Responsibility to Protect goes to China: An interpretivist analysis of how China’s coexistence policy made it a Responsibility to Protect insider
| Author | Liselotte Odgaard |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219899416 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219899416
Journal of International Political Theory
2020, Vol. 16(2) 231 –248
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219899416
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Responsibility to Protect
goes to China:
An interpretivist analysis
of how China’s coexistence
policy made it a Responsibility
to Protect insider
Liselotte Odgaard
Hudson Institute, USA
Abstract
The article offers an interpretivist analysis of China’s coexistence approach to developing
the Responsibility to Protect norm concerning atrocity crimes against civilians. The
English school’s concept of great power legitimacy through coexistence is a central
characteristic of its international society description of the international realm. The
article uses an interpretivist approach to show how China’s coexistence foreign policy
tradition was challenged by the liberal internationalist agenda of a Responsibility to
Protect norm on atrocity crimes against civilians. The emergence of an alternative
Chinese Responsibility to Protect concept coupling a state-centric and a people-centric
approach with its focus on political and economic capacity-building of existing domestic
institutions allowed China to position itself as a legitimate lifeline of liberal international
institutions. The article shows how an illiberal state can become a prominent upholder
of central institutions of the post-World War II liberal international order.
Keywords
China, coexistence, English school, interpretivism, Responsibility to Protect
Introduction
This article makes use of the English school understanding of great power legitimacy and
couples it with an interpretivist approach to explore coexistence as a Chinese foreign
policy tradition that facilitates great power legitimacy. This is done by focusing on one
Corresponding author:
Liselotte Odgaard, Hudson Institute, 1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Suite 400, Washington, DC 20004,
USA.
Email: lodgaard@hudson.org
899416IPT0010.1177/1755088219899416Journal of International Political TheoryOdgaard
research-article2020
Article
232 Journal of International Political Theory 16(2)
aspect of great power legitimacy that has been widely debated in the English school,
which is the rules and institutions that protect civilians against atrocity crimes (Ainley,
2015; Foot, 2015; Wheeler, 2001). The article shows how China’s diplomatic commu-
nity adapts its coexistence approach and how the liberal internationalist community’s
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) agenda changes over time in a way that brings their
understandings on how to protect civilians against atrocity crimes sufficiently close
together to award China legitimacy as an insider with a central role in defining and
implementing R2P. This process occurs as China’s rise to great power is accompanied by
growing demands for contributions to order and justice in international society.
For more than two decades, the future of liberal international order, including the
United Nations (UN) human rights cluster of norms and the legal, diplomatic and mili-
tary institutions making up the order, has been widely debated (Dunne, 2017; International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), 2001; Morris, 2005;
Wheeler and Dunne, 1998). The role of rising China has been seen as key to the develop-
ment of liberal order, not only in the English School, but across a wide range of liberal,
realist and constructivist approaches.
John Ikenberry (2018) provides a defence of the liberal narrative, arguing that China
provides no appealing alternative model to a liberal international order. Stephen Kotkin’s
(2018) realist analysis seeks to show that a free-trading United States is trumped by the
relative capabilities of an authoritarian China introducing meritocracy and corruption into
liberal institutional dynamics. Constructivist Yuen Foon Khong (2019) argues that the
United States and China compete for prestige as a means of shaping international institu-
tions decisively. Less attention has been given to the English school concept of coexist-
ence which highlights how different normative great power agendas can be accommodated
through the dynamics of diplomacy in international society (Bull, 1995 [1977]: 64–67).
Rather than cooperation or competition, coexistence highlights how powers can negotiate
a space for their normative agendas because international society is a socially constituted
realm with historical contingency in a setting of complex patterns of cooperation and
conflict. The social and historical contingency of coexistence emphasizes the interpretiv-
ist approach to understanding how agency transforms international order.
Bull’s (1995 [1977]) analysis of coexistence becomes a rationalist scientific enquiry
rather than an interpretivist enquiry. A scientific approach implies that international order
and international society and its institutions have an essence common to all cases of the
things to which the concept refers (Bevir and Hall, 2020). Instead, in this article, the
coexistence concept as constitutive of international society is coupled to an interpretivist
approach where the conscious management of practitioners that make up the diplomatic
community shapes order (Navari, 2020). An empirical and inductive interpretivist
approach to the development of liberal order allows for an exploration of how the emer-
gence of new beliefs might give rise to institutional innovation that is not captured with
rationalist scientific theoretical lenses. Finally, the moral concern inherent in the inter-
pretivist approach of the English school facilitates a conversation between the calls for
justice and order that are sometimes at odds in the proposals for agency in liberal world
order envisaged by the diplomatic community.
The article first investigates the English school debate on how great powers acquire
legitimacy in a liberal cosmopolitan world and the role of R2P in developing a liberal
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