Description
The four crimes listed under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) directly threaten human life. The R2P, therefore, as a commitment to prevent atrocity crimes, represents the acknowledgement of a cosmopolitan duty to prevent significant harm. But there is a problem with this apparent cosmopolitan commitment: state actors giving assistance under the R2P’s second pillar are often themselves complicit in propagating the underlying structures of mass atrocity. This speaks to the fact that there are conceptual gaps in the logic of R2P’s preventive agenda. There are all too many examples of where actors who proclaim to be committed to the R2P’s prevention agenda act in ways which directly undermine their professed commitments. The result is an R2P doctrine that misses something seemingly obvious: for atrocity prevention efforts to be successful, the international community must recognise that harmful state actions have the potential to exacerbate or facilitate atrocities, and therefore part of states’ R2P must be to curb international actions that have a current or potential contribution to instances of atrocity crime. Building on emerging claims in the scholarship about R2P’s relationship with negative harms, the main contribution of this article is to explore the potential for an explicit conceptual clarification within the three pillar R2P structure that can begin the process of more clearly aligning the R2P’s preventive agenda with a coherent approach to cosmopolitan human protection.
