The object of this thesis is to consider the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility and to examine how this relationship has developed over time. There is a conventional story told by many scholars of International Relations which holds that sovereignty has ‘traditionally’ entailed the absence of responsibility and accountability. It has meant that states have a right to govern themselves however they choose, free from outside interference. Only in recent years, the tale goes, have the indefeasible rights that sovereigns have long enjoyed been challenged by notions that sovereigns are responsible and accountable for the protection of their populations. Ideas of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ which have emerged since the end of the Cold War are framed as radical departures from the way in which sovereignty has been ‘traditionally’ understood. This thesis challenges this conventional account of the history of sovereignty. It argues that the notion that sovereignty entails responsibilities is not new. Rather, responsibilities have been an enduring feature of the social and historical construction of sovereignty. The thesis demonstrates that sovereignty has been understood to involve varied and evolving responsibilities since it was first articulated in early modern Europe and it traces the historical development of the particular tension between the right of sovereign states to be self-governing and free from outside interference and their responsibility to secure the safety of their populations.

This thesis will reassess the traditional doctrine of diplomatic protection in light of two significant and related developments in modern international law: (i) the proliferation of international human rights law and its granting of rights to individuals as subjects of international law; and (ii) the evolving conception of State sovereignty as including responsibility pursuant to the U.N.’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. It will argue that the traditional doctrine – which holds that States have a discretionary right to espouse claims on behalf of their own nationals for wrongs committed against them by other States, but that the individuals harmed have no right to protection – is outdated and that these developments should lead to the recognition of a limited individual right and concomitant State obligation to provide diplomatic protection in certain circumstances. Responsibility to protect thus confirms a duty to protect using diplomatic means.

Today there exists a legal norm that declares the existence of a global responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities. Previous doctrines of non-intervention and permissibility were inadequate and demonstrated the need for a new outlook. From a commission proposal to international acceptance the doctrine of a responsibility to protect (R2P) developed quickly and legitimately. Recent events, especially the events in Libya during the Arab Spring, highlight the conceptual evolution of the norm and, more importantly, an international acceptance of its binding quality. Therefore, it is apparent R2P has achieved the status of a legal norm of international law.

This thesis will reassess the traditional doctrine of diplomatic protection in light of two significant and related developments in modern international law: (i) the proliferation of international human rights law and its granting of rights to individuals as subjects of international law; and (ii) the evolving conception of State sovereignty as including responsibility pursuant to the U.N.’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. It will argue that the traditional doctrine – which holds that States have a discretionary right to espouse claims on behalf of their own nationals for wrongs committed against them by other States, but that the individuals harmed have no right to protection – is outdated and that these developments should lead to the recognition of a limited individual right and concomitant State obligation to provide diplomatic protection in certain circumstances. Responsibility to protect thus confirms a duty to protect using diplomatic means.

Today there exists a legal norm that declares the existence of a global responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities. Previous doctrines of non-intervention and permissibility were inadequate and demonstrated the need for a new outlook. From a commission proposal to international acceptance the doctrine of a responsibility to protect (R2P) developed quickly and legitimately. Recent events, especially the events in Libya during the Arab Spring, highlight the conceptual evolution of the norm and, more importantly, an international acceptance of its binding quality. Therefore, it is apparent R2P has achieved the status of a legal norm of international law.

