Letters, Notes, & Comments

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Subject: Responsibility to Protect and Militarized Humanitarian Intervention: When and Why Churches Failed to Discern Moral Hazard. by Esther Reed Journal of Religious Ethics 40.2 (June 2012): 30834. From: Luke Glanville Centre for Governance and Public Policy Griffith University Nathan, QLD, 4111 Australia l.glanville@griffith.edu.au

IN DEFENSE OF THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT

Luke Glanville
ABSTRACT This essay responds to Esther Reeds recent critique of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle in this journal. It argues that Reed fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents R2P. Her critique of R2P would have served well as a critique of the earlier concept of humanitarian intervention had it been penned in the late 1990s. But most of the problems and dangers that Reed identies are in reality the very problems and dangers that R2P seeks to overcome, and I suggest that it does overcome them quite successfully. R2P does not impose Western ideals on the rest of the world, weaken the legal restrictions on the use of force, or promote abusive interventionism. Rather, it offers a bold but carefully constructed framework that holds the promise of promoting the protection of vulnerable populations from mass atrocities.
KEY WORDS:

Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, just war, human rights, genocide, mass atrocities

Luke Glanville is a research fellow in the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Australia. He has articles published or forthcoming in Studies in Christian Ethics, International Studies Quarterly, and European Journal of International Relations, among others, and has a forthcoming monograph, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect. Luke is Co-Editor of Global Responsibility to Protect journal.
JRE 41.1:169182. 2013 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

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IN HER RECENT ESSAY, Responsibility to Protect and Militarized Humanitarian Intervention, in the Journal of Religious Ethics, Esther Reed humbly acknowledges that a theologian presuming to say something to the debate about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle risks blundering into the proverbial china shop and knocking over everything not nailed rmly to the oor (2012, 309). Unfortunately, I fear Reed has done just that. Certainly, there is much to recommend about Reeds contribution. Sincere concern with the dangers of loosening the restrictions on and encouraging the resort to military force is always to be welcomed. So too is a call for Christians to pay close attention, to think critically, and to make their voices heard on ideas about how the international community can work to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities. However, Reed fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents the principle of R2P as it is actually understood by states. Her critique of R2P would have served very well as a critique of the earlier concept of humanitarian intervention had it been penned in the late 1990s. But most of the problems and dangers that Reed identies are in reality the very problems and dangers that R2P seeks to overcome, and I suggest that it does overcome them quite successfully. In this short essay, I want to critique Reeds critique of R2P and, in doing so, outline how R2P is a carefully constructed and nuanced principle that holds the promise of promoting the protection of vulnerable populations from mass atrocities while refraining from imposing Western ideals on the rest of the world, while facilitating international deliberations on the resort to force along the lines of the Just War tradition, and while restraining abusive interventionism. I want, in short, to cautiously argue that the principle of R2P is one that Christians can embrace and seek to promote.

1. Reeds Critique of R2P

Reed laments that, in the key years of the emergence of R2P prior to 2008, the churches were broadly uncritical in welcoming the R2P doctrine even though it moved debate about the use of force toward the requiring of states to be proactive militarily rather than reactive (2012, 314). Difficult questions were left unasked, Reed claims. These included questions about the desirability of embracing a doctrine that is locked into a particular human rights discourse and promotion of Western liberal values, the desirability of widening the legal grounds for the use of force and legalizing unilateral or regional organization intervention, and the desirability of accepting a doctrine of humanitarian intervention that in practice is frequently merged with broader security concerns and political agendas and leads to interventions that often do more harm than good (2012, 320, 329).

