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171. Civilian Protection in Libya: Putting Coercion and Controversy Back into RtoP

Author:
Jennifer Welsh
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
As noted by other contributors to this roundtable, the response of the international community to civilian deaths in Libya—and the threat of further mass atrocities—is unusual in two key respects. First, Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians without the consent of the “host” state. The Council's intentions, and actions, could not be interpreted as anything other than coercive. Second, in contrast to other crises involving alleged crimes against humanity (most notably Darfur), diplomacy produced a decisive response in a relatively short period of time. Both of these features suggest that many analysts of intervention (including myself) need to revise their previously pessimistic assessments of what is possible in contemporary international politics.
Political Geography:
Libya

172. Libya and the Responsibility to Protect: The Exception and the Norm

Author:
Alex J. Bellamy
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) played an important role in shaping the world's response to actual and threatened atrocities in Libya. Not least, the adoption of Resolution 1973 by the UN Security Council on May 17, 2011, approving a no-fly zone over Libya and calling for “all necessary measures” to protect civilians, reflected a change in the Council's attitude toward the use of force for human protection purposes; and the role played by the UN's new Joint Office on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect points toward the potential for this new capacity to identify threats of mass atrocities and to focus the UN's attention on preventing them. Given the reluctance of both the Security Council and the wider UN membership even to discuss RtoP in the years immediately following the 2005 World Summit—the High-level Plenary Meeting of the 60th Session of the General Assembly that gave birth to RtoP—these two facts suggest that significant progress has been made thanks to the astute stewardship of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is personally committed to the principle. Where it was once a term of art employed by a handful of likeminded countries, activists, and scholars, but regarded with suspicion by much of the rest of the world, RtoP has become a commonly accepted frame of reference for preventing and responding to mass atrocities.
Topic:
United Nations
Political Geography:
Libya

173. The Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention in Libya

Author:
James Pattison
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Wars and interventions bring to the fore certain ethical issues. For instance, NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999 raised questions about the moral import of UN Security Council authorization (given that the Council did not authorize the action), and the means employed by interveners (given NATO's use of cluster bombs and its targeting of dual-use facilities). In what follows, I consider the moral permissibility of the NATO-led intervention in Libya and suggest that this particular intervention highlights three issues for the ethics of humanitarian intervention in general. The first issue is whether standard accounts of the ethics of humanitarian intervention, which draw heavily on just war theory, can capture the prospect of mission creep. The second issue is whether epistemic difficulties in assessing the intervention's likely long-term success mean that we should reject consequentialist approaches to humanitarian intervention. The third issue concerns selectivity. I outline an often overlooked way that selectivity can be problematic for humanitarian intervention.
Political Geography:
Libya and Kosovo

174. "Leading from Behind": The Responsibility to Protect, the Obama Doctrine, and Humanitarian Intervention after Libya

Author:
Simon Chesterman
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Humanitarian intervention has always been more popular in theory than in practice. In the face of unspeakable acts, the desire to do something, anything, is understandable. States have tended to be reluctant to act on such desires, however, leading to the present situation in which there are scores of books and countless articles articulating the contours of a right—or even an obligation—of humanitarian intervention, while the number of cases that might be cited as models of what is being advocated can be counted on one hand.
Political Geography:
Libya

175. RtoP Alive and Well after Libya

Author:
Thomas G. Weiss
Publication Date:
09-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
With the exception of Raphael Lemkin's efforts on behalf of the 1948 Genocide Convention, no idea has moved faster in the international normative arena than “the responsibility to protect” (RtoP), which was formulated in 2000 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). Friends and foes have pointed to the commission's conceptual contribution to reframing sovereignty as contingent rather than absolute, and to establishing a framework for forestalling or stopping mass atrocities via a three-pronged responsibility—to prevent, to react, and to rebuild. But until the international military action against Libya in March 2011, the sharp end of the RtoP stick—the use of military force—had been replaced by evasiveness and skittishness from diplomats, scholars, and policy analysts.
Political Geography:
Libya

176. Security Council Reform: Past, Present, and Future

Author:
Shashi Tharoor
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
Even though it has been more than a year since I left the service of the United Nations, the one question people have not stopped asking me here in India is when our country, with 1.2 billion people and a booming economy, is going to become a permanent member of the Security Council. The short answer is "not this year, and probably not the next." But there are so many misconceptions about this issue that a longer answer is clearly necessary.
Topic:
Security and United Nations
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, and China

177. Excesses of Responsibility: The Limits of Law and the Possibilities of Politics

Author:
Kirsten Ainley
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The twentieth century saw the unprecedented individualization, legalization, and criminalization of responsibility in international relations. At the start of the century, if any agent was held responsible in the international sphere for harm resulting from conflict or war, it was the state, and states were held politically (rather than legally, for the most part) responsible for their acts by other states. By the end of the century individuals were held legally (often criminally) responsible for such harm, now defined as "war crimes" or "atrocities." Individuals were increasingly held responsible by international or hybrid tribunals set up under the auspices of the most powerful international institution in the post-1945 system, the UN Security Council, and with significant financial support from the world's most powerful states, foremost being the United States. Only a few years into the twenty-first century, trials of individuals were under way at an independent International Criminal Court (ICC). Our first reaction when we see news reports of war or civil conflict is frequently to ask which individuals are responsible and how they are to be punished. The drive toward individual accountability can be seen in, for instance, the 2009 report by the Goldstone Commission into alleged war crimes committed in Gaza, which led to subsequent calls for the ICC to take up the case; the 2011 report by the Panel of Experts set up by the UN secretary-general to advise on accountability in Sri Lanka; and the swift referral of the situation in Libya to the ICC in February 2011.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
United States, Libya, Sri Lanka, and United Nations

178. Cosmopolitan Democracy: Paths and Agents

Author:
Daniele Archibugi and David Held
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
When, at the end of the cold war and at the beginning of a new wave of democratization, we suggested the idea of a cosmopolitan democracy, we were aware that we were pouring old wine into new bottles. The attempt to make world politics more transparent, more accountable, more participatory, and more respectful of the rule of law had pioneers spanning from Immanuel Kant to Richard Falk. Still, the idea that "democracy" as a concept and a practice could and should be applied beyond nation-states was somehow innovative.
Topic:
Cold War and Democratization

179. The Unity and Objectivity of Value

Author:
Stephen Guest
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
It is a scientific fact that a sudden magnetic field is demonstrably shown to coincide with a change in everyone's moral beliefs from time to time. People who have a strong conviction that abortion is morally prohibited before the magnetic field occurs have an equally strong conviction that abortion is morally permissible immediately after.

180. "The Honor Code" by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Author:
Sharon Krause
Publication Date:
12-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Carnegie Council
Abstract:
The language of honor is apt to strike the modern reader as quaint, even obsolete, if not downright pernicious. It calls to mind the hierarchies of the ancien régime and the absurdities of the duel, not to mention the horrible "honor killings" that perpetuate the domination of women in some traditionalist societies today. If honor is out of favor, one might think so much the better.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
China