Why has the world retreated from humanitarian intervention?

In the aftermath of mass atrocities such as the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, the U.N. General Assembly approved the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P, in 2005 — an idea endorsed as a guiding principle by the U.N. Security Council a year later.

R2P “clearly states that the international community has a fundamental obligation to protect civilians from harm when nation-states and their governments are either unable or unwilling to do so,” says Michael Butler, a political scientist at Clark who focuses on security studies, conflict management and resolution, and foreign policy.

“For that reason, it is enormously significant, reflecting a sea-change in the relationship between states and their citizens, and in the norms of international society governing that relationship,” Butler explains. “At base, R2P tells us that with sovereignty comes responsibility and, by extension, that governments do not have free rein to harm civilians or to ignore their needs.”

But R2P has been widely declared a failure; it has not lived up to expectations that it would prevent mass atrocities, he says. Take the Syrian civil war, for example, where hundreds of thousands of civilians died, many at the hands of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Butler, associate professor and chair of Clark’s Political Science Department, wanted to know why R2P hasn’t worked and how it might be reinvigorated. His research led to his sixth  and most recently published book, Reconstructing the Responsibility to Protect From Humanitarian Intervention to Human Security.

In a recent interview, Butler delved into the current status of R2P, which he describes as a “political and quasi-legal doctrine,” and its possible future.

Why did you write this book?

At the outset, my motivation was really to carry out a post-mortem of R2P, being convinced at the time of its complete failure. The Syrian civil war was really seismic for me in that regard.  Seeing the scale of human suffering and the prevalence of mass atrocity events being carried out with impunity while we had this shiny new thing that world leaders and diplomats and academics had been congratulating themselves for was something I couldn’t stop thinking about. What good is it if no one will use it? Having been deeply attuned to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia a decade earlier — which actually helped spawn R2P — only to watch the same thing play out yet again in Syria was beyond tragic. And infuriating.

Who is the book for, and what would you like readers to take away?

I’d like to think this book is for anyone who has a problem with the intentional imposition of widespread human suffering and would like to know more about the machinery we have to stop it, and beyond that, why that machinery doesn’t get used. I’d like readers to understand that the persistence and prevalence of mass atrocities today is a conscious choice by some states and their leaders to defy the principle of civilian protection which they themselves endorsed fairly recently. I’d also like readers to appreciate that this defiance is both a strategic move as well as a repudiation of an emerging norm of human security. And, finally, to recognize that this machinery still exists.  

Where, when, and how has R2P been applied?

This is a great question, since it is important to recognize that R2P is not just an idea ; it has, in fact, been invoked on a few occasions. Early on, there were some trial runs, for instance around election-related violence in Kenya in 2007-2008. But from an application standpoint, it all begins and ends with Libya. That’s a long and sordid story, but the short version is that R2P was used to justify NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war through U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 in March 2011, on the grounds of civilian protection. This contributed directly to regime change in Libya while having minimal impact from a civilian protection standpoint. There were a number of powerful states at the time, including China and Russia, who had already grown sour on R2P as a tool of what they considered Western liberal imperialism, and Libya proved to be a bridge too far in that regard. It is fairly easy to draw a direction connection from R2P’s use in Libya to its non-use in Syria, and really to its stagnation ever since.

Are there examples where R2P could, or should, have been applied, and was not?

I already alluded to Syria, which was just a textbook case, if a complicated one in practice. There were certainly people advocating for it then, though I don’t think they fully appreciated how much damage Libya had done to R2P. And most major powers were consumed with trying to influence the direction and outcome of the Syrian civil war, so civilian protection was not even on their radar. As for other examples, there have been so many, but part of the problem is the lack of any clear threshold or set of criteria to use to decide when and how to act on R2P. Incidentally, that’s not for a lack of trying by R2P’s advocates. In fact, early on, the French foreign minister proposed exactly such a thing, but the U.S. rejected it in favor of keeping things ad-hoc and case-by-case. That pretty much is a recipe for paralysis.

