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RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT ANDMILITARIZED HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

When and Why the Churches Failed to DiscernMoral Hazardjore_524 308..335

Esther D. Reed

ABSTRACT

This essay addresses moral hazards associated with the emerging doctrineof the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). It reviews the broad acceptance by theVatican and the World Council of Churches of the doctrine between Septem-ber 2003 and September 2008, and attempts to identify grounds for moreadequate investigation of the moral issues arising. Three themes arepursued: how a changing political context is affecting notions of sovereignty;the authority that can approve or refuse the use of force; and pluralfoundations for human rights in a religiously and otherwise plural worldsuch that the human rights protection does not become tyrannical.

KEY WORDS: Responsibility to Protect (R2P), humanitarian aid, use of force,sovereignty, intervention

IN JUNE 1999, United States President Bill Clinton said to Jim Lehrerof the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS):

I think the most important thing is were we right to take a stand in Kosovoagainst ethnic cleansing . . . . We can’t stop every fight like the fight betweenEritrea and Ethiopia and the struggles in Chechnya. But where we can, atan acceptable cost; that is without risking nuclear war or some other terriblething, we ought to prevent the slaughter of innocent civilians and thewholesale uprooting of them because of their race, their ethnic backgroundor the way they worship God. I think that’s an important principle myself.I think it’s a noble thing. I think the United States did a good thing. (Clinton1999)

Two years later, the International Commission on Intervention and StateSovereignty (ICISS), established by the Canadian Government, issuedThe Responsibility to Protect report (ICISS 2001). It addressed thecomplex of legal, moral, operational, and political issues surroundinghumanitarian intervention to prevent inter alia ethnic cleansing andgenocide. Kofi Annan, the then Secretary-General of United Nations,

Esther D. Reed is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics and Director of the Network forReligion in Public Life at the University of Exeter, UK. Esther D. Reed, 7 Canterbury Road,Exeter, Devon, EX4 2EQ, UK, [email protected]

JRE 40.2:308–334. © 2012 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

commented approvingly that its authors wanted to avert these ills byforging consensus around basic questions of principle and process entailedin humanitarian intervention (Annan 2005).

For reasons reviewed below, between September 2003 and September2008, the Vatican and World Council of Churches (WCC) broadly wel-comed the central concept of the ICISS Report, namely, “the responsibilityto protect” (R2P). The Vatican became more critical in September 2008 ina statement by Msgr. Celestino Migliore to the 63rd Session of the GeneralAssembly of the United Nations Organisation (UN) to the effect that theprinciple had been invoked as a pretext for the arbitrary use of militarymight (Holy See 2008). This note of concern was a long time coming,however, and seems barely to have touched upon moral issues concerningthe militarization of humanitarian action, the blurring of humanitarianand other security-related or Western liberal political agendas, theauthority of customary international law regarding the authorization offorce, and more.

A theologian presuming to say something to this debate risks blunder-ing into the proverbial china shop and knocking over everything notnailed firmly to the floor. Yet some of the consequences of the R2P doctrineare so far-reaching that public attention, including that of the major worldreligions, is warranted. This essay attempts to identify grounds for moreadequate investigation of the R2P doctrine from a Christian perspective,and of the moral challenges associated with its component elements.

1. Vatican and WCC Statements on R2P

I begin with a brief overview of Vatican and WCC statements on R2Pbetween September 2003 and September 2008. Prior to the Address byMsgr. Celestino Migliore to the 63rd Session of the General Assembly ofthe UN in September 2008, the thrust of Vatican and WCC statementsabout R2P is broadly positive:

• In 2001, The Protection of Endangered Populations in Situations ofArmed Violence: Toward and Ecumenical Ethical Approach (PEP)referred back to WCC work in 1994–1995 on criteria for determiningthe applicability and effectiveness of sanctions, and was mindful ofserious criticisms of UN peacekeeping. The paper talked in broadterms about “re-shaping the debate” and about why the protection ofendangered populations sometimes requires “‘robust’ action to stopatrocities, restore the rule of law,” and rebuild. I start with this 2001WCC paper because it includes the sub-headings “The Responsibilityof the International Community for Prevention of Violent Conflict,”“When Prevention Fails,” and “Sovereignty and International Law.”In other words, the WCC was grappling with the same issues as theUN, and the ground was prepared for finding in R2P a simple and

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powerful idea around which Christian people holding very differentideas about the use of armed force in any circumstance could poten-tially unite (WCC 2001).

• In 2003, the WCC issued The Responsibility to Protect: Ethical andTheological Reflections as a follow-up to PEP. Despite including in itstitle the name of the ICISS Report and recommending it for furtherstudy, this WCC report is little more than a list of topics for furtherwork (WCC 2003). A book of the same title was published subse-quently in 2005 and comprised papers from a WCC Conference inGeneva April 21–23, 2005, at which Gareth Evans, co-chair of theICISS, was present (WCC 2005).

• In 2005, UN employment of the concept “Responsibility to Protect” waswelcomed by the Vatican as affirming the dignity of persons. CardinalAngelo Sodano spoke to the Summit of the Heads of State andGovernment during the 60th General Assembly of the UN of theprinciple having arisen from the UN’s long-standing commitment tothe “pre-eminent dignity of every single man and woman over the Stateand over every ideological system.” The Cardinal welcomed the conti-nuity of the principle with the Preamble of the Statute of the UN whichsays specifically that the UN Organization was created “in order tosave future generations from the scourge of war” (Sodano 2005).

• By 2006, the WCC was using the phrase “the responsibility toprotect” in its own documentation. It did so in the context of Chris-tian teaching that war is never an act of justice. Even so, the phrasewas deemed to resonate with Christian commitment to the mostvulnerable people beyond one’s own state boundaries. The Statementof the WCC 9th Assembly, Porte Alegre, February 2006, welcomedexplicitly how the concept of R2P shifted the focus of debate from therights of sovereignty to the responsibilities of sovereignty and rightsof the civilian population. It added further:

The churches are in support of the emerging international norm of theresponsibility to protect. This norm holds that national governmentsclearly bear the primary and sovereign responsibility to provide for thesafety of their people. Indeed, the responsibility to protect and serve thewelfare of its people is central to a state’s sovereignty. When there isfailure to carry out that responsibility, whether by neglect, lack of capac-ity, or direct assaults on the population, the international community hasthe duty to assist peoples and states, and in extreme situations, tointervene in the internal affairs of the state in the interests and safety ofthe people. (WCC 2006)

• The report referred positively to the concept of “human security” asproviding ways of talking about human life compatible with the

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vision of God’s kingdom, and refused to refute absolutely the need toresort to the use of force for the protection of the vulnerable. A keycondition was that the use of force must be controlled by interna-tional law in accordance with the UN Charter:

This is an imperative condition. The breach of law cannot be accepted evenwhen this, at times, seems to lead—under military aspects—to a disad-vantage or to hamper the efficiency of the intervention in the short term.(WCC 2006)

• This 2006 report was clear also about the need to distinguishhumanitarian relief from the use of force for humanitarian purposes,which, in turn, must be distinguished from military war-fightingobjectives.

