International Norms and the Practice of Autocratic Rule: The Case of the R2P

After the events in Libya and Syria, it is hardly surprising to note ongoing contestation about humanitarian norms in general and the R2P in particular. Many who argue from a liberal-cosmopolitan perspective consider military interventions legitimate if they alleviate human suffering and contribute to the establishment of a Weltinnenpolitik. Critics on the other hand point to what they regard as misuse of moral arguments by Western liberal powers. Still other arguments remind of the democratic wars literature. Despite their normative disagreements, all these camps seem united in the assumption of a nexus between liberalism, imperial or not, and humanitarian justifications in world politics. In our paper, we criticize the ‘liberal bias’ of these views. More specifically, we point out that recent interventions by authoritarian powers in South-Ossetia, Abkhazia, Ukraine, Syria and Yemen have finally revealed the true ambivalence of humanitarian norms as they seem to legitimize authoritarian rather than liberal ideas. This, we argue, is no coincidence as elements of humanitarianism are easily reconcilable with the output-legitimacy needs and securitization rhetoric of authoritarian rule. As a consequence, not only is the success of liberal norm entrepreneurship questionable in this case. Rather we need to think seriously about whether R2P can be regarded as a liberal norm in the first place. Finally, we need to take into account different scenarios of norm developments in the long-run, some of them intended by liberal actors, some by illiberal actors, and some by neither of these two camps.