Responsibility To Protect:the Paradigm Shift Of International Relations On Sovereignty And Human Rights

A prevailing view and thus the aim for utilizing both disciplines holds that international law may represent the background values of international politics. The basic political ideas of the international system, such as non-intervention, human rights, political equality of states, and state sovereignty are embedded in international law. The responsibility to protect is a paradigm shift on Sovereignty and Human rights as established after the creation of the Peace of Westphalia and United Nations Charter.Firstly, an international consensus was accomplished at the World Summit Outcome Document2005especially in relation to the definition of state sovereignty in regards to four mass atrocities (genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity). Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity). This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability. Through the UN, the international community has the responsibility to use diplomatic, and other peaceful means in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the charter to help protect populations from these four mass atrocities. This would become the birth grounds of the Responsibility to Protect as an international norm within the UN Resolution1674and subsequently the Responsibility to Protect Report designed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. There are several anomalies that the responsibility to protect established as well as new problems which the new definition had to define. After its first implementation in Libya, scholars and the international system are divided upon R2P’s results and intents.Secondly, it is peculiar that the responsibility to protect has been particularly set in motion by a specific group of members within the United Nations Security Council, informally referred to as the P3-United States, France and the United Kingdom. Most international relations theories fall short of accounting for the rearrangement of the international system as has been established by the responsibility to protect whenever the international norm becomes applicable. Neoliberalists contend that the fact that the international system is anarchic does not imply that states do not act in their own interests, but rather they have a greater belief in cooperation, for the very reason that it is in the self-interest of each actor to cooperate. Institutions cannot get states to stop being short-term power maximizers. Therefore neoliberalism falls short in explaining R2P because it cannot account for why states have not agreed to R2P becoming an international law nor why states would relinquish their sovereign rights as contained within the United Nations Charter. Constructivism focuses on the identity and awareness of states as a shared sense of belonging to an international system where there must be trust between states. These characteristics of a international system may be suitable to the R2P norm since it continues to convey an identity of an "international community" and "commonness". However, this identity has not brought all the states together, especially those Great Powers who still emphasize the principle of non-intervention, cautious advancement of the responsibility to protect with the involvement of the international community (UN General Assembly) rather than just the UN Security Council.Neorealism emphasizes the power distribution among states, the dynamics of power politics, and international structure. Neorealism considers strongly that states are rational actors that only make decisions that are valuable to the survival of the state as well as in maintaining a better position in the competition between states. The theory though lacking in regards to international legal perspectives, Neorealism neglects the impact of domestic politics and the interests and cost-benefit considerations of political leaders in the making of foreign policy.This paper attempts to explore the origins of the paradigm shift on sovereignty and human rights by using the neorealist account of international relations. The thesis further argues that the contents of the responsibility to protect inevitably stifle the progress of the international norm.Within his text titled the Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn outlines the foundations of a paradigm, the threshold and the characteristics of a shift. Scientific paradigm describes everything which the science holds, all of its laws, beliefs, procedures, methods, everything upon which it bases its life. Every paradigm including that which was established by the Peace of Westphalia and United Nations Charter existed with anomalies which the could not necessarily be addressed because they would be incompatible or destructive to the paradigm. These anomilies have various levels of significance to the states at the time. Sovereignty and human rights have had the most profound significance in international relations whilst intervention has been the most contested international incident since the1970’s on under the pretext of humanitarian intervention. Kuhn argues that at this juncture the discipline is thrown into a state of crisis. When enough anomalies have accrued against current paradigm. By proliferate versions of the paradigm, the crisis loosens the rules of normal puzzle-solving in ways that ultimately permit a new paradigm to emerge. Faced with an admittedly fundamental anomaly in theory, the scientist’s efforts will often be to isolate it more precisely and to give it structure. A reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals. A reconstruction that changes some of the fields the basic theoretical generalizations including some of the paradigms methods and application. Kuhn opines that even though it occurs through a complex social process, the new paradigm is always better not just different.What is the reaction of other Great powers within the international system as a result of this shift in the nature of the international system? The strengths are that it attempts to ensure that the United Nations has a timely response for the potential humanitarian crisis zones by reconstituting the concept of sovereignty that has hindered the progression of human rights. Although its strengths are commendable, its weaknesses significantly highlight new problems of which the most prominent are the principle of intervention that not only directly challenges the core foreign policies of two members of the Permanent Security Council, appears as prima facie (appears to be true and is accepted as a fact, until evidence to the contrary is detected or submitted) but the foundations of the international system since the establishment of United Nations succeeding the atrocities of the World Wars and the order of relations among states contained within the United Nations Charter.In sum, this paper argues that the responsibility to protect is a formidable attempt to reduce humanitarian crisis in war-torn states. However, its wider implications essentially compromise the ontology of sovereignty, especially when regional organizations can act without the authorization of the United Nations and the meaning of the yielding of the responsibility or sovereignty to the international community.