A pacifist ethos for the Responsibility to Protect: detaching prevention from intervention

Abstract

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), as a project intended to avert or end mass atrocities, incorporates both preventative and interventionist dimensions. This article begins with an overview of the place of prevention within the R2P and its foregrounding over the past decade at the expense of military intervention. The second part then looks at some existing critiques of this focus on prevention and suggests that such critiques are limited insofar as they remain wedded to military intervention as the essence of R2P. Part three then expands on the political, ethical and normative problems that arise for the R2P in the attempt to connect the principles and practice of non-violent conflict or atrocity prevention to the spectre of military intervention. As a consequence, it is argued that the central tenets of human protection within the R2P can only be coherently founded upon a pacifist ethos. A broadening of the ethical imagination around R2P is, therefore, required if humanitarian norms aimed toward human protection are to be consistently pursued.