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In Defense of the Responsibility to Protect
Author(s) -
Glanville Luke
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of religious ethics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.306
H-Index - 20
eISSN - 1467-9795
pISSN - 0384-9694
DOI - 10.1111/jore.12008
Subject(s) - responsibility to protect , humanitarian intervention , interventionism (politics) , political science , law and economics , law , intervention (counseling) , use of force , human rights , environmental ethics , criminology , sociology , international law , philosophy , international relations , politics , psychology , psychiatry
This essay responds to E sther R eed's recent critique of the Responsibility to Protect ( R2P ) principle in this journal. It argues that R eed fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents R2P . Her critique of R2P would have served well as a critique of the earlier concept of humanitarian intervention had it been penned in the late 1990s. But most of the problems and dangers that R eed identifies are in reality the very problems and dangers that R2P seeks to overcome, and I suggest that it does overcome them quite successfully. R2P does not impose Western ideals on the rest of the world, weaken the legal restrictions on the use of force, or promote abusive interventionism. Rather, it offers a bold but carefully constructed framework that holds the promise of promoting the protection of vulnerable populations from mass atrocities.