Digital Commons at Michigan State University College of Law
Abstract
In this article I argue that the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has sanitized much of the revolutionary potential of human security. While R2P has not subsumed human security — the latter arguably involves a broader array of issues and themes which continue to be discussed — it has come to dominate the debate on the protection of human rights and, specifically, preventing and responding to mass atrocities. Whereas human security, in its early inception, constituted a challenge to the state-centric nature of the international system, R2P maintains the systemic status quo and treats states — and the state-based nature of the United Nations (UN) — as unalterable constants. While R2P is propelled largely by non-states actors, the strategic calculus focuses on altering the behaviour of states — a strategy I consider naïve and/or hubristic — rather than reforming the state-based system in a way which coheres with the original human security approach of empowering individuals at the expense of states