In a recent 360info.org article, you write, “a straight line can be drawn from R2P’s establishment back to the Holocaust and the sentiments of ‘never again’ that inspired the 1948 Genocide Convention and the subsequent resurgence of international humanitarian law.” Can you expound on that?

It might be hard to even imagine right now, but at the time of its endorsement, R2P was considered a watershed moment — a culmination of decades of efforts to make civilian protection and the prevention of mass atrocities obligatory, with the Holocaust inarguably the inspiration. Those efforts were arduous, and the results uneven — as Bosnia, Rwanda, or Darfur, among other horrific  situations, remind us. But R2P’s blueprint — the “Three Pillars” — expressly states that it is the duty of the international community to act to protect human beings if and when individual states are unable or unwilling to do so, or are the cause of their plight. And that certainly includes acting to stop or prevent genocide, ethnic cleaning, and crimes against humanity, as well as rebuilding societies in the aftermath.

In your book, you note that “R2P today is essentially a dead letter.” How has R2P become irrelevant, and why? Which countries have been responsible for this irrelevance?

At the outset, R2P had significant appeal and enjoyed a great deal of traction; clearly that’s no longer true. But I wouldn’t pin its slide into irrelevance — or what I refer to as its stagnation — on any particular state or states, or even on states alone. As with any collective responsibility, the failure to deliver on it is a collective failure. To that point, there’s some culpability here for academics and other proponents who took the early optimism surrounding R2P as a sign that it would seamlessly transform international society and didn’t require constant advocacy and reinforcement.

That being said, one can certainly point to illiberal and authoritarian regimes like Russia or China who threw up constant roadblocks to R2P, and to liberal and democratic states like the U.S., Britain, and France that paid lip service to the principles of R2P, but in practice failed to invoke it when given the opportunity, and declined to support and reinforce it when it was challenged.  One thing that all of these states — and for that matter lots of others — have in common is a desire to retain dominance over security matters, which is something that R2P directly threatened. So really R2P’s unravelling is a consequence of a much bigger contest over whether the security and well-being of individuals actually matters in a political, legal, and even moral sense, or whether states have the uncontested right to coerce and control human beings without limits.

Can you explain what you mean by your book’s subtitle, “From Humanitarian Intervention to Human Security”? In other words, how did humanitarian intervention become entangled with R2P, and should it be?

Humanitarian intervention has a long, complex, and fraught history. R2P entered into that history at a unique point, in the aftermath of the Cold War. This was a “moment” marked both by an interest in remaking the architecture of the international system, and the potential to do so. This was also a period when the international peace and security landscape was changing rapidly, with the proliferation of intra-state conflicts and campaigns of one-sided violence against civilian populations. All of this led to a greater perceived need for humanitarian intervention, and R2P was devised in part as a tool to meet that need.

Paradoxically, it was the close association of R2P with humanitarian intervention that explains both its early success and, later, its stagnation. The need for some mechanism to facilitate humanitarian responses to catastrophic crises created a receptive climate for R2P. Yet, as my analysis reveals, it was this attempt to frame R2P chiefly, even solely, as a “solution” to the problems of humanitarian intervention that shunted R2P back into the same contentious legal debates and political dynamics that had long plagued humanitarian intervention. Doing so undermined the larger potential of R2P to transform global security norms and practices and to reorient them around individuals and human security.

As the U.S. pulls away from international commitments and becomes more isolationist, are there other countries that might step in and embrace R2P or some form of humanitarian intervention?

There are still numerous states that support the principles of R2P as a matter of policy, including Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, to name just a few. But these countries are confronting headwinds in the form of opposition from major military powers as well as the rising tide of authoritarian populism internationally and even domestically.  

