R2P and the Emergence of Responsibilities Across Borders

This chapter examines the nature of the international responsibilities entailed by the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) principle and explores to what extent these responsibilities are recognized in contemporary international society. This chapter explores the nature of the ‘responsibility’ entailed by R2P, focusing on its quality (what sort of a responsibility is it?), scope (a responsibility for/to do what?) and agency (whose responsibility is it?)—questions that have been contested by scholars and states alike. Illuminating how these three elements speak to and reflect key aspects of cosmopolitan thought, this chapter outlines what a more cosmopolitan position on R2P would look like and how it adds normative sharpness to the debate surrounding the principle. The second part of the chapter asks to what extent states and other actors recognize these responsibilities in practice and behave as if there were protection responsibilities across borders. There are clear signs of an emerging recognition within international society of a shared responsibility to protect populations from atrocity crimes. Although agreement in principle does not translate neatly into agreement on how to act in specific situations, the experience of R2P does suggest the possibility of nascent and developing cosmopolitan responsibilities emerging from within the society of states.

The Cosmopolitan Responsibilities of Republican States

Can the republican state be a bearer of cosmopolitan responsibilities, and if so of what kind? In this chapter, I suggest that they must, but that these obligations will inevitably be constrained in kind. I reach this conclusion in two steps. First, I suggest that, unlike liberal egalitarians, republicans are all moral (if not necessarily all legal and political) cosmopolitans: they do believe that each and every moral agent is entitled to the same claim to non-domination. Yet, they sharply disagree on what it takes to secure this claim: are people best protected from domination if they live in robustly sovereign states, under a global democratic or constitutional regime, or does the solution lie somewhere in between? Second, I suggest that, if this is the case, then all republicans must recognize the existence of cosmopolitan responsibilities for states—even those who advocate the starkest forms of state sovereignty. For some of them, these responsibilities will include the obligation of states to subject themselves to supranational legal systems of some kind; for some, instead, they will only entail obligations to respect each other’s sovereignty. However, these responsibilities will have specific features regardless of such differences. In a nutshell: if, to some extent, the cosmopolitan responsibilities of states might entail the duty to intervene in, or interfere with, the conduct of other states, then these must be importantly constrained by the fact that these very interventions and interferences must themselves be of a non-dominating kind.

Extraterritorial Criminal Jurisdiction and the Cosmopolitan

The assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction by nation states is not inherently cosmopolitan. Rather, it is a double-edged sword. This is because extraterritorial jurisdiction is capable of being wielded for both cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan purposes: for empowerment, but also oppression; for rescue, but also retribution; for protection, but also unilateral political gain. In that context, this chapter introduces the law of extraterritorial jurisdiction, considers why states might wish to exercise it, and then identifies arguments both for (such as universalism, and the avoidance of impunity) and against (such as the undermining of meaningful multilateralism and the rights of an accused) exercises of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Ultimately, this chapter concludes that extraterritorial jurisdiction can only be considered capable of furthering cosmopolitan ideals if certain criteria are met.

Good International Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities to Protect

This chapter examines a key question facing advocates of the cosmopolitan state: how can states best realize their cosmopolitan responsibilities to protect alongside their other responsibilities in cases where they conflict? It does so by focusing on a modest vision of cosmopolitan statehood—the notion of good international citizenship—and the idea that good international citizen states are faced with a continual need to ‘balance’ their potentially conflicting responsibilities. Drawing on the philosophy of value pluralism, the chapter interrogates this notion of ‘balance’ and makes two main claims. First, at times the plural responsibilities of good international citizenship can be successfully balanced through both contextual political decision and pragmatic action. Second, there are undoubtedly hard cases in which this balancing act is impossible, and good international citizens are faced with irresolvable dilemmas, in which ‘dirty hands’ are inevitable.

Foreign Policy and Domination

Foreign policy, even when well-intentioned, operates beyond the control of the individuals whose lives it affects, and this makes it suspect from a republican-cosmopolitan standpoint. When a republican state aspires to avoid dominating others, may it still formulate its own foreign policy? This chapter suggests that there are two ways forward for preserving space for independent foreign policy. The first proposal parses categories of foreign policy initiatives according to their dominating effects in order to (cautiously) permit some and prohibit others. The second proposal conceives of a ‘licensing regime’ to signal which states have reliably displayed a robust commitment to non-domination in their dealings with others, and thus which states may be granted more leeway in formulating independent foreign policy than others.

