The Responsibility to Protect and Cosmopolitan Human Protection

Abstract

This chapter undertakes a robust and comprehensive assessment of the relationship between R2P and the global ethics underpinning a cosmopolitan approach to human protection. Whilst acknowledging that the doctrine has yet to fulfil the normative demands and moral exigencies of cosmopolitan human protection, the chapter contends that R2P can be equated with the principles of collective responsibility, conditional state sovereignty and the provision of delineated and limited thresholds for intervention coterminous with this cosmopolitan typology. In addition, the chapter argues that R2P engages and interacts with the broader maxims of human emancipation, atrocity prevention and human security that lie at the heart of a cosmopolitan approach to human protection.