Decolonizing the Responsibility to Protect: On pervasive Eurocentrism, Southern agency and struggles over universals

Many postcolonial or critical scholars are rather sceptical of the Responsibility to Protect principle. In most of the critical literature, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is presented as a product from the West, whose liberal ideal relies on a perception of Southern states being potentially dysfunctional, which in turn justifies an interventionist discourse with neocolonial overtones. The problem with this interpretation of R2P is that it essentially ignores non-Western, particularly Southern, inputs on the concept, falling precisely into the trap that, many authors claim, vitiates Responsibility to Protect: its West-centrism. Building upon a mix of critical, decolonial, postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law scholarship, this article proposes a number of additional steps to decolonize R2P in an effort to avoid what Pinar Bilgin describes as ‘conflating the critiques of the particularity of universals with critiques of the idea of having universals’. What successive decolonizing layers expose is a negotiation process in which the agency of states from the global South in shaping the – still controversial – principle has proved particularly obvious. Decolonizing Responsibility to Protect, this article argues, requires critical scholars to engage in a contrapuntal analysis in order to acknowledge the concept’s mutual constitution by the West and the ‘rest’ and the deeper struggles over universals hiding underneath.

1. What’s ‘neo’ about liberalism?

‘What’s ‘neo’ about liberalism?’ discusses the core ideas and principles of neoliberalism. The best way to conceptualize neoliberalism is to think of it as four intertwined manifestations: an ideology; a mode of governance; a policy package; and a particular form of capitalism. Built upon the classical liberal ideal of the self-regulating market, neoliberalism comes in several strands and variations. Although neoliberalism comes in several forms, one can find an early systematic formulation of its economic principles in those of the Mont Pelerin Society. Founded in 1947 by Friedrich August von Hayek, the Society sought to revive classical liberalism in its attempt to challenge the dominance of Keynesian ideas.

WORKING AS EQUAL MORAL AGENTS

ABSTRACTThis article develops and advances a liberal ideal of equality for evaluating the lawful scope of employer control over employees. It argues that, in addition to attending to discrimination and bargaining power asymmetries, we should ensure that our laws treat workers as the moral equals of their bosses more broadly—as people with equally weighty claims to exercising agency over their own values and lives. To illustrate, the article explains that employer control over workplace expression can preclude colleagues from communicating with each another as moral equals and can compromise employees’ abilities to exercise agency over their own characters. It then discusses how our agential interests in workplace expression can guide legal reform.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the tension between liberalism and feminism. I begin by explaining how the ideal of gender equal sharing of caregiving and paid labor remains elusive. I then introduce the concept of liberal legitimacy, the ideal of mutual respect that it aspires to realize, and the neutrality constraint that systematizes that aspiration. One goal of the Introduction is to help readers begin to feel the pull of the guiding question: How can controversial progressive exercises of political power that aim to further a controversial progressive ideal of gender justice be made consistent with the liberal ideal of mutual respect? A second goal is to set the stage for the answer I will try to defend. I provide a brief outline of the rest of the book, define key terms, and explain my use of Rawls’s theory of political liberalism.

Political toleration, exclusionary reasoning and the extraordinary politics

Western societies today are marked by a broad liberal consensus in favor of toleration. Yet, some philosophers have charged that political toleration as a liberal ideal is incoherent. Some have argued that toleration is incompatible with liberal political orders due to egalitarian considerations. Others have suggested that in a truly liberal society, where the state’s justice-based duties of non-interference are the most appropriate response to diversity, political toleration is practically redundant. This article defends political toleration against the above allegations. My goal is twofold: first of all, to formulate a coherent conception of toleration that is fully consistent with the egalitarian spirit of our times and then to demonstrate that, contrary to critics’ claims, political toleration is not an obsolete ideal that belongs to a bygone era. And all this because, I believe, in a liberal constitutional order, political toleration’s specific role is not identical with, and cannot be reduced to, the state’s justice-based duties of non-interference. Accordingly, I argue that political toleration belongs to a specific mode of politics: the extraordinary politics. When the rules of justice are not available, or their application is not feasible, the extraordinary politics, in which toleration plays a role, emerges as the persistent residue of the ordinary politics. Therefore, political toleration and justice-based duties of non-interference should be seen as accompanying practices that represent two modes of politics.

Toleration

This chapter analyzes the concept of religious toleration. Religious toleration has long been the paradigm of the liberal ideal of toleration of group differences, as reflected in both the constitutions of the major Western democracies and in the theoretical literature explaining and justifying these practice. But while the historical reasons for the special “pride of place” accorded religious toleration are familiar, what may be more surprising is that no one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument for tolerating religion qua religion—that is, an argument that would explain why, as a matter of moral principle, we ought to accord special legal and moral treatment to religious practices. The answer in this book is: not because of anything that has to do with it being religion as such.