Reconstruct the responsibility to protect: from humanitarian intervention to human security
By Michael J. Butler
Routledge, 2025
Is the doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) a dead letter? The answer to this question of subtle but deep importance is complicated and, for this reason, scholars and students of international relations should welcome Rebuild the responsibility to protectwhich not only provides an incisive and nuanced response but excites important implications. On the one hand, R2P has obviously failed. It is rarely invoked by the United Nations Security Council while civilians continue to suffer in humanitarian crises around the world without a shadow of R2P in sight. An essential element of Butler’s contribution is to diagnose this failure. In other words, why did R2P turn into it given its early promise and its international community? A range of factors has assailed R2P, in particular the dilemma of finding a delicate balance between political necessity and ideational ambition, its tenocentric international legal foundation in which human suffering has become subsumed under international democratic politics. However, the most fundamental cause of R2P’s failure has been and continues to be, its extremely close association – in terms of close confusion – with the question of humanitarian intervention.
Humanitarian intervention is a vexing and long -standing dilemma which results in the concepts of international legality and ethics. The problem is obvious. State sovereignty and the Westphalian model are built on the principle of non-interference and sovereign equality. Suspend the principle of sovereignty and non -intervention of the State for the purposes of humanitarian intervention – even temporarily sine qua no international policy. Unfortunately, despite the international support for humanitarian intervention with hair removal and to decline on different eras, a clear and viable solution to this fundamental dilemma does not exist. The obvious problem for R2P is that to bleed in a humanitarian intervention to the point of a quasi-equivalence, it is vulnerable to all their problems.
The reality of Acuity and Paradox of Butler’s Labor becomes obvious in its diagnosis of R2P diseases. The paradox is that the “failure” of R2P, following its confusion with humanitarian intervention, is in fact not a failure of R2P as such but a failure of humanitarian intervention. R2P has not “failed” because it has not been implemented and therefore remains not tested – as originally designed. Although the intervention has always been an R2P component, its architects never wanted to constitute the whole of the doctrine. On the contrary, this “reactive” dimension is one of the three dimensions, including reconstruction and, in particular, prevention. Overall, R2P, as well as originally designed, was above all an ambitious standard aimed at modifying the very structure of the international security service. The fact that he has not resolved the question of humanitarian intervention is only epiphenomenal to his inability to act as a new standard of international security, in which the international community is ultimately responsible for human security . Thus, the version of R2P which has finally materialized, which overestimated its reactive component, is what failed – not R2P in itself. The consequence, and what Butler invites us to consider is that the theoretical and normative purchase under-sham has not been exhausted but was rather ignored. There remains a viable resistance – if not tested – and guide the doctrine to reinvent security in global policy.
Unlike some researchers (Glanville and Widmaier, 2020), Butler maintains that R2P – not as a solution to humanitarian intervention, but as an ambitious standard intended to transform international security – has not succeeded. But does that mean that he has “failed”, in the fatal sense? Butler, as its title suggests, argues that this is not the case, that R2P can be “rebuilt”. To make this argument, he presents the concept of “stagnation of standards”, thus contributing to the well -known standard of life cycle of Finnemore and Sikkink (1998). Set scholarships by assuming a linear and progressive process of diffusion of standards (Harrison, 2004), Butler maintains that stagnation can afflict standards even after reaching a tilting point due to the resistance of the opposition, which seeks the Status quo beforeAnd due to a lack of internalization of ambivalent actors. Such opposition can lead to standards to reach a stasis point in which the future is uncertain. This is precisely that uncertainty which simultaneously signals the failure and the possibility. R2P’s failure is that he has not reached normative status, which means that the promise he once held may be lost. However, the possibility is that the incorporation of the non-linearity of the standard life cycle model, such as hydrized in the concept of stagnation of butler standards, is the R2P resuscitation potential as a normative project.