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The question of the use of military force to suppress tyranny and rescue innocents has been debated by Christian theologians, jurists, and philosophers since at least the sixteenth century. The critiques of military intervention that Reed offers are not new. If we were to revisit the arguments offered by thinkers such as Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and Bartolome de Las Casas in response to the Spanish conquest of the New World, we would nd that Christians have long worried about the rights and wrongs of imposing particularized understandings of justice universally, they have long understood the need to clarify the grounds and the location of authority for the resort to force, and they have long expressed wariness that the use of force can do more harm than good (Hamilton 1963; Tuck 1999, 5177). More recently, such critiques were particularly prominent in the 1990s as commentators responded to the (re)-emergence of the idea and practice of humanitarian intervention in the aftermath of the Cold War. It was precisely in response to such critiques that the principle of R2P was developed in the rst decade of the twenty-rst century, and a remarkable degree of international consensus has emerged around the principle precisely because it is perceived to overcome many of the problems that plagued the concept of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s while offering a bold framework for protecting populations from mass atrocities. Unfortunately, the principle of R2P that Reed critiques is not the one that is embraced by states today. Most problematically, Reed seems to conate R2P with the doctrine of humanitarian intervention developed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other leaders of NATO states during the intervention in Kosovo in 1999. The author repeatedly and confusingly asserts that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention began to take shape in the aftermath of NATOs 1999 intervention and proceeds to critique it without making any clear distinction between this doctrine and R2P (Reed 2012, 316, 326). Reed fails to mention that R2P was developed with the specic objective of overcoming the intractable debates around humanitarian intervention that had raged in the 1990s and that had reached a boiling point in the wake of Kosovo. More promisingly, Reed also draws on the 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), entitled The Responsibility to Protect. This report, commissioned by the Canadian Government and written by an international commission of experts, offered the rst articulation of the R2P principle. However, while it has been profoundly inuential, it is not read as the denitive guide to R2P. The society of states has never endorsed the report, and when states invoke R2P to justify or condemn particular actions, they are not invoking the principle spelled out in this report. Rather they are invoking two very specic paragraphs of an Outcome Document that member states unanimously endorsed at

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the United Nations World Summit in September 2005 (United Nations General Assembly 2005, paras. 13839).

2. Understanding R2P
At no point in her essay does Reed mention the World Summit agreement on R2P.1 Yet, as states repeatedly emphasize, it represents the denitive statement on R2P. It is the only formulation that states have agreed to, and it is the only one that they are willing to accept. And they embrace it precisely because it is perceived to overcome the kinds of critiques of Western interventionism offered by non-Western states and by commentators such as Reed. As such, it is worth quoting at length. In paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document, the society of states unanimously declared:
138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability. 139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

In the remainder of paragraph 139, member states also committed themselves to help states build the capacity to protect their own populations and stressed the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter and international law (United Nations General Assembly 2005).
1 Reed mentions the World Summit agreement once (2012, 321), but only refers to the innocuous paragraph 79 that reaffirms the U.N. Charters provisions on the use of force rather than the detailed and important paragraphs 13839 that deal with R2P.

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What should be immediately apparent is that R2P is about much more than military intervention. The Summit agreement emphasizes the responsibility of the sovereign state to protect its own population from the crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. It also emphasizes the commitment of the international community to encourage states and help them build capacity to protect their populations. And it suggests a range of non-coercive measures that can be taken to pressure states to carry out their responsibilities if they appear unwilling to do so.2 Only then does it turn to the question of military force. Those states and commentators that have sought to promote R2P since 2005 have emphasized that the Summit agreement indicates that the international community need only consider the always difficult and tragic question of resorting to military intervention in those instances where encouragement, assistance, dialogue, and peaceful persuasion are insufcient to ensure the protection of civilians (see United Nations 2009). When it does turn to the question of military force, in the discussion of collective action in paragraph 139, the Summit agreement offers a carefully nuanced account of the scope of legitimate action. The resort to force must be authorized by the Security Council, in accordance with the U.N. Charter, and only in situations where peaceful means [are] inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. When the U.N. General Assembly came to debate a 2009 report by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that offered a program for implementing the Summit agreement (United Nations 2009), states tendered a remarkable degree of explicit support for the legitimacy of military force to protect populations so long as it was undertaken within the circumscribed scope of the 2005 agreement. A very small group of states with little credibility in the international community, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Venezuela, rejected the permissibility of coercive action against a sovereign state in any situation and insisted that R2P was simply a license for unilateral intervention by the powerful against the weak. However, the vast majority of states rmly rejected such claims and some of them rebuked the attempts of the smaller group of states to misrepresent the principle of R2P as something other than what had been agreed to in 2005 (Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect 2009). In numerous General Assembly and Security Council debates on broad themes of civilian protection and also on particular crises since 2005, member states have repeatedly made clear that the principle of R2P is to be understood exclusively in terms of the

2 Such measures were put into action in a remarkably successful way in response to post-election violence in Kenya in 2008 (Steinberg 2009).

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2005 agreement. Now that we understand what R2P actually is, we are in a position to consider Reeds various critiques of the principle.

