Abstract
This study examines the motives and interests that informed the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)’s response to the Libyan and Syrian crises in the context of the emerging norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P). This came after the violent conflicts that erupted in the two countries triggered by the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ protests since the beginning of 2011. The R2P doctrine was first articulated by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 and later endorsed by the United Nations (UN) World Summit in 2005. It is premised on the principle that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their populations from mass atrocity crimes. If a state is unable or unwilling to protect its population from such atrocities, it forfeits its sovereign immunity, thereby allowing the international community to intervene to protect the population.
Against this background, this study interrogates the international commitment to the R2P doctrine by critically analyzing the UNSC’s response to the Libyan and Syrian crises. It pays particular attention to the underlying motives and interests that shaped the five permanent members of the UNSC’s varied response to the two crises. Using a political economy approach and drawing on documentary sources and elite interviews, the study provides new empirical insights into the decision-making processes of the UNSC within the framework of R2P. There is limited literature that signposts the underlying motives and interests that shaped the Council members’ disproportionate responses to these two crises.
The key findings of this study indicate that major powers across the North/South divide engage with the fledgling R2P norm, to a larger extent, on the basis of self-interest and not as humanitarian or anti-imperialist principle. Evidence challenges the simplistic view that Western nations advocate R2P purely out of humanitarian concerns, or that opposition from powers like Russia and China is exclusively grounded in anti-imperialism. For the most part, what seems to have determined the UNSC’s response in both cases is the confluence of a set of economic, geopolitical, and geostrategic considerations of the P5. In the two cases, members of the Council used R2P rhetorically or the principle of sovereignty to mask underlying self-interest. These findings cast doubt about the permanent members of the Council’s commitment to R2P as a modern-day concept formulated to protect the civilian population from crimes against humanity. More importantly, the findings reveal that major players in ...