The process of resuscitation of standards – that is to say reconstruction – is carried out with an objective assessment of R2P failures. As indicated above, the main defect in R2P was its close association with humanitarian intervention. R2P has been reduced by an ambitious standard to the last “solution” to the dilemma of humanitarian intervention. Many and many times, supporters of R2P have been forced to make political concessions to reconcile either their pure opponents and simply those with which they lacked sufficient support. The result was an “R2P-Lite” (Weiss, 2006), a dug version of R2P whose traction as a standard was paradoxically wrapped by the compromises itself that his supporters made to increase his support among the international community. The problem is that for standards to gain ground, there should be a large range of action in which standards can change behavior (Shultz et al., 2007). However, in its confusion with humanitarian intervention, R2P has narrowed the possible extent of the action of the modification of behavior. Unfortunately, “shrinking the scope of the relevant behavior in this way is under-optimal” (Butler, 2025, p.79). Thus, when the supporters of R2P were mistaken, there was the ambition of the false promise of compromise and modesty.
The silver lining, however, is by moving away from the path of ambition, supporters of R2P can now be in a more advantageous position compared to its creation. A key factor contributing to the unsuccessful R2P trajectory was the early disjunction between its objective and the international environment. This disjunction, according to Butler, in which the insecurity of climate change, the activity of the predatory market, forced migration and pandemic disease were less obvious, is no longer the obstacle to R2P that it was in the past. Although only one quarter of a century has passed since the International Commission for State Intervention and Sovereignty produced R2P, the world has witnessed not only an acceleration of global warming, but of a global financial crisis and a ruinous global pandemic. In large part, these disasters are – at least in their scope – a function of globalization. And, critically, it is this acceleration of globalization that makes proximity to the contemporary international environment for a new iteration of R2P. This time, however, R2P supporters should adopt temerity rather than timidity, because the objective is not simply to review the dilemma of humanitarian intervention; Instead, the real objective is the very transformation of international society via a new supply of security standard.
If he has not been clear so far, the author of this review is fully approved Rebuild the responsibility to protect. Butler’s work is insightful, meticulous, imaginative and ambitious. Its insight that R2P has not failed because it has never been really implemented is original and deep. R2P architects only designed it to “resolve” humanitarian intervention indirectly. Their direct objective was the creation of a new provision of security in which the international community, as well as the State, subscribed to the security of the (human) individual rather than state security. As Butler maintains, this is always possible. Above all, rather than starting from scratch, researchers, political decision -makers and activists should see R2P again – as it was originally planned. In this way, Rebuild the responsibility to protect is, largely, an invitation to its readers to reconsider the possibility and promise of R2P. Many avenues for future research can be found in these pages. What does, for example, the return of the interstate war and a multipolar system for R2P and the diffusion of standards? How should the doctrines of “protection” and “reconstruction” – two of the three dimensions of R2P – designed to arouse maximum support from the international community? How does Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency of the United States has mobile for R2P? On the one hand, an agenda focused on America in the most powerful country in the world is naturally inaugurated with a new international standard based on collective responsibility. On the other hand, given the Western bias which disillusioned supporters to support R2P, a less pronounced international presence for the United States can, ironically, is good for a renewed R2P if the actors who replace the United States are able to lose this by biases and delimit their objective of human insecurity rather than political considerations. In the end, time will tell us, but Butler’s work certainly provides many evidence to give us a break to reconsider what we think about the responsibility of protecting and the promise that it could hold for the future global policy.
References
Butler, MJ (2025) Reconstruct the responsibility to protect: from humanitarian intervention to human security. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315105628
Finnemore, Mr. and Sikkink, K. (1998) “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change”, International organization52 (4), pp. 887-917. https://doi.org/10.1162/002081898550789
Glanville, L. and Widmaier, WW (2020) “R2P and the advantages of the ambiguity of Norm” in Hunt, CT and Orchard, P. (EDS) Build the responsibility to protect: contestation and consolidation. London: Routledge, pp. 50-68. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429352430-3
Harrison, E. (2004) “Socialization of the State, the dynamics of international standards and liberal peace”, International policy41 (4), pp. 521-542. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800095
Schultz, WP, Nolan, JM, Cialdini, RB, Goldstein, NJ and Griskevicius, V. (2007) “Constructive, destructive and reconstructing power”, Psychological sciences18 (5), pp. 429-434. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617693325
Weiss, TG (2006) “R2P after September 11 and the World Summit”, Journal of International Wisconsin Law24 (3), p. 741-760.
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