Communication,reflexivity and harm principle: what might an ideal speech situation look like in responsibility to protect?

ABSTRACT

Previous accounts of International Relations research have extensively focused on deontological ethics in analysing Responsibility to Protect (R2P). At the same time, discourse ethics – along with Jürgen Habermas’ theory of ideal speech situation – has been overlooked. This article argues that the R2P process has gradually moved toward the Habermasian ideal speech situation. The Habermasian approach also provides a useful theoretical framework to understand the new, more inclusive and critical, forums of communication and initiatives set in motion by emerging non-Western norm-entrepreneurs in the R2P process, notably the Responsibility while Protecting (RwP) initiated by Brazil in 2011. From the perspective of discourse ethics, RwP could be understood as a cosmopolitan harm principle designed to manage the potentially harmful side-effects of the application of R2P. The article further argues that, despite the current paradigm shift of norm-entrepreneurship on R2P from deontological ethics to discourse ethics, it has thus far only partially fulfilled the criteria of an ideal speech situation.     

Can the doctrine of just military intervention survive Iraq?

The disastrous consequences of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 appear to discredit just war theories that justify military intervention in sovereign states in the name of human rights. It is possible, however, to identify factors that distinguish a defensible military intervention from the kind pursued in Iraq, and to incorporate these into a doctrine of humanitarian military intervention that would not have permitted the Iraq invasion. This improved doctrine stands in contrast to the militant interventionist doctrine that endorsed the invasion – a variant referred to here as the doctrine of just anti-totalitarian war (JAW). In order to critique the JAW doctrine and distinguish it from the improved doctrine, I examine critically the JAW-supporters' attempt to make sense of what went wrong in Iraq, and propose an alternative diagnosis. It is this alternative diagnosis that grounds a defense of moderate versions of the doctrine of just military intervention, which I seek in turn to render ‘Iraq-proof’. My Iraq-proof refinement is expressed in a list of injunctions. These require, among other things, critical interrogation of the moral standing of intervening powers and greater attention to the legitimate grievances of adversaries in regions targeted for intervention. They would also permit military intervention only in moral emergencies, and usually only to establish safe havens and protect relief supplies.     

Selective humanitarian intervention: moral reason and collective agents

This paper examines four interpretations of the observation that humanitarian intervention might be used ‘selectively’ or ‘inconsistently’ in order to elucidate the normative commitments of the deliberative process in international relations. The paper argues that there are several types of concerns that are implicit in the accusation of inconsistency, and only some of them amount to objections to humanitarian intervention as a whole. The paradox of humanitarian intervention is that intervention is prohibited except where the intervention is humanitarian, yet humanitarian reasons never exist in isolation, and it is nearly impossible to determine the real reason for intervention (or any other collective action) in the international arena. The problems revealed by an examination of inconsistency in the example of humanitarian intervention turn out to be general problems with applying the norms of practical reasoning to moral questions dealing with collective agents.     

The political responsibility of bystanders: the case of Mali

It has been a commonplace since the 2012 coup to hear how fragile the Malian democracy had become. Among the many causes is the political role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played as a fourth branch of government. As deliberative democratic processes were replaced by a corrupt elite consensus during the past eight years, NGOs assumed an important place in this system. This included humanitarian NGOs. However, these same NGOs until recently were blind to the political impact they were having. This essay suggests one explanation for this blindness and argues for the importance of a conception of humanitarian aid that balances moral responsibility with political responsibility.     

Self-determination Versus the Determination of Self: A Critical Reading of the Colonial Ethics Inherent to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The United Nations' (UN) adoption of a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is intended to mark a fundamental ethical turn in the relationships between indigenous peoples and the community of sovereign states. This moment is the result of decades of discussion and negotiation, largely revolving around states' discomfort with notion of indigenous self-determination. Member states of the UN have feared that an ethic of indigenous self-determination would undermine the principles of state sovereignty on which the UN is itself grounded. However, such fears are the result of very poor understandings of the ethical principles under which the relations between indigenous peoples and nation-states already have been formed under centuries of European colonialism. The principle of self-determination embraced in this Declaration does not diverge from colonial norms; it entrenches these norms as international policy. Without doubt, indigenous peoples are more likely to benefit than suffer from states' observance of the Articles within this Declaration. Reducing the challenge of indigenous peoples' rights to the notion of self-determination set out in this document, though, misses an extraordinarily important opportunity to critically investigate the ethic of rights that has produced an opposition between nation-states and indigenous peoples to begin with. A true turn in the ethics of this relationship would see not simply the institution of a right to self-determination but, rather, indigenous peoples' right to first determine the nature of self for themselves.     

