Description
A common criticism against intervention in general, and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) more specifically, is that focus is on atrocity crimes, and not on ‘everyday atrocities’ – a term used to refer to deaths from hunger, poverty, and ill-health. “In the Rwandan genocide, around 800,000 people were killed in one hundred days. A person dies for hunger-related reasons every 10 seconds” as Dunford and Neu recently argued. Chomsky similarly has argued that R2P encounters a problem of double standards as “there is no thought of invoking even the most innocuous prescriptions of R2P to respond to massive starvation in the poor countries”. The implication is that money and effort should be spent instead on hunger, poverty-alleviation, and development, since these cost more lives and can be considered underlying causes for atrocity crimes.
This paper aims to show that such a view is misguided, and that it is likely to have the opposite of the intended results. Two main arguments will be put forward. It will be shown a. that the current focus of R2P on atrocity crimes is justified on moral, psychological, and political grounds, conflating the two priorities, atrocity crimes and everyday atrocities will be counterproductive, and could lead to more lives being lost, and b. that the two priorities are mutually reinforcing, support by the international community on an instrument such as R2P is bound to have positive repercussions on similar instruments of human security and development.
