What prospects for common humanity in a divided world? The scope for RtoP in a transitional international order

Abstract

As a near-universal political commitment to prevent or address atrocities the Responsibility to Protect supports the idea of common humanity, even though the operationalization of the principle is uneven and controversial. However, the RtoP agenda has become problematized by the political frictions of the shifting international order. This is reflected in normative contestation between liberal states and those -including rising or resurgent powerswhich promote a more conservative, pluralist vision of international society and which increasingly resist Western control of the political agenda. The transitional international order has also generated geopolitical tensions which -even if unconnected to humanitarian norms -obstruct the RtoP agenda. This article explores these themes and considers if RtoP, as an expression of common humanity, can achieve progress in this context.

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

“…Consequently, as Hobson (2016: 454) responds, ‘there is value in seriously reflecting on the way vulnerability and violence operate in world politics, and coming to grips with our limited capacity to understand and respond to it’. In this sense, by rejecting the R2P as a potential ‘expression of humanity’ (Newman, 2016: 32) and embodiment of linear moral progress, one can begin to disentangle the complex nature of humanity’s role in underpinning the central normative content of the R2P while recognising the limitations of humanity’s motivational influence on the process of state decision-making.…”