Theorizing violence in the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings of the High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, do not substantively explore the problematic relationship between intrastate violence, the sovereign state, and humanitarian interventions relationship to war in the violence to which it is responding. Without looking at these complex relationships, international intervention for humanitarian purposes, as defined by the Responsibility to Protect, will not be able to truly answer sovereign intrastate violence, as it never fully identifies the processes that are producing that violence.