3. Critiquing the Critique of R2P

3.1 Imposing a Western liberal discourse of human rights Reed asserts that R2P is a doctrine that is locked into a particular human rights discourse and promotion of Western liberal values that Christian people might want to question (2012, 320). To demonstrate this, Reed rather bizarrely appeals to evidence that the adoption of minority rights standards in multi-religious and multi-ethnic Kosovo since 1999 has failed to prevent discrimination against minorities. However, minority rights standards are not a new phenomenon that represents the implementation of R2P. Rather, such standards have been a common feature of international peace agreements since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (Jackson Preece 1998). This example tells us nothing about R2P. Turning to Reeds broader point, it is clear that the principle of R2P nds some antecedents in Western ideas about human rights and humanitarian intervention and in the interventionist practices of Western states during the 1990s, but there is much more to the story of its development that needs to be told. The principle is grounded in the concept of sovereignty as responsibility that was developed in the 1990s by Sudanese scholar and U.N. official, Francis Deng, and championed by successive non-Western Secretaries-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Ko Annan. The rst international treaty providing for a right of military intervention to protect populations from mass atrocities was contracted not between Western states but by the African Union (AU) in its Constitutive Act of 2000. The AUs subsequent embrace of R2P in 2005 was crucial to the development of international consensus, encouraging other non-Western states to unanimously endorse the concept at the World Summit. The United States, on the other hand, far from driving the development of R2P, was fairly silent on the principle until it suddenly intervened in the nal weeks of negotiations leading up to the Summit with a range of demands and reservations that almost prevented any agreement being reached at all (see Bellamy 2009, 6697). Most fundamentally, R2P is simply not about imposing any particularized conception of human rights. As the Summit agreement reveals, the international consensus on what R2P is about is very clear. It is rmly restricted to the protection of populations from four crimes that are universally condemned: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The principle of R2P has been so widely embraced precisely because there is universal agreement about the abhor-

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rent nature of these atrocity crimes. R2P provides no scope for military intervention in the absence of these crimes.

3.2 Weakening restrictions on the use of force and obscuring the principle of right authority Reed charges that the emergence of R2P has had the effect of widening the legal grounds for the use of force and even legalizing unilateral or regional organization intervention (2012, 320). The author would seem to here again have Kosovo in mind. NATOs decision to use force in Yugoslavia [in 1999], Reed reports, raised questions about the identity of the authority that can approve intervention (2012, 321). She then insists that bypassing of the principle of right authority should be resisted (2012, 322). What Reed fails to observe, however, is that states are in agreement on this point. R2P offers an unequivocal answer to the questions posed by the intervention in Kosovo: the authority to undertake military intervention is expressly tied to the Security Council. While it is true that the ICISS report contemplated the legitimacy of the use of force absent the authorization of the Security Council, the Summit agreement reached in 2005 rmly wedded the use of force to the authority of the Council and to the restrictions found in the UN Charterand, again, commentators and, most importantly, states agree that this 2005 agreement is the denitive statement on R2P.3 Moreover, as noted earlier, the Summit agreement makes clear that the resort to force is only to be contemplated if states are manifestly failing to protect their populations from any of the four atrocity crimes. If we contrast this with the 1990s, when the Security Council authorized the use of force to prevent mass starvation in Somalia and to restore democracy in Haiti, we nd that the scope of legitimate intervention is actually more tightly circumscribed rather than expanded by R2P. In short, the emergence of R2P has in no way widened the legal grounds for military action or legalized unilateral intervention. Certainly, the clarity of the agreement on R2P does not ensure that the principle is not at times abused by powerful states in pursuit of their self-interests. States have and will continue to abuse arguments for the humanitarian use of force just as they have and will continue to abuse arguments for the use of force in self-defense. What the clear agreement on R2P does mean, however, is that the misapplication of humanitarian arguments can be rejected and abusive interventions condemned by
3 Certainly, as Reed indicates, numerous states rightly argue that the permanent membership of the Security Council is no longer representative of the distribution of power or cultural diversity in the international system and needs to be reformed. Yet there is agreement that, even in the absence of reform, the Council is the sole organization with the authority to mandate the use of force.