• In 2006, Msgr. Celestino Migliore used the phrase “the responsi-bility to protect” to describe that which is essential to the raisond’être of any state. In other words, he opted to treat state sover-eignty in these terms (Holy See 2006). Msgr. Migliore closed hisaddress at the UN on the phenomenon of genocide with the rhe-torically rousing phrase “never again,” having just repeated thegrowing international consensus that “when a country cannot ordoes not want to intervene to protect its population, the interna-tional community represented by the UN has not only the right butthe duty to intervene.”

• Also in 2006, Msgr. Silvano M. Tomasi called for sufficient politicalwill in the international community to interpret the responsibility toprotect broadly enough in order to prevent the forced displacement ofpersons fleeing conflict (Holy See 2006a).

• In 2007, Msgr. Celestino Migliore extended the concept in Vaticanusage to mean not only a responsibility to protect citizens, but “topromote their welfare” especially through legal means (Holy See2007). In an intervention on the rule of law, he spoke of the need topursue debate about juridical codification of peaceful means in orderto promote the rule of law under which sovereignty is not understoodas an absolute right. Of significance here is that Msgr. Migliore linksR2P to the protection of citizens not only from the InternationalCriminal Court (ICC) provisions against genocide, war crimes, ethniccleansing, and crimes against humanity, but more socio-economicprovisions also. This runs counter to UN interpretation of R2P thatpredominated in the Report of the Secretary-General on January 12,2009 (UN 2009), and is, to my mind, welcome. Msgr. Migliore’sintervention had the effect in Vatican usage of keeping the conceptrelatively broad by including the socio-economic needs of citizens.

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Elsewhere, Msgr. Pietro Parolin called for the concept of R2P to applyalso in the context of climate change (Holy See 2007a).

• Also in 2007, the WCC repeated theological support for R2P in aMinute on Darfur: “It is in those who are most vulnerable that Christbecomes visible for us,” the Assembly said, “The responsibility toprotect the vulnerable reaches far beyond the boundaries of nationsand faith traditions. It is an ecumenical responsibility, conceiving theworld as one household of God” (WCC 2007).

• This minute précised UN understanding of R2P at the time, urgedmember churches to bring the people of Darfur to the attention oftheir governments alongside reference to WCC 9th Assembly policyon the responsibility to protect, and noted with seeming approval thatUN Security Council Resolution 1706 on Darfur was the first time theSecurity Council had referred to the responsibility to protect in aspecific crisis: “we recommend that churches request their govern-ments to pay special attention to its implementation.”

• In April 2008, His Holiness Benedict XVI commented that the“responsibility to protect”

is coming to be recognized as the moral basis for a government’s claim toauthority. It is also a feature that naturally appertains to a family, inwhich stronger members take care of weaker ones. This Organizationperforms an important service, in the name of the international commu-nity, by monitoring the extent to which governments fulfil their respon-sibility to protect their citizens. (Holy See 2008a)

• In a meeting with the members of the General Assembly of the UN,he rooted the concept of the responsibility to protect in ancientphilosophical discourses on governance, notably the ancient conceptof ius gentium “as the foundation of every action taken by those ingovernment with regard to the governed,” and cited the DominicanFriar Francisco de Vitoria who “described this responsibility as anaspect of natural reason shared by all nations” (Holy See 2008b).Explicit reference was made to the capacity of the principleto evoke the idea of the person as created in the image of theCreator.

• Not until September 2008 does the Vatican voice a strong public wordof caution. In the Address by Msgr. Celestino Migliore to the 63rdSession of the General Assembly of the UNO, it states:

In the past, the language of “protection” was too often a pretextfor expansion and aggression. In spite of the many advancementsin international law, this same understanding and practice tragicallycontinues today.

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Despite the growing consensus behind the responsibility to protect as ameans for greater cooperation, this principle is still being invoked as apretext for the arbitrary use of military might. This distortion isa continuation of past failed methods and ideas. The use of violence toresolve disagreements is always a failure of vision and a failure ofhumanity. The responsibility to protect should not be viewed merely interms of military intervention but primarily as the need for the interna-tional community to come together in the face of crises to find means for fairand open negotiations, support the moral force of law and search for thecommon good. Failure to collectively come together to protect populations atrisk and to prevent arbitrary military interventions would undermine themoral and practical authority of this Organization. (Holy See 2008)

Here a warning is sounded about the use of violence under the guise of anobjective “to protect.” Hitherto, the principle of R2P, its component ele-ments and norms, seems to have provided not only the UN but thechurches with a way of holding together disparate elements of debatesabout responding ethically to the humanitarian horrors of the 1990s(Rwanda, Srebrenica, Racak, and more).

Considerably more critical comment was made on July 23, 2009 byH. E. Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, M.M., President of the 63rdSession of the United Nations General Assembly—albeit not in his capac-ity as ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church (d’Escoto 2009).Referring to the silence and inactivity that had shamed much of the worldafter the Khmer Rouge killing fields, the massacres in Rwanda, and theformer Yugoslavia, to name just a few, d’Escoto opened to question thebest form of response to these horrors. Significantly, he noted the prevail-ing lack of trust from many developing countries when it comes to the useof force for humanitarian reasons, and identified four tests for R2P:

(1) Do the rules apply in principle, and is it likely that they will beapplied in practice equally to all nation-states, or, in the nature ofthings, is it more likely that the principle will be applied only by thestrong against the weak?

(2) Will adoption of the R2P principle more likely enhance or under-mine respect for international law?

(3) Is the doctrine of R2P necessary and, conversely, does it guaranteethat states will intervene to prevent another Rwanda?1

(4) Do we have the capacity to enforce accountability upon those whomight abuse the right that R2P would give nation-states to resortto the use of force against other states?

