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From ISIS to ICISS: A critical return to the Responsibility to Protect report

In light of the post-intervention crisis in Libya, this article revisits critically the vision of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) offered in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) – frequently taken as the conceptual bedrock for R2P doctrine. It is argued that the perverse effect of ICISS doctrine is to replace political responsibility with paternalism. The demand that states be made accountable to the international community ends by making states accountable for their people rather than to their people. The argument is developed across five critical theses. These include claims that R2P changes the burden of justification for intervention, that it usurps popular sovereignty in favour of state power, and that it diffuses post-conflict responsibilities. The article concludes that pre-emptive ‘human protection’ efforts risk crowding out questions of systemic transformation, i.e. what kind of an international order we want to live in.