This project seeks to expand the dialogue about international humanitarian intervention in a complex emergency or mass atrocity situation by asserting that post-intervention political reconstruction is as essential to the intervention as is the provision of material humanitarian aid and even the ostensive goal of protecting the aid regimes. As a result of this assertion, consideration of humanitarian intervention has, to this point, been too focused on the legal, ethical, and theoretical implications of war and hegemony. The current dialogue centers on its security studies aspects, owing largely to its Cold War precedent. However, a full consideration of the subject of humanitarian intervention must also consider the broader implications of the intervention, including recovery and mitigation of future events. When this is considered at all, the literature to this point largely treats post-intervention establishment of political and social infrastructure as a secondary consideration to the military intervention. The primary approach to address this needed expansion includes drawing a comparison between humanitarian intervention and a similar domestic concept: comprehensive emergency management theory. While there are several dissimilarities between emergency management and its putative international correlate, the theoretical framework it establishes—including not only the response found in the usual literature, but also the well-defined concepts of recovery, mitigation, and preparedness—can expand our understanding of the implications and requirements of humanitarian intervention. It also provides an important lesson in its mirror example for the prescribed evolution of humanitarian intervention scholarship away from its Cold War genesis. This is because domestic emergency management also has a foundation in security studies concerns, but has since evolved into an all-hazards philosophy that embraces prevention and recovery as much as simple response to a human crisis. This parallel will provide a framework for approaching humanitarian intervention that goes significantly beyond the literature to this point and provides a much more encompassing approach to the subject than there has been to this point.

Humanitarian intervention is a concept that generates several problems in our time. The idea of humanitarian intervention concerns the modern norms of sovereignty and noninterventional principals. It also concerns the conventional norm, which declares that states are not allowed to interfere in other states’ internal affairs. The use of military force to implement humanitarian intervention is restricted according to international law. This is what this thesis intends to investigate. The purpose was to find out the causes behind the intervention in Libya, which was carried out by NATO. The main questions were (1) to find out if the intervention in Libya was a humanitarian intervention (2) or if there were other motives that were behind the intervention. Two classical international relations theories have been utilized for the analysis. The analysis focused on the five UN Security Council members’ statements and arguments, which have been expressed in the UN Security Council. This issue created a gap between the members of the Security Council, especially between the Western states and the Russian and Chinese authorities

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This thesis examines the discourse on human security, in particular the 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect. I contend that the human of human security is deeply indebted to an account of the modern subject that is also responsible for producing the model of the citizen/state relationship to which human security is conceived of as a response. Human security reaffirms the appropriateness of the sovereign state while at the same time re-conceiving sovereignty as responsibility and empowering certain international actors to intervene in sovereign states should they fail to act responsibly. Like the citizen, the ostensibly universal category of the human is produced through the exclusion or dehumanization of some ways of being human and some human beings. However, I also consider the ways in which human security works to humanize its subjects, producing the kinds of humans that can be secured.

This dissertation examines the history of humanitarianism in international relations by tracing the relationship between moral obligation and sovereignty from the 16th century to the present. Its main argument is that moral obligations and sovereignty are mutually constitutive, in contrast to a widely held assumption in international relations scholarship that they are opposed to each other. The dissertation’s main theoretical contribution is to develop a framework, using a genealogical method of inquiry, for understanding the relationship between sovereignty and the shifting boundaries of moral obligation during the Westphalian period. This approach makes it possible to identify both elements of continuity and change in the history of humanitarianism and practices of sovereignty. The first chapter demonstrates how the extant literature on sovereignty and humanitarianism fails to adequately account for how states have participated in the construction of new moral boundaries even as they have sought to assert their own sovereignty. Chapter two lays out the dissertation’s theoretical framework, first by outlining an identity-based understanding of sovereignty in relationship to moral obligation, and then discussing the genealogical method that is used in three case studies. The following three chapters contain the dissertation’s empirical contributions, which are three historical cases that represent pivotal moments in the history of moral obligation and sovereignty. Chapter three examines the assistance offered by Elizabeth I to Huguenot refugees from 1558-1603, and relates England’s moral obligations towards Huguenots to the emergence of a sovereign English confessional state. Chapter four examines the relationship between British abolitionist arguments against slavery in the 19th century, and justifications for the extension of empire. Chapter five examines the emergence and evolution of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine since 2001, whose advocates posit a modified conception of sovereignty that is explicitly tied to moral obligation. The concluding chapter discusses how the dissertation accounts for both the rise of humanitarianism and the persistence of sovereignty in international relations, as well as provides some reflections on areas for future research.