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Libya and the Responsibility to Protect:
Between Opportunistic Humanitarianism and Value-Free Pragmatism
Author: Ramesh Thakur
Volume 7, Number 4 (Summer 2011), pp. 13-25.
Abstract
Since the Treaty of Westphalia, sovereignty has been backed by the norm of nonintervention. By contrast, the responsibility to protect (R2P) strikes a balance between unauthorised unilateral interventions and institutionalised indifference. With a rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Libya in early 2011, the United Nations (UN) authorised the use of force to protect an imminent slaughter of civilians but prohibited taking sides in the internal civil war, intervening with ground troops, or effecting forcible regime change. The record of NATO actions in Libya marks a triumph for R2P but also raises questions about how to prevent the abuse of UN authority to use international force for purposes beyond human protection.
About the Author
Ramesh Thakur is Professor of International Relations in the ANU’s Asia–Pacific College of Diplomacy, and Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Ethics, Governance and Law at Griffith University. He was Vice Rector and Senior Vice Rector of the United Nations University (and Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations) from 1998–2007. He was a Commissioner and one of the principal authors of The Responsibility to Protect, and Senior Adviser on Reforms and Principal Writer of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s second reform report. His related books include The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey, co-written with Thomas G. Weiss (Indiana University Press, 2010); The Responsibility to Protect: Norms, Laws and the Use of Force in International Politics (Routledge, 2011); Blood and Borders: The Responsibility to Protect and the Problem of the Kin-State, co-edited with Walter Kemp and Vesselin Popovski (UN University Press, 2011); and The People vs. the State: Reflections on UN Authority, US Power and the Responsibility to Protect (UN University Press, 2011). His next major project is The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy co-edited with Andrew F. Cooper and Jorge Heine (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). ramesh.thakur@anu.edu.au.
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