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states. Russias attempt to legitimize its invasion of Georgia in 2008 as an appropriate response to genocide in accordance with R2P, for example, was widely condemned. Recognizing that its invasion clearly fell outside the scope of legitimate action provided for by R2P, Russia did not even attempt to gain Security Council authorization for its actions. Likewise, the largely belated attempt by the United States and its coalition partners to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds was similarly rejected by a signicant proportion of the international community. There are little grounds for thinking, then, that the emergence of R2P has legitimized an increase in the resort to force in relations between states.4 Rather than weakening the restrictions on the use of force, the key shift proposed by R2P is that the resort to force should not be considered merely a discretionary right that states might make use of if the occurrence of atrocities in another state happens to coincide with their particular material or strategic interests, but that it is a solemn responsibility that states ought to discharge in those rare and tragic instances where various stringent considerations have been met and military action can make a positive contribution to the alleviation of grave human suffering. As I have argued elsewhere, this is in accord with scriptural injunctions and a long history of Christian thought that claims that we bear not merely a discretionary right but a God-given and demanding duty to do what we can to protect the vulnerable; as such this proposal is to be welcomed (Glanville 2012). When contemplating what she supposes to be the overly permissive nature of R2P with respect to the use of force, Reed perceives some hope for the future by pointing to the 2004 Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change that included the suggestion that those considering the resort to force should be guided by criteria including seriousness of threat, proper purpose, last resort, proportional means, and balance of consequences (Reed 2012, 324). The High-level Panel, Reed observes, appears to be seeking constructive engagement with the orientation of traditional just-war thinking about limiting the use of force (2012, 324). What Reed fails to acknowledge is that the High-level Panel was merely repeating the suggestion of ICISS (2001, XII) that deliberations on the resort to force for humanitarian purposes be guided by these just war criteria. Such criteria were not adopted by states in the 2005 Summit agreement, and nor does it seem that they will be any time soon despite the repeated pleadings of many R2P advocates, most prominently ICISS co-chair Gareth Evans (see Evans 2008). The permanent members of the Security Council are reluctant to bind themselves to criteria that
4 For a discussion of these cases and a broader argument that the emergence of R2P has neither legitimized, facilitated, or been accompanied by an increase in the resort to force, see Glanville 2013.

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might demand military action where they do not wish to act. However, the Summit agreement outlines in fairly clear terms some provisions that are akin to just war criteria. In addition to making clear that right authority rests with the Security Council, in paragraph 139 of the Summit agreement, seriousness of threat is delineated by the four atrocity crimes, proper purpose is described as the protection of populations from these crimes, and last resort is implied by the phrase should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations. Moreover, a close reading of Security Council deliberations on how to respond to particular crises, such as the crisis in Libya in 2011, clearly reveals that states are already guided in their deliberations by the remaining criteria of proportional means, and balance of consequences.5 3.3 Doing more harm than good I now turn to Reeds nal critique of R2P, one that is concerned with the nal criterion mentioned above: balance of consequences. Reed contends that, while some humanitarian military interventions have been successful, on balance, the militarization entailed in R2P has achieved more harm than good (2012, 315). Among a few fairly scattered examples, Reed asserts that, in Somalia, the militarization of intervention proved disastrous, and in Kosovo, militarized humanitarian intervention without adequate domestic and international legal mechanisms has also been recognized widely as counter-productive (2012, 31516). Detailed studies which have been conducted on the practice of humanitarian intervention since the end of the Cold War tend to paint a very different picture. Taylor Seybolt, for example, has analyzed seventeen military operations conducted in the six conict areas that were the dening cases of the 1990snorthern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and East Timorand concluded that the majority were successful (Seybolt 2007). Of the seventeen operations, nine succeeded in saving lives, four saved some lives but failed to save more, four failed to save lives, and only two made life worse for the victims of conict. Seven were specically charged with delivering humanitarian aid and each one did so successfully (Seybolt 2007, 27074). Certainly this is a mixed record and the two examples of intervention that did more harm than good are to be gravely lamented. Nevertheless, it is a much more positive chronicle of events than that suggested by Reed. Related to her concerns about the balance of consequences is Reeds lament that intervention to protect populations is frequently merged with broader security concerns and political agendas (2012, 320). In a
5

See, for example, United Nations Security Council 2011a, 2011b.

