Description
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) mandates that state sovereignty implies responsibility. When a state fails in its responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocity crimes, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect. But while R2P articulates when a military intervention is permissible, it has left a critical question unanswered: how can intervening states morally justify a military intervention to their own citizens? This article explores how the present standard for justifying the use of force under Pillar III has created a moral tension between states’ obligation to their own citizens versus non-citizens. Zeroing in on the normative conceptualisation of state legitimacy, the article analyses how the dominant understanding of the nature of the state and the role of government in liberal political thought (the social contract model), makes the demand of a global duty of humanitarian intervention theoretically impossible. It further discusses Allen Buchanan’s “state as an instrument for justice” model. The article finds that although this model effectively shows why humanitarian intervention is morally legitimate vis-à-vis the intervening states’ own citizens, it is not without its problems. Of particular concern is its failure to demonstrate the special relationship that exists between citizens of a state. Finally, the article sets out what it perceives to be a superior account of the normative conceptualisation of political legitimacy: a so- called “dignity based” model of political legitimacy derived from Ronald Dworkin’s philosophical narrative in Justice for Hedgehogs. The article discusses why the “dignity based” conception of state legitimacy offers a superior model for reconciling governments’ duties towards their own citizens with the existence of a global duty of humanitarian intervention to save non-citizens from the most atrocious crimes.
