harmed and made vulnerable by intervention).

With more reservations and less self-serving interests than Hobson ascribes to them, some scholars see reasons to preserve R2P despite its shortcomings. At the 2005 World Summit and in numerous settings since then, states from both the Global North and Global South, from different creeds and cultures, have affirmed that the international community, through the United Nations, has a responsibility to help to protect populations from genocide and mass atrocities. Scholars working on R2P have recognised this consensus as both ground-breaking and limited. It is the first formal and most universal endorsement of an international protection responsibility that expands beyond existing state obligations. At the same time, its UN endorsement shifted R2P’s meaning away from the ‘coercive solidarism’ its architects envisioned to less interventionist, more sovereignty-deferential ‘consensual solidarism’ (Hurrell 2007; Murthy and Kurtz 2016, 40). There is little argument that the consensus on R2P is thin, its ambitions more modest, and that R2P’s capacity to galvanise great powers to decisively confront state violence has been wildly overstated. However, supporters see this not as reason to abandon the common aspiration R2P has articulated, but to ‘manage expectations’ about R2P’s ‘limitations and possibilities’ (Gallagher 2015, 272). They see its upsides in helping to consolidate and give expression to a belief that the international community, through the UN Security Council, ought to take action to inhibit atrocities. It is this imperative that makes the Security Council’s paralysis in atrocity situations so troubling, and that has mobilised other UN bodies such as the General Assembly, International Court of Justice, and Human Rights Council to carve out new and innovative atrocity response roles ‘to create alternatives to an untenable status quo’ (D’Alessandra and Whidden 2023).

In a recent online symposium on ‘The Future of Atrocity Prevention’, Lawrence Woocher, research director at the Simon-Skjodt Centre for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, offered a thoughtful reflection on the disconnect between remarkable advancements in US atrocity prevention policy and the ‘stubborn persistence’ of atrocities worldwide. His sense of ‘what went wrong’ resonates with ‘insider’ assessments of R2P: the preoccupation with military intervention was misguided; the global context is more challenging, due to, among other factors, great power antagonism, an uptick in armed conflicts, resurgent nationalism, and the spread of exclusionary ideologies; decisionmakers have not prioritised atrocity prevention despite their rhetorical commitment; and there is a persistent but ‘largely neglected’ problem of identifying which particular actions or measures will work to effectively avert atrocities in any given situation. For Woocher (2023), the way forward is ‘adapting to greater uncertainty and constraints’.

R2P scholarship is already moving in this direction – asking what implementing R2P in a post-liberal order might look like (Pattison 2021), urging greater humility, learning, and adaptability in implementing R2P (Ralph 2023), and imagining new meanings of R2P that continue ‘to emphasize individuals’ right to be protected’ but avoid ‘the spectre of hierarchy and external enforcement’ that is a source of contestation and backlash (Welsh 2013, 395; 2016). Yet, it is also true that, even if the focus on military intervention is overstated, many R2P advocates routinely call for a similar set of Pillar 3 emergency response measures (e.g. sanctions, naming and shaming, embargoes, and international criminal proceedings) despite quite limited evidence of their efficacy and intended impact (see ‘Tools for Atrocity Prevention’ n.d.). If R2P has a future, its supporters recognise that they must address rather than downplay uncertainties and constraints, and offer a better response to criticism that the principled rigidity of R2P is, at least partly, responsible for the mismatch between what is advocated for and what works ( Brenner et al. 2015; Conley-Zilkic and de Waal 2014; de Waal, Meierhenrigh, and Conley-Zilkic 2012). At the same time, a key challenge in R2P’s ‘pragmatic turn’ is avoiding what Alex Bellamy (2018) labels the ‘false promise of fatalism’, where the immediate imperative to accept deals with the devil, trade-offs, and dilemmas undermines R2P’s broader normative project of compelling collective international action to confront atrocities.

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Sarah Teitt

Dr Sarah Teitt is an Australian Research Council DECRA Senior Research Fellow and the Deputy Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.