1 D’Escoto’s point is that the absence of the doctrine was not what prevented theinternational community from acting.

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Here, at last, we find adequately tough, critical attention to the moral andpolitical hazards associated political agenda to require potential interven-ers to be proactive in the use of force. D’Escoto’s speech represents, to mymind, the kind of critical engagement absent from ecclesial statementsover the previous decade.

This review has shown that the churches were broadly uncritical inwelcoming the R2P doctrine even though it moved debate about the use offorce toward the requiring of states to be proactive militarily rather thanreactive. Between September 2003 and September 2008, the Vatican andWCC both accepted and used the new doctrine called R2P as a way ofexpressing that the world could no longer remain inactive in the face ofmassive human suffering, waiting until the crisis spilled across borders orposed a more conventional threat to international peace and security. Thenotion of R2P was deemed to resonate favorably with many of theimpulses of Christianity: it directed attention to the vulnerable, affirmedthe dignity of every person created in God’s image; shifted the focus ofdebate from the rights of sovereignty to the responsibilities of sovereigntyand rights of the civilian population; had features that appertainednaturally to a family in which stronger members take care of weaker ones;and had roots in ancient and traditional teaching with respect to iusgentium. The remainder of this essay examines further some of thereasons why the churches welcomed the emerging R2P norm, and seeksmore constructive engagement with the orientation of traditional Chris-tian teaching toward limiting the use of force.

2. R2P and Limiting the Use of Force

I have suggested that the churches neglected to exercise an adequatelystrong ministry of ideology critique between September 2003 and Sep-tember 2008 with respect to R2P. The following substantiates this sug-gestion by pointing out that militarized aid often has often, in practice,given offending governments spurious humanitarian credentials orbecome a component of counter insurgency. With Paul Ramsey in his 1965essay “The Ethics of Intervention,” I accept that militarized interventionmay be a necessary evil. Ramsey lamented the moral short-comings ofsitting and watching while humanitarian crises unfold.2 Like Ramsey, wemust keep in view that principled inactivity fails to judge and act wisely

2 This essay is perhaps the most well-known and substantive engagement in the last fiftyyears with the question of intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state; it addressed directlythose “impressed only by the immorality and probably ineffectiveness of interventionaryaction,” asking such people to sensitize their conscience to the “immorality and probablyineffectiveness of non-intervention” (Ramsey 1968, 23). Mindful of Ramsey’s significance inthis debate, I also accept that there might be justifications for both preemptive action on thepart of a nation for its own citizens or intervention for the sake of citizens elsewhere. The ethics

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in the face of wrongdoing.3 I also accept that some militarized interven-tions on humanitarian grounds have been pacifistic. So, for instance, theNigerian-led UN and British intervention in Sierra Leone, notably Opera-tion Palliser, is accepted widely as hastening a ceasefire and restoring acivilian government to power in 2000. Even so, strong arguments can beadvanced to the effect that, on balance, the militarization entailed in R2Phas achieved more harm than good.

Regarding intervention in Rwanda and Somalia, for instance, the notedobserver of African politics Alex de Waal concludes:

It is in this context that the call for military intervention has emerged:ungrounded in a sober and professional appraisal of the situation, unen-cumbered by demands for accountability, and subject only to the hastydemand to ‘do something’ by an array of organizations that have monopo-lized the moral high ground. (de Waal 1995)

In Somalia, the militarization of intervention proved disastrous. InDecember 1992, the UN authorized the deployment of 35,000 soldiers ina U.S.-led mission (UNOSOM II) which ultimately failed in October 1993when two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by Aidid’s militia.Mohammed Sahnoun, a co-author of The Responsibility to Protect Report(ICISS 2001) and head of UNOSOM I in 1992/3 wrote: “It is my belief thatif the international community had intervened earlier and more effectivelyin Somalia, much of the catastrophe that has unfolded could have beenavoided” (Sahnoun 1994, xiii). A series of missed diplomatic opportunitiesallowed a dreadful situation to become horrendous. The imperative toprevent had not been taken seriously enough politically at an earlyenough stage. More recently, the U.S. and Ethiopia intervened in Somaliaearly 2007. Within six months almost 6,000 people were dead (O’Connell2007).

It is true that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) lobbied formilitary intervention by the UN before the doctrine of R2P was formu-lated. Journalist and experienced NGO worker Connor Foley notes: “Oneof the main arguments from those who supported the UN’s military

of intervention differs from the ethics of preemptive and preventive war in that the action tobe undertaken is on behalf of the citizens of a nation other than the nation, or group of nations,initiating military action. Borrowing J. Warren Smith’s working definition drawn from hisstudy of Augustine’s De libero Arbitrio and Civitas Dei, intervention may be classed togetherwith preemptive rather than preventive action. Preemptive war may be understood as actionto protect the innocent from suffering unjustly and “preventing the would-be aggressor’scarrying out his unjust will” (Smith 2007, 147). Preventive measures are those taken becauseof a perceived vulnerability and the threat that might be imagined to arise because of it (Smith2007, 151). Smith understands Augustine to allow the possibility of preemptive, though notpreventive, military action for the sake of justice and the prevention of innocent suffering.

3 For an overview of Ramsey’s explication of the idea of just war in Christian terms, seeJohnson 1991.

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intervention [in Somalia–EDR] in 1992 was that the aid effort wassustaining a war economy” (Foley 2008, 54). The looting of supplies andmurder of five workers pushed CARE to request militarized UN protec-tion. Oxfam America and other U.S.-based NGOs called publicly formilitary intervention (Foley 2008, 54). NGOs called upon the interna-tional community for militarized assistance. The resulting realities werenot those that had been sought. De Waal examined the difficulties facingrelief agencies when large amounts of food aid are diverted to militias (deWaal 1995). “The sad truth,” he wrote in 1995, “is that the huge pouringof relief aid into Africa for over a decade has contributed to the institu-tionalization of violence.” Hence the supposed need for militarized inter-vention to support humanitarian work. As Mary Ellen O’Connellconcludes, however: “R2P may have added to the new acceptability of war”(O’Connell, 2008).

In Kosovo, militarized humanitarian intervention without adequatedomestic and international legal mechanisms has also been recognizedwidely as counter-productive. This is especially noteworthy because thedoctrine of humanitarian intervention began to take shape shortly afterPrime Minister Tony Blair’s speech on April 22, 1999 to the ChicagoEconomic Club at which he asserted: “No one in the West who has seenwhat is happening in Kosovo can doubt that NATO’s military action isjustified . . . .We cannot let the evil of ethnic cleansing stand. . . . Milosevicwill have no veto on the entry of this international force” (Blair 1999).NATO’s use of force in Yugoslavia had begun on March 24, 1999. At leastin the short term, the consequence of military intervention was to escalatethe fighting. In the mid-term, 2006 and 2009 Reports from MinorityRights Group International express repeated concern about a manifold ofmatters, not least too little capacity under the international mission’slegal accountability for the protection of minorities—Bosnians, Croats,Gorani, Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians (Stevens 2009, 6). Despite Blair’soptimism, there has been an appalling failure of the UN Mission inKosovo (UNMIK) and the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) to turn therhetoric of military-backed humanitarian intervention into beneficialresults.