With respect to China, there is really nothing to suggest support for anything that one could plausibly recognize as R2P and humanitarianism. And that’s less an indictment of China than it is a recognition of what happens when an attempt at launching a new norm fails, and the society in question reverts to form. After decades of criticizing Western interventions as neo-imperialist, China has completely changed course — but its interventions are entirely motivated by commercial gain and have no concern whatsoever with governance or human rights. That approach is clearly beneficial from the standpoint of Chinese interests — and appealing to many developing countries.

It might be hard to even imagine right now, but at the time of its endorsement, R2P was considered a watershed moment — a culmination of decades of efforts to make civilian protection and the prevention of mass atrocities obligatory, with the Holocaust inarguably the inspiration.

— michael butler

Russia, on the other hand, has advanced highly legalistic and, frankly, absurd arguments that its interventions in places like Ukraine and Georgia were and are humanitarian in nature, drawing on the NATO intervention in Kosovo as a parallel. Other countries, such as Türkiye, seem to be pursuing a blend of the two — seeking to cloak self-interest under the stated guise of humanitarianism, not unlike the U.S. did for many years.

Have Western countries abdicated responsibility for humanitarian intervention? And how might that affect human (and national and international) security?

To be honest, it is hard to say anything definitive about “Western countries” right now. It is also worth mentioning that “pure” humanitarian intervention on the part of the West was never really a thing; the motivation for these interventions were always mixed at best, and the interventions themselves often proved to be problematic and intrusive, particularly when they occurred in developing countries.

That being said, it has been pretty clear for well over a decade now that the appetite for humanitarian intervention on the part of the West isn’t there, and I don’t see that changing. The idea of Western countries acting (or even claiming to act) to stop or prevent human suffering in some far-off land seems almost mythological at this point, particularly since some of them don’t seem all that concerned with the well-being of their own populations.

How will that affect security in practice? Well, from a human security standpoint, the situation is pretty dire. The consolidation of coercive power in the hands of the state gives states and leaders a license to inflict harm on individuals with impunity. This was the dynamic which R2P sought to disrupt, and the chief consequence of its unraveling is a return to that dynamic on an even larger scale. From a national security standpoint, this consolidation is obviously beneficial to the state, allowing for governing regimes to rule over their territory and population however they wish — though this is certainly not the best formula to ensure national security long-term. From an international security standpoint, it looks to me that the scaffolding around civilian protection and mass atrocity prevention has collapsed.

What is the future for R2P?

As I argue in the book, the key to R2P’s future lies in its past. R2P’s architects never intended for it to be solely or entirely a mechanism for justifying humanitarian intervention; that was a shift rooted in political calculations. When it came to alleviating human suffering, from the start R2P identified the need to develop capacities and devote resources to prevention and rebuilding, not just reaction. In this way, R2P has been, and remains, much broader and more ambitious in its scope and objectives than it has been given credit for. Resuscitating R2P requires revisiting its origins and embracing these more expansive and proactive elements of it.

If R2P is to be salvaged, it requires a recalibration of its aims and focus toward promoting human security in the face of ongoing, diffuse, and broad-based threats that states aren’t able or willing to address, such as climate change or pandemic disease. This doesn’t require abandoning the reaction dimension in acute cases of human suffering such as in Gaza or Ukraine. But it does represent a long-overdue course correction that could break the stagnancy around R2P by recalibrating it to address what are broad-based threats to human well-being — threats which outstrip the capacity of states, individually and collectively.

How do your students respond to questions of national and international security these days?

I am finding this a particularly interesting time to teach the courses that I do. We are now well into a second generation of scholars who aren’t afraid to push against the statist/militarist/materialist orthodoxy when it comes to thinking about issues such as security and conflict resolution. We are moving into new terrain, and the field looks like it is slowly but surely catching up to lived experience, and this is something many Clark students appreciate. 

The planetary implications of climate change, the multifaceted threat of pandemic disease, the structural violence of discrimination and injustice, the challenges of identity-based conflict, the pernicious effects of weaponized information — these are now the “stuff” of security studies.  These are things that our students care a lot about, and consequently I find their responses to the topics and questions we grapple with together to be thoughtful and insightful. That gives me hope.