CCTS
Review 31

Pacifism and the responsibility to protect

by Diana Francis, freelance consultant and Chair of CCTS

Consideration of the responsibility to protect (R2P) is active in both CCTS and Quaker circles and so I am writing this short piece in my dual CCTS-Quaker identity, with two overlapping sets of readers in mind. In any case, no two members of either group think identically on this issue and we are all, I suspect, exercised by it. So in the end I write as a concerned human being, with my own particular understandings of the world and of ethics.

As many readers will know, I am a pacifist and a war abolitionist. I shall remain so unless I am convinced that such an approach is not practicable. Ethical principles and judgements, by definition, have to work for good in the world.

The belief that human beings have a responsibility for one another’s well being is one that I share. I find the NGO statement of principles on R2P (reproduced earlier in this Review) an excellent one, in that it clearly rules out the kind of violent intervention that has recently been justified by the US, the UK and others, and points to the need for solidarity and principled engagement, if necessary across national boundaries. Almost all the recommendations embodied in this statement are ones that ‘all right minded people’ (i.e. all our likely readers!) would endorse, as far as they go. But for those who see lethal violence as essentially unacceptable as a means towards any end, the ‘last resort’ of military violence is bound to be a problem. As Alan Pleydell has said in his excellent article, the statement can be seen as embodying old Just War theory, spelling out the stringent principles for its application in today’s context, with recent history in mind, and within the framework of international law. I do not accept Just War theory and I believe that having violence kept visibly in the background is a contradiction in terms.

Because this is the place of discomfort and because recourse to military action is given guarantor status, this question assumes an importance apparently disproportionate to its hopefully minimized role in the scheme of things. In one sense we are, I believe, disproportionately, though by no means inappropriately, exercised by this moral dilemma, when there is a whole world of responsibility to protect that goes unaddressed while we wrestle with the particular issue of outbreaks of gross violence against unprotected groups. This assumes, it seems, far greater importance than protection from starvation, or from thirst, or from death by water-borne infection and other preventable diseases. The hideous clusters or crowds of deaths by direct atrocity do not come near equalling the numbers of those who die in domestic or street violence, or even, I suspect, of those who are killed on the roads. And how do we compare them to endemic human rights violations that take their toll over time? They assume such a central place in our thinking because they are so dramatic and confront us with a moral challenge that we simply fail to see sharply enough in other circumstances. That challenge is real and our horror and our desire to act are entirely proper to our humanity. That case is well made in the NGO statement. We should beware, however, of letting that desire and determination take our attention and effort – and resource allocation – away from those other forms of collective responsibility that are chronically neglected, with disastrous consequences for millions. 

I want to link this point with some remarks on the notion of ‘prevention’. Preventing large-scale atrocities is clearly better than waiting for them to begin and then trying to intervene. The proposal for a monitoring etc system is a good one, assuming that its function and related judgements could not be usurped by particular powers for their own purposes (quite a large assumption, in fact. These proposals are radical ones, requiring a high measure of optimism.) But without any monitoring at all I can see that our current world is disfigured by gross structural violence and every ingredient for the fomenting of violence, whether chronic or acute. If we are focussed only on the prevention of violent crises and do not set out to transform global relationships, economic, social, political and environmental, we shall go on failing to protect on the grand scale and continue to face growing numbers of outbreaks of widespread violence in which those who have lived lives of daily misery are finally dispatched with brutality. When I consider Dafur or Northern Uganda or Sierra Leone, I see greed and grievance going hand in hand. I also see that the culture of violence that we wrap in the decent clothes of technology and disguise with words such as ‘intervention’, ‘deterrence’, and ‘surgical strike’, has made gross cruelty possible in other cultures, whether fuelled by greed or by grievance, or (usually) both.
 ‘Prevention’, taken seriously, would include transforming this culture, whatever its manifestation, and taking out the weapons and systems that facilitate and magnify its violent consequences. It would mean ensuring that populations are educated, active members of society (in whatever units it shapes itself) so that they are not at the mercy of tyrants and demagogues. They need the ability to organise their collective power and choice to improve their own lot and stand up for themselves in non-destructive ways.
Peace that is not built from the bottom up, with the involvement of all strata and identity groups, is no peace and will not hold. In Iraq we have seen the disastrous consequences of top-down military intervention that has in fact embodied rather than prevented atrocity and has not respected the lives and needs of  ‘ordinary people’. But in Kosovo we have an example where the people who were ‘protected’ by the war were not thereby confirmed in nonviolent principles or democratic processes (which they had notably used before) but rather in that strand of their culture which favoured violence, ethnic nationalism and lawlessness. The (still many) people committed to peacebuilding have had a hard time of it and minority groups still more so. 