In venturing to speak about R2P, the churches were faced with extraor-dinarily weighty and complex matters concerning the extent to which thewarning against “principled inactivity” must be treated together withquestions about the probability of a good outcome. Three themes are nowpursued: how a changing political context is affecting notions of sover-eignty; practical and procedural questions about the authority that canapprove or refuse the use of force; and the responsibilities of the mostpowerful nation-states on the international stage and what kind of dis-cernment is required with respect to the international common good withrespect to the protection of human rights.

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3. Changing Notions of Sovereignty

Integral to R2P is a reconceptualization of political sovereignty in termsof responsibility rather than control, and in a manner that reflectsbroadening conceptions of human rights standards amongst the interna-tional community. Recognizing the shift entailed in this reconceptualiza-tion is important if we are to assess the moral claim associated with R2Pthat people are more important than state sovereignty, and the questionof whether moral benefits associated with this shift blinded the churchesto how the doctrine was contributing to a new militarism rather than thelimitation of force. The shift is away from sovereignty conceived as anattribute of military power or legal standing or the locus of decisivepolitical power, and toward a definition subject to a variety of transsov-ereign problems and responsibilities that cross borders and entail whatcosmopolitans call “transnational citizenship” (Ieda 2006).

The import of this shift may be illustrated by means of a comparisonbetween Ramsey’s engagement with notions of sovereignty in the 1950sand 1960s, and more recent accounts. Ramsey engaged with versions ofmodern or post-Westphalian doctrines of sovereignty (Ramsey 1950, 384).He spoke of national sovereignty as that which locates the cause of justice“among the rights and duties of states unless and until supplanted bysuperior government” (Ramsey 1968, 20). In an essay on human rights inBasic Christian Ethics, he contrasts biblical notions of Israel’s obligationto God and Hugo Grotius’s success in putting sovereignty under theconcept of natural right (Ramsey 1950, 383; referencing Grotius 1738, BkII, chap. xxii, sec. xi, 478). Here, says Ramsey, is the heart of the modern,Hobbesian notion of contracted sovereignty whereby the people retain norights “of a governing kind” (Ramsey 1950, 383, emphasis in original). Afootnote expounds differences between Grotius, Rousseau, and Hobbesregarding personal liberty in relation to sovereignty. Similarly, in The JustWar, he refers to the inherent attributes of national sovereignty supposedin Pacem in Terris and to the preferability of resolving disputes betweennations by diplomacy not arms (Ramsey, 1968, 192). Albeit alert to thedifferences between these modern theorists, his discussion of sovereigntyis framed by them. In other words, Ramsey supposed the familiar rangeof modern conceptions of sovereignty as attributes that embody force,dominance, legal superiority, etc., and which weigh against intervention.

In the emerging doctrine of R2P, concepts of sovereignty such as thosesupposed by Ramsey are portrayed as increasingly problematic for manyand complex reasons. R2P catches a drift in international relations toward“transsovereignty” and a critique of methodological nationalism whichworks from the assumption that humanity is divided naturally into alimited number of nations. Witness the plethora of recent books andarticles with titles such as Beyond Sovereignty (Wissenberg 2008), “The

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Concept of Suspended Sovereignty” (Yannis 2002), Justice without Borders(Tan 2004), Negotiating Sovereignty and Human Rights (Sibylle 2009),and the like. Many, though not all, are written by the so-called newcosmopolitans who contend typically that Immanuel Kant’s formulation ofthe universalistic character of right, universal history, perpetual peace,and cosmopolitan justice, can be reconstructed in our own time as acorrective to post-Westphalian nationalism (Fine 2008, 4). They challengenot only methodological nationalism but the related realist school ofinternational relations which contends that there is no legal authoritybeyond the plurality of nation states. This interest in transsovereignty isfuelled by a variety of political and economic factors, notably the entrench-ment of human rights in international law, transborder flows of people,commodities, knowledge, viruses, the global scope of media institutions,terrorism, and how environmental concerns are exposing the interdepen-dence of nation-states. Of interest for our purposes is why and how therelatively uncritical acceptance by the churches of R2P is due, at least inpart, to the welcome aspects of this renewal of interest in the concept ofsovereignty.

Problems arising from diverse modern, politico-philosophical definitionsof sovereignty have long been recognized by political theologians. Mostnotable is the analogy between state sovereignty and sovereignty of theself understood in terms of an individualistic account of the will. So forinstance, John Locke’s response to Robert Filmer’s tracing of politicalauthority back to Adam’s personal and paternal power associates politicalsovereignty with an anthropology that begins from the conatus or theindividual’s will to live. Locke constructs from this “mighty power inAdam” theories of the human essence cast in terms of sovereignty overself, children, labor and property (Locke 1690/1988, First Treatise sec. 10,148). The theologico-moral problem is that when Adam’s dominion orsovereignty is treated as a faculty rather than a call to answerabilitybefore God, it becomes a matter of mastery—whether of the passions,one’s property, or the state. There is a kinship between this problematicanthropology and political theories of sovereignty. Hence OliverO’Donovan’s observation that Augustine “managed altogether withoutwhat was later called a theory of sovereignty” (O’Donovan 2008, 4). To theextent that modern definitions of sovereignty are essentially aboutmastery, they are fundamentally at odds with the ordered love of theCivitas Dei and the ordering of natural law within divine providence. Theconceptual basis is radically different.4

4 A similar point is made in John Milbank’s essay “Christ the Exception” which describeshow, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, Jesus was reduced to “bare life” and died on the cross ashomo sacer. The choice is stark, Milbank implies: whether to do theology from the perspec-tive of God’s own action in the world in Christ or from the perspective of the sovereign as

