Abstract

This book offers a critical appraisal of the international legal idea of the 'Responsibility to Protect'. The idea that the international community has a responsibility to protect populations at risk has become the prominent mode and structure of address in response to mass human atrocities, gross human rights violations and large-scale loss of life. Although the 'international community' of liberal international law and of legal cosmopolitanism for the most part projects a self-assured collective project, this book maintains that it transforms global ethical responsibility into a project of governance, management and control. Pursuing this argument, and drawing on critical legal literature, critical international relations and on ideas of responsibility and ethical relationality in the work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, the book develops a concept of 'irresponsibility'. This concept is then juxtaposed to the dominant Responsibility to Protect discourse. By exposing and acknowledging 'the sites of irresponsibility' of the Responsibility to Protect, the book argues that irresponsibility itself can become the condition of ethical responsibility and the possibility of justice. This original approach to an increasingly important topic will prove invaluable to those working in international law, international relations, politics and legal theory.