The prevention of widespread and gross violence, then, will involve the most fundamental changes and correspondingly huge, sustained efforts. It will involve the big powers in radically changing their own policies and demilitarising their own relationships and behaviour. This is, inevitably, a long-term goal. But what (and here I can avoid the crunch point no longer) is to be done in the meantime? Intervention from outside is, surely, going to be needed?

Alan Pleydell, in his article, concludes:

Our job, and the job of civil society and NGOs, is to help tip the balance towards a general acceptance of the proposition that intervention in some form is legitimate when governments fail in their minimum obligations to protect their citizens, and that the acceptance of advice and good offices is likely to result in a decreasing reliance on the last resort of military intervention.  

This brave statement is already radical, in current terms. As I remarked earlier, it presupposes a strong sense of the possibility for change. To have the powers that currently act largely at will, marshalling their own resources to pursue their own interests, putting those resources at the disposal of others and renouncing their own control implies a wonderful transformation. For other powers to trust their involvement and support interventions resourced by them, such a transformation would be necessary. For them, additionally, to share economic power equitably, to pursue global needs in relation to the environment and to take that crisis seriously, to go for radical reductions to their own military establishments and spending to set an example and to fund all this, would be a miracle indeed. So we are all optimists here and there is plenty for non-pacifists to concentrate on. Their task is to ‘build down’ the violence component in protection and see how far they can get.

That will involve an exploration of the many forms of pressure and incentive that can be exercised, as well as the development of far more nuanced skill and honesty in the conduct of mediation and negotiation. Though I touch on this briefly here, it is a huge area for study and creative thinking by all who accept a responsibility to protect.

For pacifists and non-pacifists alike, the issue of effectiveness is extremely difficult.  To be effective, the threat or use of military means relies on violence-power that is credible not only in scale and deadliness but also in the real possibility of its use. This is the dilemma of background visibility. Furthermore, it is not clear that when violence is high the use of third party violence can be effective and kept to a low level. (Remember Oliver Ramsbotham’s hourglass, where the tight bit represents the moment of crisis and there is no room for manoeuvre.) Military intervention seems to work mostly where there is already a lull, at least, in the violence, and a strong policing role is what is needed. The continuing level of violence in Iraq demonstrates that, where strong opposition to an intervention remains, even a huge military presence cannot control it.

Where armies have not acted in the face of atrocities, it would seem to have been, at least in part, because they have not known how to do so. The Belgian general who pulled his troops out of Ruanda as the genocide began said as much. Presumably Britain put troops into Sierra Leone when it did in part, at least, because the violence had reached a level when peacekeeping was possible and there was reason to believe that peacebuilding was a possibility at that point. In East Timor, ‘peace enforcement’ was achieved through a very large military intervention. It is beyond my scope here (and my knowledge) to analyse its ways, means and outcome. I want to acknowledge it and at the same time to point out that such an action after so many years of neglect could hardly be seen to fit in with the principles of the NGO statement.    

And military deterrence or action requires superior might, in terms of hardware and/or numbers or skill, to succeed. That seems to suggest it could be used only if malefactors were weaker than the international force in question. This would certainly limit its operation.

Then, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who have apparently been quelled can prove unquellable or be replaced by others. Violence is not easy to quell: it is like an unquenchable fire, ready to break out in any place.

This is at the heart of the case for nonviolence: you can’t fight fire with fire. You have to transform the heat and the energy. For those of us who hold the view that every resort to violence perpetuates its dynamics and culture; who believe that the maintenance of armies of any kind is an invitation to others to organise their own violence; who know they would never be prepared to train to kill or to join an army and who therefore cannot honestly require others to do so; who believe that the categorical imperative is indeed categorical, the challenge is to build up the capacity for nonviolent intervention in situations of acute violence.

The trouble for us, and for those we want to persuade of our case, is that, though we now have strong examples of the use of violence by populations to overthrow tyranny, when it comes to third party intervention[1] in situations of acute violence it would seem that we have only the smallest examples to offer. But there are many examples of where military functions could be undertaken by civilian personnel. An excellent book on this issue is Achieving Security in Sub-Saharan Africa: Cost Effective Alternatives to the Military edited by Geoff Harris.[2] Geoff Harris’s motto is ‘there are always alternatives’ (acronym TAAA) and his own chapter on ‘Civilianising Military Functions’ demonstrates how many of the roles we tend to attribute to armies can in fact be undertaken by civilians (as police, observers, monitors etc.). Brian Martin, in another chapter, discusses non-military defence.

It seems that in recent years, since the early work of the likes of Brian Martin and Gene Sharp, rather little attention has been paid to the power of nonviolence to address harsh situations. The less challenging (though more immediately relevant) field of conflict resolution/transformation has perhaps displaced it. I believe we must give it new attention.

[1] It might be that if we looked more seriously at the ‘not violent’ menu, we would find that non-military physical intervention was not in fact a last resort but an earlier one. Back to text

[2] Published in 2004 by the Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria. Back to text

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