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The attraction of the reconceptualization of sovereignty associated withR2P is clear. Sovereignty, says the ICISS Report, is not about the unlim-ited power of a state to do what it wants to its own people but implies adual responsibility: “externally—to respect the sovereignty of other states,and internally, to respect the dignity and basic rights of all the peoplewithin the state” (ICISS 2001, 7–8). Sovereignty is no longer a Westpha-lian concept that signifies the legal identity of a state in international lawbut recharacterized “from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as respon-sibility in both internal functions and external duties” (ICISS 2001, 13).This rethinking is said to have a threefold significance:

First, it implies that the state authorities are responsible for the functionsof protecting the safety and lives of citizens and promotion of their welfare.Secondly, it suggests that the national political authorities are responsible tothe citizens internally and to the international community through the UN.And thirdly, it means that the agents of state are responsible for theiractions; that is to say, they are accountable for their acts of commission andomission. (ICISS 2001, 13)

Sovereignty is cast in explicitly moral terms as responsibility for thehuman security of citizens, that is, for economic development, universaleducation, good governance, political inclusion, fair trade, promotingconfidence in public institutions, etc. All this offers opportunities forconstructive engagement on the international scene. Hence the churches’enthusiasm to conceive of sovereignty in terms of responsibility. The R2Preconceptualization proposes a new interpretation of sovereignty thatreflects the broadening of the concept of human rights, long advocated bythe churches, and leaves behind the main conceptual links between theselate modern, political definitions of sovereignty that are problematic for avariety of reasons.

R2P could thus be welcomed by the churches as directing aspects of themodern discourse back toward questions of “rightness” (iustitia) in earthlygovernance, and the measures required to curtail the corruption of humannature. A strong ethic of prevention was deemed to resonate with biblicalteaching about obligations to widows, aliens, the poor, orphans, theafflicted and the needy (Exodus 22:20–26; Isaiah 1:17; Psalms 82). Indeed,these passages were cited by Konrad Raiser, former General Secretary ofthe WCC, in the book entitled The Responsibility to Protect: Ethical andTheological Reflections (2005). The responsibility to protect, writes Raiser,must never pretend to provide security for all. Yet acute threats to human

somehow reflecting the divine essence construed as power that cannot bind itself (Milbank2001). Agamben does not, of course, allow that the limits to human sovereignty remaintheological. Yet Milbank picks up on his exposure of the shadow side of modern definitionsof sovereignty that arise from problematically individualistic account of the will and tend insecularized form toward unrestricted executive policing.

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security call UN member states to account. Care must be taken tominimize the risk of escalation, protect places of religious significance,and strengthen legitimate authorities and the rule of law. “These consid-erations regarding an ethic of protection should ultimately find expressionin new norms to be incorporated into the framework of international law”(WCC 2005, 16). Within this constraint, however, Raiser gives broadsupport to the development of the doctrine and its entrenchment in UNpolicy. R2P was deemed to offer a way of asking afresh the question ofhuman government in relation to Christ’s lordship of earthly powers. Forthose still struggling with why many Christians remained silent when theNazi regime took over the church in the early 1930s, and for others, R2Pwas potentially a catalyst for bringing together the forces of good will.

No one can see with the clarity of hindsight when looking ahead. Evenso, to have “signed-up” to R2P without some attempt to assess themilitarization of humanitarian invention in Somalia and Rwanda, BosniaHerzegovina and Kosovo, and elsewhere, now seems rather too much likeheeding only one aspect of the truth; a triumph of optimism over experi-ence. Mindful of Ramsey’s lament against the moral short-comings ofsitting and watching whilst humanitarian crises unfold, it is important tonote also his test of seeking “the whole truth.” He states his test asfollows: “[i]f the churches presume to address any word to them, it mustbe the whole truth, and not merely a corrective piece of it” (Ramsey 1968,24). My concern in this essay is that difficult questions were largelyunasked and unaddressed by the churches, at least in public, betweenSeptember 2003 and September 2008. Where, we must ask, were thequestions about perceptions of R2P from those at the receiving end?Where was the concern that a new customary rule should not develop ininternational law to legitimize unilateral or regional organization inter-vention? Where were questions about the widening of the legal grounds onwhich force may be used against states thereby risking the emergence ofa new culture of violence under the guise of church-blessed moral accept-ability? What about empirical investigations into whether, on balance,military intervention for humanitarian purposes more often does harmthan good? What about evidence to the effect that, since 2001, there hasbeen a frequent merging of humanitarian intervention with broadersecurity concerns and political agendas? What about the concern that theR2P doctrine, at least in its dominant interpretations, is locked into aparticular human rights discourse and promotion of Western liberalvalues that Christian people might want to question? Where are questionsabout the correlation between acceptance of R2P and a new acceptabilityof war? The churches do not seem to have seen beyond the welcomeobjectives in R2P; both the Vatican and the WCC stated their posi-tions rather too enthusiastically without examining fully enough theimplications.

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4. On the Identity of the Authority that CanApprove Intervention

Few member states condemned NATO for violating international lawafter the decision to use force in Yugoslavia in 1999, and fundamentalvalues underpinning the legitimate authority of the United Nations Secu-rity Council (UNSC) remain broadly recognized. Yet few since the Kosovoconflict have supported the argument that NATO and other regionalsecurity organizations are no longer bound by the requirements of UNSCauthorization (O’Connell 2000, 88). The Outcome Document of the 2005World Summit reiterated the importance of promoting and strengtheningthe multilateral process “and of addressing international challenges andproblems by strictly abiding by the Charter and the principles of inter-national law, and further stress our commitment to multilateralism”(United Nations General Assembly 2005). Section 79 states:

We reaffirm that the relevant provisions of the Charter are sufficient toaddress the full range of threats to international peace and security. Wefurther reaffirm the authority of the Security Council to mandate coerciveaction to maintain and restore international peace and security. We stressthe importance of acting in accordance with the purposes and principles ofthe Charter.

Gareth Evans has emphasized that the ICISS did not see its work astrying to find alternatives to the legal authority of the UN SecurityCouncil but rather to make it work better (Evans 2008, 43). This, incontrast to Blair’s April 1999 speech to the Chicago Economic Club whichnoticeably omitted legitimate authority, that is, approval by the UNSC,from his list of five basic considerations.5 Evans’s multilateralism helps toclose the gap that Blair attempted to introduce between law and morality,that is, between the militarized pursuance of humanitarian goals andtheir UNSC authorization. Even so, NATO’s decision to use force inYugoslavia raised questions about the identity of the authority that canapprove intervention.

