DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12387
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The limits of sovereignty as responsibility Adom Getachew University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Correspondence Adom Getachew, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, 5828 S. University Ave, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA. Email: agetachew@uchicago.edu
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INTRODUCTION
On March 17, 2011, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1973 on the crisis in Libya, demanding a cease-fire, imposing a no-fly zone, and authorizing all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas while explicitly prohibiting a “foreign occupation force” (United Nations Security Council, [UN], 2011). While the resolution itself justified these actions by invoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter, UN officials, policymakers, and commentators identified the reference to civilian protection with the emerging principle of responsibility to protect. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called the resolution a “historic affirmation of the global community's responsibility to protect people from their own government's violence,” and urged immediate action in order to implement the resolution (UN News, 2011). Just two days after the passage of Resolution 1973, NATO members and allies would answer this call by launching airstrikes targeting Libyan military sites. The strikes lasted for 7 months and ended with the death of Muammar Qaddafi, the fall of his regime, and the installation of a provisional government. The responsibility to protect had emerged from debates about humanitarian intervention in the 1990s and was articulated as an alternative to “the right to intervene” in the early years of the new millennium. In 1996 the lawyer and [South] Sudanese diplomat Frances Deng, along with his colleagues at the Brookings Institution, drew on the experiences of postcolonial conflict in Africa to argue for a model of responsible sovereignty where the international community holds states accountable for guaranteeing minimum standards such as “basic health services, food, shelter, physical security, and other essentials” (Deng, Kimaro, Lyons, Rothchild, & Zartman, 1996, p. 32). Five years later, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) organized by the Canadian government extended Deng's early interventions and made the case that sovereignty as responsibility highlights the state's instrumental role in protecting citizens, suggests that states have commitments internally to citizens and externally to the international community, and offers an account of sovereignty in keeping with the growing centrality of international human rights norms (ICISS, 2001, pp. 13–14). In this redefinition, sovereignty was no longer attached to the principle of nonintervention to which it had been linked since the end of World War II. According to the International Commission's report, “If a state is unable or unwilling to end [humanitarian] harm, or is itself the perpetrator, the responsibility to protect falls on the international community” (ICISS, 2001, p. 17). In 2005 the UN Word Summit unanimously endorsed a definition of the responsibility to protect that contained three pillars to guide UN action. The first pillar identifies individual states as the primary institutions charged with protecting populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Pillar two empowers the international community to “encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility.” This pillar also calls for “establishing an early warning capability” that would allow the UN to identify when individual states need further international assistance or intervention to fulfill their responsibility to protect. Finally, the third pillar calls for “collective Constellations. 2018;1–16.
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