Mimicking Just War? How the R2P Uses and Misuses the Just War Tradition

In the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) normative perspective if a state is not capable or is unwilling to be responsible toward its citizens the responsibility to protect them should be borne by the international community which, under certain conditions, can carry out a military intervention in its domestic jurisdiction to address gross violations of human rights. The R2P principles for military intervention (right intention, last resort, proportionality etc.) are deliberately inspired by the Just War Theory (JWT). The paper problematizes the way the R2P uses JWT. In the first place, it claims that the establishment of modern international relations around the principle of sovereignty matched with the rejection of the Just War doctrine. It argues that such a rejection cannot be reduced to a pure normative evolution – that a current normative change can overtake – but the incongruity between sovereignty and Just War was more substantial and still persists today. In this view, the stark dichotomy between responsibility and control (assumed by the R2P) should be questioned, since it neglects a more ambiguous relationship in which sovereignty has always implied a political responsibility. In the second place, the paper challenges the notion of individual sovereignty – on which the R2P is based on – to emphasise the pluralistic character at the origins of sovereignties. The pluralist character of sovereignty collides with the inescapable universalistic stance of the JWT. Finally, building on these insights, the paper sheds some light on current limits and paradoxes of the R2P: the biased reading of the JWT, the problem of ‘who should intervene’, its problematic reception from the states and its narrow effectiveness.