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Decolonizing the Responsibility to Protect: On pervasive Eurocentrism, Southern agency and struggles over universals
- Source :
- Security Dialogue. 53:38-56
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- SAGE Publications, 2021.
-
Abstract
- Many postcolonial or critical scholars are rather sceptical of the Responsibility to Protect principle. In most of the critical literature, Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is presented as a product from the West, whose liberal ideal relies on a perception of Southern states being potentially dysfunctional, which in turn justifies an interventionist discourse with neocolonial overtones. The problem with this interpretation of R2P is that it essentially ignores non-Western, particularly Southern, inputs on the concept, falling precisely into the trap that, many authors claim, vitiates Responsibility to Protect: its West-centrism. Building upon a mix of critical, decolonial, postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law scholarship, this article proposes a number of additional steps to decolonize R2P in an effort to avoid what Pinar Bilgin describes as ‘conflating the critiques of the particularity of universals with critiques of the idea of having universals’. What successive decolonizing layers expose is a negotiation process in which the agency of states from the global South in shaping the – still controversial – principle has proved particularly obvious. Decolonizing Responsibility to Protect, this article argues, requires critical scholars to engage in a contrapuntal analysis in order to acknowledge the concept’s mutual constitution by the West and the ‘rest’ and the deeper struggles over universals hiding underneath.
- Subjects :
- Critical security studies
Sociology and Political Science
media_common.quotation_subject
Global South
Environmental ethics
Problem of universals
Political science
Political Science and International Relations
Agency (sociology)
Product (category theory)
Eurocentrism
Responsibility to protect
Skepticism
media_common
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14603640 and 09670106
- Volume :
- 53
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Security Dialogue
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........11e8e0892b7904581b1d2f984f4202ae