Free Movement, Sovereignty and Cosmopolitan State Responsibility

How ‘cosmopolitan’ can a sovereign state be? That question is considered here in the context of unauthorized immigration and arguments for free movement of persons across state boundaries. Details are first presented on non-cosmopolitan attitudes commonly expressed by receiving-state leaders in response to unauthorized immigration. They focus not on equal moral standing and the cosmopolitan mandate to give fair consideration to all persons’ interests, but on the criminality of unauthorized entry, often the perceived criminality or poor character of entrants themselves, and a ‘war’ on human smugglers. A robustly cosmopolitan state, it is argued, would support much freer movement of persons. This raises a question, however: is a state which does not seek to control its borders still a cosmopolitan state? It is acknowledged, in relation to an argument from Joseph Carens, that state sovereignty might, in principle, be defined separate from state control of borders. In practice, however, free movement has been strongly associated in recent years with fairly intensive projects of regional integration. These entail significant pooling of sovereignty, creating in effect more-cosmopolitan regions, rather than more-cosmopolitan sovereign states. Overall, the analysis reinforces some significant challenges, highlighted by institutional cosmopolitans, to realizing robust cosmopolitan moral aims in a system of independent sovereign states. It also, however, highlights ways in which states can be ‘more-cosmopolitan’ in relation to migration in the current system.

Coalitions of the Willing and the Shared Responsibility to Protect

There has been widespread support for the idea that the so-called ‘international community’ has a remedial moral responsibility to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities when their own governments fail to do so. Moreover, military intervention may, when necessary, be one means of discharging this proposed ‘responsibility to protect’ or, more colloquially, ‘R2P’. But, where exactly is this responsibility located? In other words, which body or bodies can be expected to discharge a duty to safeguard those who lack the protection of—or, indeed, come under threat from—their own government? In this chapter, I propose ‘coalitions of the willing’ as one (likely provocative) answer to this question, and explore how the informal nature of such associations should inform the judgements of moral responsibility that we make in relation to them. Perhaps most controversially, I suggest that, under certain circumstances, states and other entities each have a duty to contribute to establishing such an ad hoc association.

Global Refugee Crisis

The chapter argues that any effort to share responsibility for refugee asylum will draw upon some cosmopolitan notion of moral and institutional responsibility, but measures far short of a genuinely cosmopolitan legal order could improve the global reception of refugees. Current responsibility is, in practice, based on ‘proximity’ to conflicts, leaving upwards of 84 per cent of the world’s refugees the responsibility of the developing world. The chapter thus suggests that what is required now is to reform existing global structures in order to create alternative assistance pathways that reflect ‘culpability’ for causing the harm that resulted in flight, and ‘capability’ to provide assistance at least proportionate to national cost.

Introduction

The twenty-first century saw the emergence of a new doctrine of state and international responsibility in the form of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This doctrine transforms, in principle, the moral and political vocabulary of international politics from one of traditional definitions of state and human rights to a broadened normative understanding of domestic and global responsibilities. The doctrine stipulates that states individually and collectively have responsibilities to protect their citizens and those of other states from mass atrocity crimes. In using this language the international community has formalized the idea that states, in addition to their rights, have responsibilities that are essentially cosmopolitan in that they are owed to people everywhere....

Legitimacy and the State in Cosmopolitan and Republican Politics

While there exist significant points of divergence between cosmopolitanism and republicanism in their respective responses to the tensions arising within contemporary legitimacy politics and the role for the state therein, it is significant that there remains agreement that there is an efficient role for the state in the global politics of legitimation, an efficiency that actively responds to the tensions in legitimacy that characterize global politics. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the state—in both cosmopolitan and republican politics—shoulders responsibility not only towards its own formally assigned population, but further functions as an agency culpable in solutions to more globally oriented problems: as bearing the burden of responsibility to peoples whose own states fail. The state—cosmopolitan and republican—is a global agent with glocalized and globalized responsibilities.