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globalized world such as ours, it will rarely be the case that the occurrence of mass atrocities in one state does not impact on the security and political concerns of other states. Mass atrocity crimes commonly spill across territorial borders. They are typically accompanied by ows of refugees and ows of arms that can destabilize regions. The state failure that often attends these crimes can generate harbors for terrorists and drug trafckers. The coincidence of humanitarian concern with strategic interest does not automatically render an intervention unjust. Nevertheless, Reed is right to warn of the dangers that humanitarian arguments will at times be cynically offered by powerful states in an attempt to justify interventions that are strategically motivated and that do not generate humanitarian outcomes. Thankfully, R2P in no way legitimizes such interventions. As noted earlier, both the attempt by Russia to justify its intervention in Georgia according to the principle of R2P and the largely belated effort by the U.S.-led coalition to justify its invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds gained little traction and were rmly rejected by large portions of the international community. The mere invocation of R2P does not provide legitimacy to an otherwise illegitimate, self-interested intervention. The clarity of agreement on R2P provides the society of states with the means to judge when and where an intervention is justied and to condemn those that fall outside of these bounds. That said, I heartily agree with Reed that we need to be vigilant against the danger that the principle of R2P will be abused, or even simply misapplied, and that military interventions will be undertaken that do more harm than good. This is something that Christians have long been concerned about. Las Casas, for example, warned in the sixteenth century that we ought not endanger a large number of innocent persons in order to free a few persons who also are innocent (1992, 207). It is also something that supporters of R2P, both states and commentators, take very seriously. I suspect that all advocates of R2P are troubled by the idea that the principle could facilitate military actions that only exacerbate the suffering of vulnerable peoples. And so, when R2P is put to work to justify the non-consensual deployment of military force, as it was only for the rst time in Libya in 2011, those who believe that the use of force can at times successfully protect those at risk of atrocities watch closely to determine whether a humanitarian outcome is achieved and to learn lessons about what could be done better next time. In this instance, it seems clear that the bombing campaign waged by NATOs forces helped to prevent the mass slaughter of civilians in the rebel-held city of Benghazi in March 2011. Libyan leader Gadda had declared that he would cleanse Libya house by house and execute anyone who threatened the unity of the state (BBC News 2011). Hours before the Security Council authorized the bombing campaign, he had warned the residents of Benghazi, We are coming tonight. . . . We will nd you in your closets. He promised no

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mercy or compassion for those who opposed his forces (Kirkpatrick and Fahim 2011). But there is less agreement among observers about the balance of consequences of continuing the bombing campaign for a further seven months until Gaddas regime was overthrown. While I suspect that such action was the only way to ensure that mass atrocities were not committed against the civilians that had opposed Gaddas rule, others argue that NATOs actions exceeded the mandate authorized by the Security Council and that the pursuit of regime change was not the best way to secure the safety of the Libyan population (Thakur 2012). These are difficult issues, but they are by no means issues that the principle R2P seeks to obscure or ignore. Rather, those promoting the principle insist that the deployment of force should always be authorized by the Council, undertaken in response to the gravest of atrocity crimes and only when peaceful means are inadequate, and that it should only be pursued when it is perceived to be likely able to successfully rescue vulnerable peoples without doing more harm than good.

4. The Key Limitation of R2P

R2P does not impose a Western liberal discourse of human rights, it does not weaken the legal restrictions on the use of force or legalize unauthorized intervention, and it does not promote the resort to force without due regard for the balance of consequences. But neither is it a awless solution to the centuries-old problem of mass atrocities. The key limitation of R2P, as I see it, is one that Reed does not dwell upon. It is that R2P continues to depend on the political will of states to act. It depends on the willingness of bystander states to apply diplomatic and other non-coercive pressure and, in extreme and tragic situations, to deploy authorized military force to protect populations. The emergence of R2P, which articulates not merely a right but a responsibility to respond to mass atrocities, has quickly had a profound impact on international deliberations on the protection of populations. It acknowledges a moral imperative and it creates a political imperative to respond to grave suffering. World leaders can no longer pretend that atrocities beyond their territories are not their concern, and they struggle to escape socio-political pressures to at least appear to be taking constructive steps toward preventing these atrocities or bringing them to an end. Nevertheless, as Russian intransigence with respect to international efforts to end violence in Syria in the rst months of 2012 has made clear, the practice of R2P remains subject to the vagaries of political will, particularly the will of the most powerful states, and the responsibility to protect the vulnerable continues to be too often eclipsed by the desire to safeguard material and strategic interests. (It is worth emphasizing here that I am lamenting Russian intransigence with respect to international efforts to impose

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non-coercive pressure on the Syrian regime to end the violence, rather than military force. Signicantly, it is in large part due to concerns about the balance of consequences that most states and commentators that desire an R2P-based solution to the crisis remain opposed to the idea of authorizing the resort to force in Syria at the time of writing.)