The politics of humanitarian intervention: a critical analogy of the British response to end the slave trade and the civil war in Sierra Leone

A leading scholar of humanitarian intervention, Brown (2002) Brown, C. 2002. “Humanitarian intervention and international political theory”. In Human rights and military intervention, Edited by: Mosley, A. and Norman, R. 153–69. Aldershot: Ashgale Publishing.  [Google Scholar] refers to British internal politics to satisfy the influential church and other non-conformist libertarian community leaders, and above all ‘undermining Britain's competitors, such as Spain and Portugal, who were still reliant on slave labour to power their economies, as the principal motivation for calls to end the slave trade than any genuine humanitarian concerns of racial equality or global justice’. Drawing on an empirical exploration, this article seeks to draw a parallel between this politics of humanitarian intervention which characterised the abolition movement, albeit rarely recognised in the academic literature, and the British intervention to end the almost 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of this politics of humanitarian intervention in the reconstruction of post-conflict Sierra Leone.     

Alternative agents for humanitarian intervention

The use of private security companies by national governments is met with widespread skepticism. Less understood is the role these companies can play in international humanitarian interventions in the service of international organizations. I argue here that despite valid concerns about the use of such private entities, we should nonetheless see them as legitimate participants in efforts to secure human rights protection around the globe. In order to assess their legitimacy, we need to ensure, among other things, that they can adhere to ethical standards when serving in humanitarian missions, that they can be held accountable when they fail to uphold the standard of justice enshrined in international law, and that their for-profit status does not have implications detrimental to humanitarian concerns.     

Tarasoff and the Duty to Protect

Summary

The Tarasoff I and Tarasoff II cases were decided by the California Supreme Court in 1974 and 1976, respectively. These cases involved the murder of a young woman by her ex-boyfriend, who had been a patient at a University counseling center. The parents of the young woman sued, alleging negligence. Tarasoff I set forth a “duty to warn” on the part of psychotherapists. Upon rehearing in Tarasoff II, the decision was upheld but modified. The court ruled that when a therapist determines, or should have determined, that a patient presents a serious danger of violence to another, the therapist has a “duty to protect” that other person. In this article, we address subsequent cases that have arisen under the “duty to protect” doctrine, and analyze some of the legal issues that these cases have raised.     

Humanitarian Intervention, Altruism, and the Limits of Casuistry

This essay argues that the ethics of humanitarian intervention cannot be readily subsumed by the ethics of just war without due attention to matters of political and moral motivation. In the modern era, a just war draws directly from self-benefitting motives in wars of self-defense, or indirectly in wars that enforce international law or promote the global common good. Humanitarian interventions, in contrast, are intuitively admirable insofar as they are other-regarding. That difference poses a challenge to the casuistry of humanitarian intervention because it makes it difficult to reason by analogy from the case of war to the case of humanitarian intervention. The author develops this point in dialogue with Michael Walzer, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and President Clinton. He concludes by showing how a casuistry of intervention is possible, developing a motivational rationale that draws on the Golden Rule.     

“Never Again War”

This essay addresses the complexities of the Roman Catholic position on war by evaluating recent documentary evidence, attending to the contemporary challenges of terrorism and humanitarian interventions. It presents two arguments. First, attending to traditional Catholic resources for assessing war, papal criticism of recent military action, and debates about a recent shift in Catholic just war logic, this essay argues that Catholic teaching on war has undergone a repositioning in a pacifist direction. Second, it contends that recent critiques of this shift in position by scholars such as George Weigel and James Turner Johnson, however, are wrong to categorize this a “functional pacifism.” Though a development from within just war theory and pacifist reasoning, the Church's new stance does not operate as a type of pacifism, allowing too many possibilities for justified armed conflict to be labeled as “functional” pacifism. The essay concludes by examining the traditional Catholic theological commitments that place limits on any movement toward pacifism, precluding even a functionally pacifist position.