CIAO DATE: 09/2011
Volume: 25, Issue: 3
Fall 2011
Introduction (PDF)
James Pattison
The NATO-led intervention in Libya, Operation Unified Protector, is noteworthy for two central reasons. First, it is the first instance in over a decade of what Andrew Cottey calls "classical humanitarian intervention"— that is, humanitarian intervention that lacks the consent of the government of the target state, has a significant military and forcible element, and is undertaken by Western states.Not since the NATO intervention in 1999 to protect the Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing has there been such an intervention. To be sure, since 2000 there have been some robust peace operations that fall in the gray area between classical humanitarian intervention and first-generation peacekeeping (such as MONUC, the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo). But, even if these operations were to some extent forcible, they had the consent of the government of the target state. Second, this is the first (classical) humanitarian intervention since the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect, and the agreement among states at the 2005 UN World Summit that there exists a responsibility to protect (RtoP).
Civilian Protection in Libya: Putting Coercion and Controversy Back into RtoP (PDF)
Jennifer Welsh
It is unclear how the crisis in Libya—and NATO's ongoing aerial campaign—will affect the fortunes and trajectory of the principle of the responsibility to protect (RtoP). There is much wisdom in Thomas Weiss's statement that today "the main challenge facing the responsibility to protect is how to act, not how to build normative consensus." As I will suggest later, there have been costs to the current secretary-general's diplomatic strategy for building support for RtoP, which has placed great emphasis on so-called root-cause prevention and state capacity building. At the same time, it would be too rash to conclude that the Libyan case ends the debate over RtoP's status, meaning, and strength in contemporary international society. Indeed, the very fact that Resolution 1973 mentions only the "responsibility of the Libyan authorities to protect the Libyan population" and not the responsibility of the international community suggests that the latter notion was still contested by some members of the Security Council as an appropriate rationale for military action.
Libya and the Responsibility to Protect: The Exception and the Norm (PDF)
Alex J. Bellamy
The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) played an important role in shaping the world's response to actual and threatened atrocities in Libya. Not least, the adoption of Resolution 1973 by the UN Security Council on May 17, 2011, approving a no-fly zone over Libya and calling for "all necessary measures" to protect civilians, reflected a change in the Council’s attitude toward the use of force for human protection purposes; and the role played by the UN's new Joint Office on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect points toward the potential for this new capacity to identify threats of mass atrocities and to focus the UN's attention on preventing them. Given the reluctance of both the Security Council and the wider UN membership even to discuss RtoP in the years immediately following the 2005 World Summit—the High-level Plenary Meeting of the 60th Session of the General Assembly that gave birth to RtoP— these two facts suggest that significant progress has been made thanks to the astute stewardship of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is personally committed to the principle. Where it was once a term of art employed by a handful of likeminded countries, activists, and scholars, but regarded with suspicion by much of the rest of the world, RtoP has become a commonly accepted frame of reference for preventing and responding to mass atrocities.
The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention in Libya (PDF)
James Pattison
Wars and interventions bring to the fore certain ethical issues. For instance, NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 raised questions about the moral import of UN Security Council authorization (given that the Council did not authorize the action), and the means employed by interveners (given NATO's use of cluster bombs and its targeting of dual-use facilities). In what follows, I consider the moral permissibility of the NATO-led intervention in Libya and suggest that this particular intervention highlights three issues for the ethics of humanitarian intervention in general. The first issue is whether standard accounts of the ethics of humanitarian intervention, which draw heavily on just war theory, can capture the prospect of mission creep. The second issue is whether epistemic difficulties in assessing the intervention's likely long-term success mean that we should reject consequentialist approaches to humanitarian intervention. The third issue concerns selectivity. I outline an often overlooked way that selectivity can be problematic for humanitarian intervention.
Simon Chesterman
Humanitarian intervention has always been more popular in theory than in practice. In the face of unspeakable acts, the desire to do something, anything, is understandable. States have tended to be reluctant to act on such desires, however, leading to the present situation in which there are scores of books and countless articles articulating the contours of a right—or even an obligation—of humanitarian intervention, while the number of cases that might be cited as models of what is being advocated can be counted on one hand. So is Libya such a case? It depends on why one thinks that precedent is important. From an international legal perspective, debates have tended to focus on whether one or more states have the right to intervene in another for human protection purposes. From the standpoint of international relations and domestic politics, the question is whether states have the will to intervene. From a military angle, a key dilemma is whether states have the ability to intervene effectively. This essay considers these three issues in turn. The legal significance of Libya is minimal, though the international response does show how the politics of humanitarian intervention has shifted to the point where it is harder to do nothing in the face of atrocities. At the same time, however, military action to the end of May 2011 suggested a continuing disjunction between ends and means.
RtoP Alive and Well after Libya (PDF)
Thomas G. Weiss
With the exception of Raphael Lemkin's efforts on behalf of the 1948 Genocide Convention, no idea has moved faster in the international normative arena than "the responsibility to protect" (RtoP), which was formulated in 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Friends and foes have pointed to the commission's conceptual contribution to reframing sovereignty as contingent rather than absolute, and to establishing a framework for forestalling or stopping mass atrocities via a three-pronged responsibility—to prevent, to react, and to rebuild. But until the international military action against Libya in March 2011, the sharp end of the RtoP stick—the use of military force—had been replaced by evasiveness and skittishness from diplomats, scholars, and policy analysts.