The responsibility to protect? Imposing the ‘Liberal Peace’

Since the end of the Cold War, debate over international peacekeeping has been dominated by the question of the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’. Advocates of the right of intervention, largely Western states, have tended to uphold liberal internationalist claims that new international norms prioritizing individual rights to protection promise a framework of liberal peace and that the Realist framework of the Cold War period when state security was viewed as paramount has been superseded. In an attempt to codify and win broader international legitimacy for new interventionist norms, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty released a two-volume report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. In the light of this report and broader developments in international security in the wake of September 11, this essay suggests that rather than a moral shift away from the rights of sovereignty, the dominance of the liberal peace thesis, in fact, reflects the new balance of power in the international sphere. Justifications for new interventionist norms as a framework for liberal peace are as dependent on the needs of Realpolitik as was the earlier doctrine of sovereign equality and non-intervention.