5. Conclusion
Upon lamenting the uncritical attitude that the church has generally taken toward R2P, Reed quotes with approval two critical interventions that have been offered (2012, 31214). The rst, by Msgr. Celestino Migliore in 2008, I would suggest, represents a helpful word of caution that all advocates of R2P would endorse. Speaking shortly after Russias widely criticized intervention in Georgia, Migliore rightly rebuked the abusive invocation of R2P as a pretext for the arbitrary use of military might, and emphasized that R2P should not be viewed merely in terms of military intervention but that it should be about the international community working together to seek solutions to crises. I would hope, however, that the second critique of R2P that Reed cites, Father Miguel dEscoto Brockmanns speech as President of the General Assembly immediately prior to the Assemblys debate on R2P in 2009, is not to be understood as representative of the Christian position on R2P. While there may be value in some parts of what he said, dEscotos speech was widely interpreted as a destructive contribution to the international conversation on R2P: one that cynically sought to preempt and confuse the General Assemblys debate by misrepresenting the concept of R2P and tying it to the invasion of Iraq, and by pretending that the nuanced agreement on the concept had never been reached in 2005 and that the most extreme and problematic interpretations of the principle were still on the table. Unfortunately, Reed similarly misrepresents R2P in her essay for this journal. The critique of R2P that Reed offers would have served as a strong critique of the idea of humanitarian intervention being promoted by some Western powers had it been written in the late 1990s, but it is not a helpful critique of R2P. Most of the problems and dangers that Reed cites are in reality the very problems and dangers of militarized intervention that R2P seeks to overcome and, as I have argued, international consensus has rapidly emerged around the principle precisely because it is understood to overcome these problems and dangers remarkably well. R2P is far from awless. The debates that continue around the principle, particularly in the wake of the Libyan intervention, reveal that even more clarication on its coercive aspect is desired by some states. Brazils recent suggestion of a principle of responsibility while protecting has

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been well received and represents a useful contribution in this regard.6 But even in the absence of possible further agreement by states, R2P is far from a principle that imposes Western discourses, expands the legal scope for the use of force, and promotes interventions that do more harm than good. It is one that offers a bold but careful framework for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and, as such, I think it holds the promise of advancing the Christian principle of protecting the vulnerable.

REFERENCES
BBC News 2011 Libya Protests: Deant Gadda Refuses to Quit. February 22. Bellamy, Alex. J. 2009 Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities. Cambridge: Polity. Evans, Gareth 2008 The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All. Washington, D.C.: Brookings. Glanville, Luke 2012 Christianity and the Responsibility to Protect. Studies in Christian Ethics 25.3 (August): 31226. 2013 Humanitarian Intervention and the Problem of Abuse after Libya. In Armed Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Reconsiderations, edited by Don Scheid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming. Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect 2009 Implementing the Responsibility to Protect. The 2009 General Assembly Debate: An Assessment. http://globalr2p.org/media/pdf/ GCR2P_General_Assembly_Debate_Assessment.pdf (accessed May 1, 2012). Hamilton, Bernice 1963 Political Thought in Sixteenth-Century Spain: A Study of the Political Ideas of Vitoria, de Soto, Suarez, and Molina. Oxford: Clarendon Press. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) 2001 The Responsibility to Protect. Edited by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun. Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre. Jackson Preece, Jennifer 1998 National Minorities and the European Nation-States System. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kirkpatrick, David D., and Kareem Fahim 2011 Qadda Warns of Assault on Benghazi as UN Vote Nears. New York Times, March 17.
6

See United Nations 2011.

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de Las Casas, Bartolome 1992 In Defense of the Indians. Translated by Stafford Poole. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press. Reed, Esther D. 2012 Responsibility to Protect and Militarized Humanitarian Intervention: When and Why Churches Failed to Discern Moral Hazard. Journal of Religious Ethics 40.2 (June): 30834. Seybolt, Taylor D. 2007 Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Conditions for Success and Failure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steinberg, Donald 2009 Responsibility to Protect: Coming of Age? Global Responsibility to Protect 1.4: 43241. Thakur, Ramesh 2012 Syrians Are Paying the Price of NATO Excesses in Libya. e-International Relations, March 2. Tuck, Richard 1999 The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press. United Nations 2009 Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: Report of the SecretaryGeneral. A/63/677, January 12. 2011 Responsibility While Protecting: Elements for the Development and Promotion of a Concept. A/66/551S/2011/701, November 11. United Nations General Assembly 2005 World Summit Outcome. A/60/1, October 24. United Nations Security Council 2011a Verbatim Record of Meeting 6498. S/PV.6498, March 17. 2011b Verbatim Record of Meeting 6528. S/PV.6528, May 4.