Hannes Peltonen - International Responsibility and Grave Humanitarian Crises: Collective Provision for Human Security

This book examines responsibility in grave humanitarian crises, focusing on the international communitys collective responsibility to take action in such cases as genocide or ethnic cleansing.

The idea of collective responsibility highlights how we would like to see the global level primarily as something akin to a community of peoples, rather than as a society of states in which other international and transnational actors operate. Since the acceptance of human rights, and in view of the atrocities of the Holocaust and other genocides, we have realized that some things concern us all: a realization that has led to the development of the responsibility to protect (R2P) framework.

This book focuses on understanding the international community and its collective responsibility. Unlike the research frameworks put forward in other publications on this topic, the research model developed here does not distribute the collective responsibility to particular actors; instead, it sets out how the burden should be divided among those actors responsible in order to protect human security on a global scale.

This book will be of interest to students of humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect, international law, peace and conflict studies, and international relations in general.

Hannes Peltonen is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Lapland, and is the author of Justifications of Inaction: Responsibility and Non-Intervention in Genocide (2012, Saarbrcken: LAP).

Series Editors:
Alex J. Bellamy
Griffith University
Sara E. Davies
Griffith University
and
Monica Serrano
The City University of New York

The aim of this book series is to gather the best new thinking about the responsibility to protect into a core set of volumes that provides a definitive account of the principle, its implementation, and its role in crises, that reflects a plurality of views and regional perspectives.

Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect
From Words to Deeds
Alex J. Bellamy

The Responsibility to Protect
Norms, Laws and International Politics
Ramesh Thakur

Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect
Security and Human Rights
Cristina G. Badescu

Sri Lanka and the Responsibility to Protect
Politics, Ethnicity, Genocide
Damien Kingsbury

International Responsibility and Grave Humanitarian Crises
Collective Provision for Human Security
Hannes Peltonen

First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2013 Hannes Peltonen

The right of Hannes Peltonen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peltonen, Hannes, 1978
International responsibility and grave humanitarian crises : collective
provision for human security / Hannes Peltonen.

pages cm. (Global politics and the responsibility to protect)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Humanitarian intervention. 2. Intervention (International law)
3. Security, International. I. Title.
JZ6369.P44 2013
363.34526dc23

2012026590

ISBN: 978-0-415-52587-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-09376-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

This book has benefited from the challenges offered by a number of people during the past few years. These challenges have come in many shapes and forms, but in the end they have all been helpful in pushing me to think and explain myself better. Some of these people are unknown to me, since they have been anonymous reviewers along the way or conference participants whose names I did not catch. For this reason I cannot thank them directly in person, but my most sincere thanks go to all who have challenged me. Of the people I can name, I am indebted for the guidance given to me by Annabelle Harris, Andrew Humphrys, and Oliver Richmond. I would also like to thank Alex J. Bellamy, Sara Davies, and Monica Serrano, the editors of this book series. The two people who have never refused to read or comment on anything I have pushed on them are Friedrich Kratochwil and Nicholas Onuf. To them I owe the most.

Some of the research or thoughts presented in this book draw from my previous work published in a different or preliminary form elsewhere. These include In or Out? International Community Membership: Beliefs, Behaviour, Contextuality and Principles in Cambridge Review of International Affairs ; The Collective Level in the Responsibility to Protect: Taking the International Community Seriously in Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies ; Sovereignty as Responsibility, Responsibility to Protect, and International Order: On Responsibility, Communal Crime Prevention, and International Law in Uluslararasi Iliskiler ; Modeling Collective International Responsibility: The Case of Grave Humanitarian Crises in Review of International Studies ; Of Rights and Responsibilities in Finnish Yearbook of International Law ; and the published version of my doctoral dissertation, Justifications of Inaction: Responsibility and Non-Intervention in Genocide (Saarbrcken: LAP).

I dedicate this book to you, my reader, who have taken the time to wrestle with the questions discussed here.

This book is about three interrelated things at the international level: responsibility, community, and human security. I discuss responsibility also in general, but I am most interested in the notion of a collective responsibility to ensure at least minimal human security around the world. Particularly since the acceptance of human rights as some measure of human dignity (or of civilization, as in Donnelly 1998) and since the atrocities of the Holocaust and other genocides, we have realized that some things concern us all. One expression of this realization is the notion of crimes against humanity. We have condemned certain acts as crimes that are committed not only against particular others but against us all. Simultaneously, we consider that even though we have not committed such heinous acts, we nevertheless bear some indirect responsibility for them, particularly if we have allowed them to continue. Some call it bystander responsibility (Kroslak 2003), but a more popular expression is the responsibility to protect framework, which has attracted a good deal of attention during the past decade. Although this book is not limited to the responsibility to protect (R2P) framework, I argue that this framework contains a collective responsibility to ensure at least minimal human security around the world and this collective responsibility should be treated as such. To explain, it is usually considered that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their populations, and that if they are unable or unwilling to do it, or themselves perpetrate atrocities against their populations, the responsibility to protect is transferred to some external actor, for instance to the UN Security Council, that may even use force if needed. Contrary to this, I argue that the responsibility to protect framework implies and contains two responsibilities that exist parallel to each other. One is an individual responsibility of each sovereign state, and the other is a collective responsibility of the international community. The latter, I argue, may be dormant at times but it is nevertheless always in the background.