The legality or otherwise of the NATO authorization of force in Yugo-slavia has been debated in detail.6 Some have (correctly, to my mind)

5 Blair listed right cause (“are we sure of our case?”); last resort (“have we exhausted alldiplomatic options?”); probability of success (“are there military options we can sensibly andprudently undertake?”); long-term commitment; and national interest (“The mass expulsionof ethnic Albanians from Kosovo demanded the notice of the rest of the world. But it doesmake a difference that this is taking place in such a combustible part of Europe”). Citationsin parentheses are found in Blair 1999.

6 Security Council resolution 1199 (1998) affirmed that the deterioration of the situationin Kosovo constituted a threat to peace and security in the region, yet resolved only toconsider further action and additional measures [S.C. Res. 1199, U.N. SCOR, 3930th mtg,U.N. Doc. S/Res/1199 (1998), 16]. Winter was coming and people would die in the mountains

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regarded the bypassing of right authority as troubling. Father Migueld’Escoto Brockmann spoke of “the extent to which some great powers haverecently avoided the strictures of the Charter in resorting to the use offorce, and have gone out of their way to denigrate international law”(d’Escoto 2009). D’Escoto spoke of “self-appointed saviours who arrogate tothemselves the right to intervene with impunity in the name of overcom-ing nation-state impunity.” His idiom is inflammatory. Nevertheless, thatsome member states bypassed the Security Council is insufficient reasonto suppose that the principle no long holds, or that the principles of theUN Charter now apply directly to NATO and its members.

D’Escoto is surely correct that bypassing of the principle of rightauthority should be resisted. Yet the temptation is to freeze politicaldiscourse into dismal prospects for reform of the Security Council versusthe need to provide security for all peoples in dire humanitarian need, orat risk of becoming caught up in non-international armed conflicts. Thetemptation to allow this opposition may be illustrated with further ref-erence to Ramsey’s essay “The Ethics of Intervention.” The choice, saidRamsey in 1965, is to side with the Charter and try to strengthen the UN,or for the smaller nations to rally in an effort to prevent the UN forumremaining “an ancillary of luxuriant nationalism” (Ramsey 1968, 26).Ramsey wrote to a predominantly American audience where the prospectof reform of the veto was unlikely to have been welcome and weighed thebalance of interests question regarding intervention in full awareness ofthe problem with the veto. “Until higher authorities in the government ofmankind are organized, resolute and powerful,” he writes “the responsi-bilities of national statesmen in our structurally defective internationalorder must still include possible resort to intervention” (Ramsey 1968, 25).

Ramsey’s 1965 essay rehearsed with remarkable prescience many ofthe arguments that have been in play since the NATO use of force inYugoslavia. Theoretically, said Ramsey, the principle of state sovereigntyin the world community contains within itself at least the possibility ofintervention: “even the principle of non-intervention contains an impliedright to intervene to bring protective retribution upon any violationof . . . policy, and to restore the system of non-interventionary states bydeterring future non-compliance” (Ramsey 1968, 25). This is not readilyaccepted because “we have not properly analyzed the meaning of acommitment to non-intervention as a political promise” (emphasis inoriginal). In other words, the system of non-intervention rests in theinternational community upon states claiming the right to be imperme-able. Deterrence rests upon at least the possibility of intervention—theproblem being that the people of the world lose out when permanent

if action was not taken. NATO Secretary-General Solana made clear that the whole point ofNATO action was to support 1199 (NATO 1998). On this, see O’Connell 2000, 78.

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members of the Security Council exercise their veto thereby putting a stopto interventionary measures that could correct threats and dangers topeace: “the Assembly seems not to be an organ capable of the radical sortof decision-making this would require” (Ramsey 1968, 26). Toward the endof “The Ethics of Intervention” essay, Ramsey pulls back from the seem-ingly wide-open range of possibilities for intervention presented to thestatesperson. His discussion of “penultimate” justifications of interven-tions comprises a case-study type consideration of two justifications ofintervention: counter-intervention and intervention by invitation (Ramsey1968, 33–38). Nothing in his exposition prohibits in theory unilateral orregional action inconsistent with the UN Charter if justice and orderrequire it. Nor would anything in Ramsey’s discursus necessarily haverequired member States to accept that such action was exceptional andshould have no bearing on the future need for Security Council authori-zation.7 Indeed, some sections of the essay read as though they could havebeen written as a briefing for Tony Blair’s April 1999 speech to theChicago Economic Club, and also for The Responsibility to Protect Report(ICISS 2001), which proposed a significant departure from the UNCharter in its claim that subsequent authorization could be sought fromthe Security Council by a regional or sub-regional authority (ICISS 2001,XIII). Ramsey is resistant to the legalism that does not give the states-person room to move in an attempt to effect the best available conjunctionof justice and peace, and opts, at the end of the day, for military force. Thequestion is whether his realism hides a way to unfreeze political discoursefrom the dilemma between dismal prospects for reform of the UNSCversus the need to respond to humanitarian need.

Need for reform of the UNSC is no less urgent today than in 1965. AsRamsey anticipated, states have not obtained the authorization whichthey sought for the use of force. Yet more can be done than merely lamentthis impasse. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s High-Level Panel onThreats, Challenges and Change addressed the problem of bypassing theCouncil by inter alia returning to core principles of the just war tradition.A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. The Report of theHigh-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change faced up to thebypassing of the UNSC and acknowledged that the Security Council hasnot been very consistent or effective in dealing with humanitarian disas-

7 Issues here about the rules governing the use of force by regional organizations arecomplex. I draw on O’Connell for her discussion of whether NATO’s operations since 1992 insupporting no-fly zones (Resolution 781) and enforcing the embargo (Resolution 787) meant,in effect, that the SC treated NATO as a Chapter VIII organization, that is , as a regionalagency authorized to undertake enforcement action (2000, 62–67). Her conclusion is thatResolution 1031 which authorized NATO participation in the stabilization of Bosnia-Herzogovina referred only to Chapter VII: “From then on, it was clear that the Council wouldnot treat NATO as a Chapter VIII organization” (2000, 62–67).

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ters in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur,Sudan, and elsewhere (UN 2004, sec. 201). The Report also endorsed theemerging norm that the United Nations should exercise a collectiveresponsibility to protect against genocidal acts or other atrocities andaddressed the issue of the legality of militarized interventions in suchcontexts:

The Security Council is fully empowered under Chapter VII of the Charterof the United Nations to address the full range of security threats withwhich States are concerned. The task is not to find alternatives to theSecurity Council as a source of authority but to make the Council workbetter than it has. (2004, sec. 198)

It acknowledged that the UNSC was far from perfect as an institution butstill provided the means for a global collective security system that issubject legally to the United Nations Charter. Of particular interest,however, was that the question of legality of military measures autho-rized, or not authorized by, the UNSC was addressed explicitly alongsidea relatively detailed exposition of a set of guidelines that should always beaddressed by the UNSC or anyone else involved in such decisions: seri-ousness of threat, proper purpose, last resort, proportional means, andbalance of consequences.

