Description
The crimes of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing listed under the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) directly threaten the right to a minimally decent standard of life. R2P, therefore, as a commitment to prevent atrocity crimes, represents the acknowledgement of a duty to prevent significant harm. But there is a problem: state actors giving assistance in alignment with R2P’s second pillar are often themselves complicit in propagating the underlying structures of mass atrocity. This means that there is a conceptual gap in the logic of R2P’s preventive agenda. The result is an R2P doctrine that misses the vitally important point that, 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 cosmopolitan negative duties, 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 R2P’s preventive agenda with a coherent approach to cosmopolitan human protection.
