Undertaking the Responsibility: international community, states, R2P and humanitarian intervention

In the last decades, an increasing awareness of instances of grave violation of human rights on a massive scale has brought to attention the problematic that whether states and the international community have an ethical responsibility to react to such cases, and (when the conditions require so) to undertake humanitarian military interventions. In the immediate post-Cold War environment, this has taken place parallel to the shift of focus in the security literature from national security towards human security. The varying responses to the grave cases of the 1990s such as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo reaffirmed the necessity to undertake decisive and timely collective action, reminded the question of an ethical duty on the part of the international community to react to mass atrocities. By December 2001, the introduction of the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) set a new framework to take up this question with the aim of transforming the notion of the “right to intervene” into a “responsibility to react”. With all its controversies humanitarian intervention continues to be a part of international political conduct. At the current state of affairs, humanitarian intervention has become politically relevant within the context of the RtoP doctrine. In this context, this dissertation seeks to assess the role of moral/ethical motives in the decisions and/or behaviour of the international community. Accordingly, it takes the assumption of humanitarian intervention as a moral duty as its subject matter, and puts it into test in relation to its newly defined limits and conduct within the RtoP framework.