Of interest is that The Report of the High-level Panel on Threats,Challenges and Change appears to be seeking constructive engagementwith the orientation of traditional just-war thinking about limiting theuse of force. It focuses attention on the principled relation betweenmilitary action, the identity of the authority that can approve interven-tion, and the rule of law. At a time when many politicians and theoristsof international relations were rethinking the rules and questioning thepotential universality of norms and principles, The Report of the High-level Panel was prepared to reassert key tenets of traditional just warthinking with respect to the judicial structure of the framework withinwhich an appropriate authority decides upon the use of force.8 Thiswillingness stands in contrast to Ramsey’s acceptance in 1965 that whenstates do not obtain the authorization sought for the use of force, then themost powerful nations bear responsibility for quasi police action in theabsence of right or competent authority. When posed as an either/or, heoutlined “the possible justifiedness of political and military intervention”(Ramsey 1968, 21). The welcome move in The Report appears to be morethan an exercise in political realism or mere appeal to legal rules thatgovern an institution’s mediation of social action by means of an agreed

8 The phrase “rethinking the rules” was the title of a forum at the University of St.Andrews, June 2005, the papers from which were subsequently published in InternationalRelations 20:3 (2006).

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set of criteria, and more like a reminder that legal validity depends uponproper justification. Ramsey wrote at a time when the so-called commandtheories (J. Bentham and J. Austin) and social convention theories (H.Kelsen and H. L. A. Hart) were no longer acceptable because, as the directexpression of will, they lacked integration in the politics of the day. Suchtheories told us what the law ought to be but tended in their applicationtowards the amoral, apolitical, and atheoretical. It was not enough toachieve order by either the force exercised by a sovereign or that implicitin convention. He also wrote at a time when even secularist conceptionsof natural law were written off by broad sweeps of opinion because of theplurality of modern conceptions of the good, and when it was no longerassumed that there was a shared rational foundation for moral and legaljudgment. I remain unconvinced, however, that Ramsey can help usfurther in finding a path between, on the one hand, the new militarizationthat has accompanied the early years of the new R2P doctrine and, on theother, an absolute prohibition on intervention in a state’s internal affairs,because his theology of natural law reasoning was not sufficiently devel-oped. More hopeful is that The Report of the High-level Panel on Threats,Challenges and Change indicates openness to the possibility thatreworked accounts of natural law reasoning are necessary once more injurisprudential debate about right authority.

5. R2P and the Protection of Human Rights

The emerging doctrine of R2P is associated closely with respect forhuman rights and promoting confidence in legal institutions that protecthuman rights. Of foundational significance in the 2001 ICISS Report TheResponsibility to Protect was the role of human rights obligations: “specificlegal obligations under human rights and human protection declarations,covenants and treaties, international humanitarian law and national law”(ICISS 2001, XI). The Report recounts inter alia how international orga-nizations, civil society activists and NGOs use international human rightsnorms and instruments as reference points against which to judge stateconduct (ICISS 2001, 14). The 2009 Report of the Secretary-GeneralImplementing the Responsibility to Protect has lengthy sections on themonitoring of human rights and humanitarian norms, education andadvocacy.

At issue in this section is the nature of appeal to legal human rightsobligations in the doctrine. My concern is that the R2P doctrine—atleast in its dominant interpretations—has been locked into a particularhuman rights discourse that Christians and others might want to ques-tion. It is important to make clear that I do not have an anti-humanrights agenda. To the contrary, I have argued elsewhere that rights-talkproperly has a home in Christian tradition, and does not belong

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overwhelmingly to a secularizing agenda progressively at odds witholder Christian traditions of political right (Reed 2007). Yet the questionof how the U.S./NATO should lend its weight on the international stagein the name of human rights protection remains of high importance.Some kinds of human rights ideology undermine rather than supportuniversality claims for human rights and damage prospects for the sus-tainability of human rights regimes in the twenty-first century. Politi-cally, it can be argued, for instance, that the UN Mission in Kosovo(UNMIK) and the NATO-led Kovoso Force (KFOR) were too optimisticin assuming that the adoption of minority rights standards under inter-national law would not only be possible but would transform politicalpractice. As Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im has said about religious minori-ties under Islamic Law: “It takes more than normative formulation interms of positive law, even in the domestic context, to achieve compli-ance” (An-Na’im 1987, 3).

Consider briefly the failure of UNMIK and KFOR to turn therhetoric of protecting minority rights into reality. This is especially note-worthy because the so-called doctrine of humanitarian interventionbegan to take shape shortly after Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech onApril 22, 1999 to the Chicago Economic Club (Blair 1999). In the shortterm, the consequence of military intervention was to escalate the fight-ing. In the mid-term, 2006 and 2009 Reports from Minority RightsGroup International expressed repeated concern about little capacityunder the international mission’s legal accountability for the protectionof minorities. According to Clive Baldwin’s report Minority Rights inKosovo under International Rule (2006), written for Minority RightsGroup International, an NGO working to secure rights for minoritiesand indigenous peoples worldwide, reasons for concern politicallyclustered around:

• such broad reference to “minority rights” that the term becomes toounwieldy to be effective;

• casual appeal to “minority rights” in situations of ethnic conflictreadily leads to segregation rather than integration;

• the prioritizing of “minority rights” used to justify the problematicoverturning of other legal standards; for example, Regulation 2000/47On the Status, Privileges and Immunities of KFOR and UNMIK andTheir Personnel used, in effect, to allow detention without the orderof a judge. (Baldwin 2006, 3–6, 26)

More recently, the May 2009 Report from Minority Rights Group Inter-national (MRGI) expressed repeated concern about too little capacityunder the international mission’s legal accountability for the protection ofminorities in Kosovo—Bosnians, Croats, Gorani, Roma, Ashkali, and

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Egyptians. From having been a people in need of international protection,the new Kosovo state is now reportedly failing to protect minority rightswithin its newly proclaimed independence:

In the new Kosovo state, smaller minorities suffer from lack of access toinformation or tertiary education in their own languages, and discrimina-tion due to association with the former Serbian majority. Together with abad economy, these conditions mean that many members of minoritycommunities are now leaving the new Kosovo altogether. Unless reversed,this trend will see the steady migration of minority groups who haveother states to migrate to, such as Bosniaks and Turks, who have livedin Kosovo for hundreds of years. For Ashkali, Gorani and Roma, who haveno such options of escape, these trends are likely to lead to ingrainedpoverty and further marginalization for generations to come. (Stevens2009, 6)

The report analyzes the shortcomings of legal protections for minoritiesunder the pre-independence UNMIK international protectorate and underthe post-independence Constitution. The focus is on the rule of law,political participation and, crucially, on international accountability withrespect to minority rights. The concern in these MRGI reports is thatminority rights are not discussed in abstraction from implementation ofthe rule of law. They discuss in some detail the effects of the absence ofeffective remedy for human rights abuses before and during the transferfrom UNMIK protection to the implementation of the Ahtissari Plan bythe International Civilian Office (ICO) and the European Union Rule ofLaw Mission in Kosovo (EULEX). The message that comes through loudand clear is that, in this multi-religious and multi-ethnic context, high-minded and quasi-philosophical abstract talk about minority rightswithout adequate domestic and international legal mechanisms has beencounter-productive.9

9 Debate about how globalization has affected human rights thinking has been ongoingwithin the Journal of Religious Ethics for nearly two decades. Preston N. Williams warnedin 1995 about the need to be watchful for Western biases in human rights discourse andmindful because no talk about human rights is self-evidently neutral (Williams 1995, 324).The counter-position, that is, the autonomy of human rights vis-à-vis religion, was arguedlater by Louis Henkin (1998). David Little’s review of human rights literature for the Spring1999 issue questioned the plausibility of Abdullahi An-Na’im’s resistance to cultural rela-tivism combined with critique of the assumed universality of rights discourse but heightenedsensitivity with respect to his concerns (Little 1999). In both 1998 and 2004, Sumner Twisslaid out the hermeneutical options available to theorists seeking intra- and cross-culturalunderstanding, with a view to understanding the impact of globalization on the politics andphilosophy of human rights (Twiss 1998; 2004). He highlighted the need for practical wisdomalert to the need for cross-cultural dialogue and active search for consensus. One of myconcerns in writing this paper is that the ICISS Report was inadequately sensitive to suchmatters and too close to the “autonomous” position advocated by Henkin.

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Many things are needed where massive violations continue to occur. Itis necessary both to deny violators the pretext of claiming that they neednot act in conformity with human rights standards because they are aliento their own cultural standards, and to advance the politics of humanrights in a religiously and otherwise plural world. An underlying problemis also that no normative system of morality and political accountabilityis culturally neutral; all normative systems are the product somehow ofcontextual specificities (An-Na’im 2000, ix-xiv, 1–32, see especially 3).Even the language of human rights is not neutral. Kosovo shouts to usthat this was not adequately recognized. The following caption from J. B.Handelsman New Yorker cartoon illustrates the kind of point that I amattempting to make. The cartoon shows one iron-age, tunic-clad manbeing clubbed by another (Handelsman 1998). The caption reads: “AndCain rose up against Abel and violated his civil rights.” The cartoon isfunny because of the cultural and contextual adjustment that the readeris asked to make. Expected associations invoked in everyday, twenty-first-century talk about human rights are frustrated and unusual associationsinvited.

As cultural critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin reminds readers that we cannever find a word in its “virginal state”; any word is “always-already”imbued with the evaluations and perceptions of others (Bakhtin 1963/1984, 231). Whether used of Cain killing Abel or the Cambodian genocideof 1975–1979, the language of human rights cannot be employed as if wewere a primordial Adam or Eve. Nor can the language of human rightsever grasp the entirety of the event but represents only some aspects tothe neglect of others. Bakhtin, Bloch, Gramsci, Adorno, and other majortwentieth-century analysts of ideology interpreted neglect of this realitywith respect to language as a fundamental form of injustice. We must ofcourse use words, concepts and identifications in order to talk or thinkabout anything. The point here is not to reject conceptual identification ofthe injustice suffered by the Cambodians and so many others as violationsof human rights, but to call attention to the shortcomings of manyattempts to shake the a priori universality of human rights into thepartiality of culturally-shaped positive law. The problem is forgetfulness ofthe blind spots of all representational thinking, and neglect of how thesupposed achieving of unity and identity in language can suppress orignore different understandings of the object in question.

The ICISS Report is, to my mind, a good example of this forgetfulnessof what John Gray calls “standard or conventional liberal thought” whichsupposes human rights norms to be rationally derived and thereforeinsulated from those incommensurabilities that arise within and amongreligious conceptions. Gray points more effectively than most politicaltheologians to the cultural shifts underway in most, if not all, NATOcountries from post-liberalism to pluralism. My concern is that human

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rights theorists are not keeping up with these developments, and thatthere is need for Christians to contribute to this debate. Drafters of theUNDHR were silent in the Declaration on matters of faith and philosophy.More recently, theorists such as Michael Ignatieff have urged thoseworking with human rights to maintain this deliberate silence withrespect to substantive beliefs. A “thin” (describing only the rights them-selves) rather than “thick” (contextualizing rights in the religious, cul-tural, economic and other complexes of a given society) approach ispreferable, he argues, because it tends to keep human rights instrumentsout of political debates about the relation of rights to traditional, religiousand authoritarian sources of power (Ignatieff 2003, 76). Significant here isthat Ignatieff was one of the human rights specialists on the ICISS whenit was launched in 2000. He was, says Gareth Evans, “particularly closelyengaged with the co-chairs” along with Ramesh Thakur. No surprise,therefore, that the ICISS Report is characterized by the core values ofliberalism: individualism, egalitarianism universalism, and meliorism—toborrow Gray’s summary (Gray 1995, 200). The Report represents some-thing of a low point in this non-sustainable approach to human rightsdiscourse in the twenty-first century.

6. Conclusion

This essay has attempted to identify some of the most pressing ques-tions around the emerging doctrine of R2P, especially those relating towhen and why the churches failed to discern moral hazard. There is nodoubt that the Church must continue to stand alongside people in timesof oppression, injustice, attack, and subjugation. Worryingly absent fromthe churches’ support for R2P between September 2003 and September2008, however, were difficult questions about the merging of humanitar-ian intervention with security and other political agendas, the acceptabil-ity of violence that has increasingly accompanied R2P, the fact thatmilitarized humanitarian aid has often worsened situations of conflictrather than hastened their resolution, how the ideology of human rightsnorms functions in the doctrine developing around R2P, and more.

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