UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE With the Best of Intentions: Normative Dilemmas of the Responsibility to Protect DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Political Science by Tiffany Iris Williams Dissertation Committee: Professor Kevin Olson, Chair Associate Professor Keith Topper Associate Professor Bronwyn Leebaw 2017 © 2017 Tiffany Iris Williams DEDICATION To Cayden, Landon, and Emma, for giving me more joy than I ever could imagine, and Adam, I still love you and miss you. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Historical Narrative 22 CHAPTER 2: Community 70 CHAPTER 3: Responsibility 129 CHAPTER 4: Conclusion 194 REFERENCES 218 APPENDIX A: Member Countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 244 APPENDIX B: Member Countries of the Group of 77 (G-77) 246 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair, Kevin Olson, for his support throughout this arduous process. Without his help in navigating the program and his advocacy, this dissertation would not have been possible. I also appreciate the intellectual freedom he granted to pursue my interests and the careful feedback that greatly improved my work. I would also like to thank Keith Topper for introducing me to Cavell and Wittgenstein, whose work animated this dissertation, and for inspiring me to look at my subject in a new way. I would also like to express appreciation to both for their dedication to and passion for teaching. Finally, I would like to thank Bronwyn Leebaw, a careful and critical scholar on issues of international ethics, for providing me with a valuable international relations perspective and so graciously agreeing to be on my committee on such short notice. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues. I owe a debt of gratitude in particular to Pernilla Johannson, who inspired me to begin writing my dissertation and who has been with me every step of the way. I am grateful for the immense amount of time she spent giving feedback on my dissertation, and most importantly, for her unwavering encouragement and faith in my academic abilities, motivating me to keep going when I was ready to give up. I would also like to thank Marcos Scauso and John Emery, as well as Eric Heinze, for in different ways having faith in the value and interest of my work even when I didn’t. Finally, my thanks to Alexander Hodge- Wallis for finally making UCI feel like home. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Tiffany Williams Education University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science, June 2017 Concentrations: Political Theory; Philosophy of Language; Postcolonial Theory; International Relations Theory San Diego State University, San Diego, CA Master of Arts in Political Science, May 2009 San Diego State University, San Diego, CA Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, May 2005 Teaching Experience University of California Irvine, School of Social Sciences – Irvine, CA Graduate Teaching Assistant: Introduction to American Politics, Introduction to International Relations, Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology, Introduction to Law, Families and Intimate Relations, Race and Ethnicity Fall 2010 – Fall 2016 San Diego State University – San Diego, CA Graduate Teaching Assistant: American Politics in an International Perspective, Introduction to American Politics, Fall 2006 – Spring 2008 Work Experience Legal Assistant, 2005-2010 McAteer and McAteer – San Diego, CA Administrative Assistant, 2000-2005 West Star Properties – El Cajon, CA Awards and Special Recognitions Frances V. Harbour Graduate Student Paper Award, International Studies Association (2017) Dean of Social Sciences recognition of outstanding teaching award at the University of California, Irvine (Winter 2015, Fall 2012). Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship, University of California, Irvine v Conference Presentations Williams, Tiffany (2017). “Talk of a Break to Hide Continuities: Revising the End of the Cold War in the Light of North-South Relations” International Studies Association Baltimore, MD 24 February 2017. Williams, Tiffany (2017). “Hi-stories of Sovereignty and Human Rights: Critiquing the Myth of Westphalia and the Holocaust” International Studies Association Baltimore, MD 22 February 2017. Williams, Tiffany (2016). “Challenging the Responsibility in R2P: An Alternative Based on Critical Solidarity Rather than Naïve Cosmopolitanism” International Studies Association, West Pasadena, CA 23 September 2016. Williams, Tiffany (2016). “Is the Responsibility to Protect Undermining International Democracy?” Jack W. Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy 12th Annual California Graduate Student Conference, UC Irvine Irvine, CA 7 May 2016. Williams, Tiffany (2016). “The Grammar of Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Deconstruction of R2P” International Studies Association Atlanta, GA 16 March 2016. Williams, Tiffany (2015). “Cosmopolitanism and R2P: Cozy Bedfellows or Antagonists?” Who Cares? Workshop on the Economies, Technologies and Ethics of Aid, UC Irvine Irvine, CA 2 October 2015. Williams, Tiffany (2015). “With God on Our Side: Perils and Promises of Prophetic Speech in International Human Rights Discourse” International Studies Association, West Pasadena, CA 25 September 2015. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION With the Best of Intentions: Normative Dilemmas of the Responsibility to Protect By Tiffany Iris Williams Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Irvine, 2017 Professor Kevin Olson, Chair The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is widely heralded as a new norm in international relations and has become a primary ethical language in international politics. That R2P represents a normative advance is widely assumed, and the overwhelming focus for R2P supporters is how to improve its implementation. Whether R2P should be implemented is rarely asked. In contrast, I argue that R2P suffers from severe normative and theoretical flaws that undermine its desirability as an international political project. To bring these flaws to light, this dissertation analyzes the discourse of humanitarian intervention/R2P by identifying its underlying concepts and categories and demonstrating how this field of knowledge has been constituted by relations of power, specifically structures of global inequality. First, I demonstrate that R2P and humanitarian intervention use two historical narratives to justify their legitimacy and necessity. These stories, which involve the historical emergence of international law, including the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention, and the emergence of the norm of humanitarian intervention, largely exclude the historical experiences of those in the global South, rendering both narratives theoretically and empirically flawed. Second, R2P relies on the idea of community, as evidenced by its calls for an international vii community imbued with responsibility and claims that this community has accepted R2P. In contrast, I show that the existence and character of the ‘international community’ itself is problematic and that by marginalizing perspectives from the South, the R2P discourse actually undermines the formation of such a community. Third, I argue that R2P’s invocation of responsibility again works against its intention of instantiating global responsibility. By grammatically linking sovereignty and responsibility, human rights become relevant within a state and not in international practices, making Western states responsible for protection but not for their own harms. Moreover, this problematization reduces all events to an intervention/non- intervention binary frame, which lends support to harmful military interventions and marginalizes other humanitarian options. In response to these severe limitations, I offer an alternative to R2P, which I term international responsiveness, that retains a concern for the well- being of those beyond our borders but challenges rather than reinforces structures of global inequality. viii INTRODUCTION In the wake of the controversy surrounding NATO’s 1999 intervention into Kosovo, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked, “if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?” (quoted in ICISS 2001a, vii). In response, the Canadian government convened the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), a panel of prominent diplomats and academics, representing all parts of the globe, which sought to develop a global consensus on when it was acceptable to employ force to stop human rights atrocities.1 The result was the 2001 doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which sought to shift the meaning of sovereignty from the principle of non-intervention to responsibility. Its central theme is the “idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophes – from mass murder and rape, from starvation – but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be born by the broader community of states” (ICISS 2001a, viii). This global responsibility involved a continuum of action: to “prevent” atrocities from occurring at all; to “react” when they did occur; and to “rebuild” after intervention takes place. After its initial formulation, the Responsibility to Protect