Assessing the Responsibility to Protect’s motivational capacity: The role of humanity
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
| Author | Samuel Jarvis |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088217748673 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088217748673
Journal of International Political Theory
2018, Vol. 14(1) 107 –124
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088217748673
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Assessing the Responsibility
to Protect’s motivational
capacity: The role of humanity
Samuel Jarvis
The University of Sheffield, UK
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.
Keywords
Humanitarian intervention, humanity, motivation, Responsibility to Protect,
sovereignty
Introduction
In his final report on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as the United Nations (UN)
Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon (2016) placed explicit focus and attention on the
Corresponding author:
Samuel Jarvis, Department of Politics, The University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Western
Bank, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK.
Email: s.jarvis@sheffield.ac.uk
748673IPT0010.1177/1755088217748673Journal of International Political TheoryJarvis
research-article2017
Article
108 Journal of International Political Theory 14(1)
continued challenge of mobilising collective action for protecting populations from mass
atrocity crimes. Reflecting on a period of ‘retreating internationalism, diminishing
respect of international humanitarian law and a growing defeatism about promoting
ambitious agendas like protection’, Ban Ki-moon (2016: 18) made a final plea to mem-
ber states to ‘show greater resolve in defending and upholding the norms that safeguard
humanity, on which the responsibility to protect rests’. Critical to his appeal to member
states was thus the emphasis placed on the centrality of the concept of humanity as an
overriding moral imperative for motivating action under the R2P. While the principle of
the R2P is first framed around the idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to pro-
tect their own populations from four mass atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against
humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing), the failure of a state to meet this responsibil-
ity is argued to generate a further responsibility for the international community to
respond in order to provide protection. In this regard, it is the concept of humanity which
has been argued to underpin this specific moral obligation for the international commu-
nity to respond to mass atrocity crimes. However, as previous literature has highlighted
(Zehfuss, 2012; Zolo, 2002), appeals to the moral cause of humanity have been a consist-
ent part of attempts to motivate humanitarian responses to mass atrocity crime situations,
long before the introduction of the R2P, and with vastly contradictory results. Thus, as
the current global context exemplifies, questions remain as to the extent to which the
concept of humanity can in fact function as an effective motivator of political will under
the specific framework of the R2P. In response, there is therefore a need to more empiri-
cally examine what role is played by the concept of humanity during the process of
generating consensus for humanitarian action and, furthermore, the limitations of the
R2P’s focus on the motivational power of moral concepts.
Despite the considerable emphasis placed on the concept of humanity, it has most
often been the case that humanity’s normative status and value has been one left assumed
and/or unexplored by both scholars of the R2P and international relations theorists more
broadly. As Gallagher (2016: 342) has argued ‘scholars specifically appeal to humanity
in order to facilitate their argument, but more often than not, fail to ground it in a substan-
tive manner’. Furthermore, while the concept of humanity has been studied extensively
over the past few decades (Gaita, 2000; Nussbaum, 1997; Teitel, 2011), there has been a
significant lack of research into the relationship between the R2P and humanity, in par-
ticular the extent to which moral claims to the motivational capacity of humanity can
help to generate political will. As a consequence of such oversights, those attempting to
explain the process through which the R2P is able to motivate state response to mass
atrocity crimes have continued to fall back on the concept of humanity as the underlying
moral imperative, without sufficient empirical analysis of its motivational capacity and
impact.
For R2P advocates such as Thakur (2015: 23), the concept of humanity is seen to
function as the source of the R2P’s international responsibility, which he believes
‘demands an acceptance of a duty of care by all of us who live in zones of safety towards
all those who are trapped in zones of danger’. Subsequently, the R2P is conceptualised
as ‘the normative instrument of choice for converting a shocked international conscience
into decisive collective action – for channelling individual moral indignation into collec-
tive policy remedies – to prevent and stop atrocities’ (Thakur, 2015: 23). In this sense, the
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