International Protection and the Sovereign Decision - A Geneology of the Responsibility to Protect

Sammanfattning: In the wake of the 2005 World Summit ratification of the responsibility to protect doctrine, the cases of Darfur and Syria have revealed the decisionary discretion of the collective international responsibility to protect inscribed within the doctrine. Through an engagement with the decisionist theory of Carl Schmitt and the work of Giorgio Agamben, this essay seeks to return the question of the decision regarding intervention under the responsibility to protect doctrine to its proper place as the functioning of power. Through the genealogical method of Michel Foucault, the diverse elements of the doctrine could be traced to show the decision as the articulation of a certain relation of power. Inscribed within the legal anomie where international humanitarian and human rights law no longer applies, the doctrine would prescribe a collective international responsibility to protect only in relation to a figure of bare life, such that the fate of the latter would remain subject to the decision of the Security Council. This decision can, as such, always take the form of an abstention on action, sustaining the legal anomie wherein sovereign power would exist without legal restrictions.