Operationalizing the Responsibility to Protect--the Policekeeping Approach (Global INSIGHTS‪)‬

At the battle of Solferino, Henri Dunant was so appalled by the loss of life that he founded what became the International Red Cross movement to mitigate the most barbaric effects of modern warfare. His concept was that an agreement between states, the Geneva Conventions, could regulate the conduct of combatants along more humane lines. Since then, the transformation from conflict between states to conflict between peoples within states has fundamentally altered the moral and political space within which such initiatives take place. In Srebrenica, Rwanda, and a long list of orphaned conflicts, neutrality has often cost lives rather than saved them. Doing "no harm" has sometimes meant doing nothing at all, whereas aggressive military operations in support of humanitarian objectives in Somalia and Iraq have produced their own conflicts. (1) Understandably, the consensus has increasingly been that if humanitarianism is to retain credibility it must devise better methods to safeguard human security: it needs a third way. To resolve the dilemmas of state failure that emerged in the 1990s, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked for an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Its 2001 report, The Responsibility to Protect, argued that in cases of severe humanitarian emergency, territorial sovereignty would "yield to an international responsibility to protect," including the use of military force to enforce peace. (2) Such a responsibility, however, could not be exercised lightly and was to be accompanied by equal obligations to prevent or react to conflict and to "rebuild" postwar states, a reinvigoration of what Burke described as "the dual mandate" of trusteeship. (3) The Responsibility to Protect represents the most sophisticated attempt at establishing a moral guideline for international action in the face of humanitarian emergency. It predicates legitimate intervention on the welfare of populations subjected to persecution rather than on calculations of national interest and security; it is multilateral in vision and it advocates the UN's role in authorizing intervention and in guiding the path to peace; it warns of the use of force as an option of last resort while endorsing the pragmatic merits of coalitions of the willing and regional security arrangements. It is a practical guideline that, now more than ever, requires our support. However, operationalization of The Responsibility to Protect has been captive to the traditional dual deadlock of establishing a permanent international military capacity and well-founded fears of nonconsensual intervention that could facilitate less salubrious forms of political exploitation. Military aspects of intervention may remain ad hoc and continue to be subcontracted to coalitions of the willing and capable among UN member states. Full-scale transformation of societies through international administration, reconstruction, and security assistance will likely continue to occur selectively in those situations where national interests intersect with international media attention to human rights abuses. Nor for that matter is military intervention a panacea for internal conflicts; diplomatic pressure can produce results if applied judiciously. However, in those cases where the international community does commit to transformation, such as Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq, much could be done to make intervention more effective, and by implication more affordable, thus allowing and perhaps inspiring wider engagement internationally than is currently the case.