The doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ as a practice of political exceptionalism
| Author | Philip Cunliffe |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116654956 |
research-article2016
EJ R
I
Article
European Journal of
International Relations
The doctrine of the
2017, Vol. 23(2) 466 –486
© The Author(s) 2016
‘responsibility to protect’
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116654956
DOI: 10.1177/1354066116654956
as a practice of political
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
exceptionalism
Philip Cunliffe
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
The consensus on the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ has replaced ideas of
humanitarian intervention with a new vision of the responsibilities that states have to
protect their peoples from the most egregious suffering. The contention of this article
is that this is a politics of exceptionalism, whereby power is legitimated by reference to
its effectiveness in responding to emergency or crisis. By analysing the doctrine in this
way, new light is shed on the debate surrounding the responsibility to protect. First,
understanding the doctrine in terms of exceptionalism helps explain the paradox of
how the doctrine has been assimilated so readily into institutional and state practice
without manifesting any greater commitment to international intervention. Second,
understanding these new security practices in terms of exceptionalism allows us to
move beyond questions of imperialism. Once understood in terms of exceptionalism,
it can be shown that the stakes in the debate on the responsibility to protect are
restricted not only to relations between states, but also to relations within them:
principles of representative government are to be substituted with paternalist and
authoritarian visions of state power.
Keywords
Humanitarianism, human rights, International Relations, liberalism, responsibility to
protect, sovereignty
Corresponding author:
Philip Cunliffe, School of Politics and International Relations, Rutherford College, University of Kent,
Canterbury CT2 7NX, Kent, UK.
Email: P.Cunliffe@kent.ac.uk
Cunliffe
467
Introduction
Over 15 years since the publication of the Responsibility to Protect report of the
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), it would be
fair to say that the doctrine of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) has saturated the dis-
course of international policy in terms of responding to humanitarian crises and atroci-
ties. The tenets of RtoP have become embedded in numerous speeches and reports of
United Nations (UN) Secretaries-General and their special advisers, in resolutions of the
UN Security Council, in General Assembly debates, and — not least — in countless
academic seminars, policy papers, workshops, briefs, edited collections, journal articles
and handbooks. The tenets of RtoP are widely seen as having informed the international
military responses to conflict and atrocities in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya in 2011.1 Yet,
despite the insistent language of responsibility in the doctrine, many could name ongoing
conflicts and crises that have seen mass atrocities resulting from state neglect, predation
or oppression and yet have seen no meaningful international response. The Syrian civil
war would likely top the list, but conflicts in Burundi, Yemen, South Sudan and the
Central African Republic would be no less plausible candidates in this grim repertoire.
How can it be that RtoP has become at once normalised and yet applied so unevenly?
How can it be that ‘preventive military intervention’ has become more acceptable and yet
non-intervention remains the rule in practice?2 In this article, I argue that we can better
understand these paradoxes and contradictions if we reconceptualise RtoP as an attempt
to ‘norm the exception’ — that is, as an attempt to reorganise international order by pre-
emptively incorporating political responses to humanitarian emergencies. It is nothing
new to consider RtoP as a question of exceptionalism as the doctrine is explicitly formu-
lated around questions of crisis that may require overriding the sovereignty of states.3
This article takes a second step however — to consider how ‘claims of exceptionality’
function politically.4 In other words, how do such claims ‘structure stakes and positions
in international struggles for legitimacy and authority’?5 Using lenses crafted from inter-
national political theory, I make a first cut at applying this approach in this article.
This is not to say that humanitarian emergencies are merely phoney episodes ‘con-
structed’ by self-serving media and aid agencies, and exaggerated in the struggle to
maintain their institutional prominence. Nor am I seeking merely to draw attention to
instances of humanitarian hypocrisy and selectivity (important as these are). Rather, I
want to show that different types of exceptionalist practice will have different implica-
tions for international order. I suggest that studying RtoP in this way, first, helps us
understand how RtoP has displaced humanitarian intervention.6 Second, this approach
opens up a new critical vantage point on the doctrine, which goes beyond the issue of the
imperialist appropriation of humanitarianism, and even beyond questions of intervention
between states. Instead, using the international political theory of exceptionalism, we can
see how the idea of state power itself is being transformed through RtoP, with the protec-
tive functions of the state displacing its representative functions.
Outline
Exceptionalism has become a familiar theme in discussions of how civil liberties are
undermined by the waging of the war on terror.7 Studying exceptionalism in the context
468
European Journal of International Relations 23(2)
of the international sphere is perhaps a less familiar exercise, therefore requiring some
justification and markers as to how such an analysis may differ from studying emergency
politics in a domestic setting. This is the first part of the following discussion. After hav-
ing reviewed the current status of RtoP thought and practice, we can now turn to look at
the links between RtoP and exceptionalism. Before we can do this, to understand how
RtoP has institutionalised exceptionalism in international politics requires us to under-
stand how RtoP emerged out of humanitarian intervention.
I show how the RtoP was justified as a legitimate shift from the era of humanitarian
intervention through claims for exceptionalism. I show that the specific type of exception-
alism that is advanced in RtoP doctrine is a decisionistic and existential concept of excep-
tionalist politics. Drawing on the work of Jef Huysmans, Ian Zuckerman and Jean Cohen,
I draw out the political implications of the specific type of exceptionalism and the concep-
tions of political identity and practice that it embodies. I go on to argue that the new
exceptionalist understanding of atrocity prevention embodied in RtoP reflects the surren-
der of a classical liberal telos oriented towards the ultimate elimination of irrationality and
violence. In its place, we have a presentist, pessimistic vision that effectively normalises
extreme violence through the very effort to contain it. I then move to consider how the
responsibilities prescribed for states in RtoP doctrine reflect a new vision of state power
where legitimacy is measured by effectiveness in providing security from extreme vio-
lence, and I show how this erodes the foundations of representative government and
popular sovereignty.
The study of exceptionalism in international politics
The politics of exceptionalism is most closely studied in relation to domestic settings.
When an event breaches what is taken to be the routine functioning of social and political
order in an extraordinary fashion, an exception is generated: ‘a suspension, break, or
transformation of all or part of the fundamental formal or informal laws governing a
political order’.8 The idea of exceptionalism thus presupposes a nominally rational,
secure and institutionalised political order. However, it is precisely the absence of such
an order that is traditionally believed to be the defining characteristic of the international
system. The system of states is classically held to be a political system characterised by
the persistence rather than dearth of overwhelming threats, as famously evoked by
Martin Wight: ‘International politics is the realm of recurrence and repetition; it is the
field in which political action is most regularly necessitous’.9
How, then, should the study of exceptionalism in the international realm be justified
and conducted? Refusing to accept Wight’s eschatological views of international order
need not make us naively idealistic about the status or validity of international norms.10
We can treat exceptionalism in international politics either as ‘a single constitutive given’
of the international system,11 or as ‘a political problem that invites multiple responses’.12
I will follow the latter course in this article. As Huysmans reminds us, such questions can
be seen as questions of politics in general: ‘The fact that one can transpose legal theories
focusing on the state and domestic politics to international relations is not surprising
given that theories of the state are also theories of the political more generally.’13
As it is nothing new to assert that a normative and legal infrastructure (however rudi-
mentary) exists in the anarchic political system of the international realm, it...
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