A philosophical investigation of the responsibility to protect in international law

The papers that comprise this dissertation track the development of the emerging international legal principle of a "responsibility to protect" over the past decade. The argument is primarily concerned with the influential conception of the responsibility to protect introduced by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001, and the Commission's reading of the underlying idea of human security.;This thesis demonstrates that the ICISS's conception of the responsibility to protect can be recruited to support a range of irreconcilable projects, ranging from those of cosmopolitan constitutionalism -- in both its liberal pluralist and liberal anti-pluralist incarnations -- through those of hegemonic international law --- in both its unilateral and multilateral variants. However, despite the dangers posed by this susceptibility to profoundly conflicting employments, I argue that the responsibility to protect is one of those modern emancipatory formations which, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, "we cannot not want." I conclude that it is possible and desirable to develop an alternative account of the responsibility to protect in order to limit the extent to which this still-unsettled legal principle can be employed to serve the interests of liberal anti-pluralist and hegemonic international law agendas. I sketch an outline of the key features of such a minimalist conception and reflect on the consonance of this minimalist view with the "RtoP" version of the responsibility to protect elaborated in recent years by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's administration. Finally, I argue that two key features missing from the UN reading of the principle should be developed in future interpretations: an acknowledgement of the role of non-state actors as bearers of the responsibility to protect, and a recognition of the principle's legal character.