Assessing the Responsibility to Protect’s motivational capacity: The role of humanity

Abstract

While the concept of humanity is most often referred to as the moral source of the Responsibility to Protect’s motivational capacity, humanity’s normative status and value has continued to be left assumed and/or unexplored. Consequently, there remains a considerable lack of analysis into humanity’s role in supposedly helping to both locate moral harm and subsequently provide a motivational cause that can drive protection practices in support of the Responsibility to Protect principle. In response to this lacuna, this article puts forward three hypotheses regarding the motivational role of humanity in this process: (a) humanity functioning as a rhetorical tool with no motivational qualities, (b) humanity as a concept that works to redefine sovereignty in support of the Responsibility to Protect and (c) humanity as a motivating principle that ultimately diminishes in influence as the Responsibility to Protect principle is diffused into action. Through this analysis, the article offers a more rigorous and systematic evaluation of humanity’s limitations as a moral motivator for generating collective response to mass atrocity crimes, highlighting the need to further develop understanding of the complex interaction between morality and politics in international decision-making.