Imperfect Duties? - Professor David Chandler's Website

March 5, 6 and 7, 2009 

Thursday, Friday and Saturday 

The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, DePauw University 

in collaboration with The United Nations, 

Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, West Africa 

presents 

Imperfect Duties? 

Humanitarian Intervention in Africa 

and THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT 

in the Post-Iraq Era

Long have the Treaty of Westphalia’s words 

cuius regio, eius religio (whoever reigns, his 

religion) constituted the keystone of 

state sovereignty – the principle of noninterference 

in “matters which are essentially 

within the domestic jurisdiction of ” states (UN 

Charter 2.7). But beginning in the late 1980s 

and 1990s, the practice and scholarship of 

international relations began to reflect the limits 

of Westphalian thinking. The unprecedentedly 

violent 20th Century opened with the Armenian 

Genocide, crested with the Holocaust, and closed 

with astonishing violence allegedly unleashed 

across the globe by the end of the Cold War: 

ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, genocide 

in Rwanda, Africa’s first “world war” in the 

Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), mass 

slaughter in East Timor, to name but a few. 

The 21st century has not begun 

auspiciously. Slow motion genocide in Darfur 

has left more than 200,000 dead and 2 million 

displaced into the nightmarish conditions of 

refugee status on the periphery of the world. The 

Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues unabated 

with more than half of Gazans now living in 

refugee camps. Perhaps only until its “invisible 

children” were highlighted in an American film 

was the war in Northern Uganda no longer what 

Jan Egeland had referred to as the “world’s worst 

ignored humanitarian disaster.” And despite the 

official end of the war in the DRC in 2003, an 

estimated 45,000 people continue to die there 

every month (International Rescue Committee 

2008). 

In response to the explosion of civil 

conflict across the world, and the “new world 

order’s” transformed Security Council, a “New 

Humanitarianism” appeared to challenge what 

its advocates saw as the clearly mistaken notion 

that the non-interference principle was an 

Inspiration for the Symposium 

by Brett O’Bannon 

inviolable shield behind which murderous tyrants 

could commit mass atrocities with impunity. 

At the same time, however, counter-tendencies 

emerged. One was in response to this “muscular 

humanitarianism,” and the fears of a neoimperial 

age it stoked (Orford 2003, Bello 2006). 

Another reflected a growing appreciation for the 

limited utility or even counter-productivity of 

the palliative care offered to the suffering by the 

“humanitarian international” (de Waal 1998). 

In hopes of reaching some global 

consensus on how to balance human rights with 

sovereignty, the International Commission on 

Intervention and State Sovereignty delivered in 

December 2001 its report The Responsibility 

to Protect (R2P). Apparently successful, 

Thomas Weiss argues that “[w]ith the possible 

exception of the prevention of genocide after 

War II, no idea has moved faster or farther in 

the international normative arena than The 

Responsibility to Protect.” (2006, 214) 

Yet something of a perfect humanitarian 

storm remains in place around Africa and Weiss 

recognizes that despite the speed of R2P’s norm 

cascade, “the Security Council’s dithering over 

Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo 

demonstrates the dramatic disconnect between 

multilateral rhetoric and reality” (Ibid.) Africa’s 

infamously weak states, that most tragic of 

colonial legacies, play host to governments that 

are mired in perverse structures of incentives, 

generating chronically bad governance. This gives 

rise to immiserated populations that rebellious 

entrepreneurs seeking control of enclave sites 

of “cursed resources” have exploited to great 

effect (Sawyer 2004). The world’s apparently 

insatiable demand for these blood commodities 

makes the atrocities committed by the Charles 

Taylors and the Foday Sankohs merely rational 

responses to global economic incentives. And 

>>

Inspiration for the Symposium 

now it seems that the West’s Cold War bankrolling 

of kleptocratic tyrants, which had briefly gone 

the way of the Soviet Union, might now be 

renewed in its War on Terror. Flows of arms 

from the West, and increasingly the East, often 

to the worst regimes, continue to provide the 

means for African self-destruction. At the same 

time, a myopic conception of what constitutes 

good governance among the Bretton Woods 

Institutions has informed their cookie-cutter 

demands for ever more limited government, 

which often produces African states less capable 

of managing their now increasingly desperate 

societies’ conflicts (O’Bannon 2006). 

But just as something like a global 

consensus on a balance between the ordering 

principles of justice and sovereign coexistence 

was emerging under the rubric of R2P, 

which might have generated well-informed, 

multilateral responses to these complex 

problems, humanitarianism became the ex post 

facto justification for war on Iraq. This use of 

humanitarian principles for raisons d’état, left 

even some of R2P’s most ardent supporters 

wondering, as Stephen Holmes does, “how should 

we be thinking about humanitarian intervention 

today, after having seen how easy it was for the 

[Bush] Administration to steal the liberal agenda, 

packaging reckless bellicosity as liberation of 

the oppressed” (2006)? Are not, critics ask, 

Michael Ignatieff ’s (2003) and Rudyard Kipling’s 

(1899) respective calls to the West to shoulder its 

civilizational burdens just too similar to ignore? 

Now standing in the shadow of Iraq, 

we seek to explore in this symposium questions 

such as “have the disastrous humanitarian 

consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom 

confirmed the worst fears of a renewed Imperial 

age, underwritten as was the previous, with the 

narrative of a burdensome responsibility to 

rescue the peoples of the global south from its 

barbarism? Has the apparent openness to abuse 

of humanitarian principles already doomed next 

month’s 45,000 victims of the Congo “peace” or 

the 200,000 victims of the next Omar Al-Bashir 

who determines that genocide is the only effective 

response to a perceived existential threat to the 

regime (Valentino 2004)? And what does R2P 

mean in the post-Iraq/War on Terror era? 

In particular, what does the doctrine’s 

priority emphasis on conflict prevention by 

addressing its root causes actually demand from 

the international community in terms of its 

responsibility to protect, when some of the most 

significant causes of conflict include poverty 

(Fearon and Laiton 2003, Rice 2007), arms 

transfers (Bureau of Intelligence and Research 

2001), commodity export dependence (Collier 

and Hoeffler 2004) and, increasingly, climate 

change and environmental degradation (Homer- 

Dixon 2001, Brauch 2002, Egeland 2008)? What 

are the implications for international law and the 

society of states of an ascendant human rights 

regime that enshrines an interventionist right (or 

responsibility), when powerful states are prepared 

to employ humanitarianism to justify any violation 

of state sovereignty it deems necessary? 

These are not easy questions to answer. 

If they were, symposia such as ours would not 

be necessary. But seek answers we must; getting 

through the brush and thorny brambles of these 

complicated issues demands our diligence. We 

must keep ourselves moving along the path 

toward a meaningful global consensus on how 

to achieve real respect for the dignity of all of 

persons, regardless of the geographical accident 

of one’s birth. Our task is to seek a global regime 

protective of those who would be the targets 

of mass atrocities without simply transferring 

the source of that threat to human dignity 

from tyrannical governments shielded by some 

antiquated notion of sovereignty, to states with 

the power to determine for themselves when 

another has forfeited its sovereign rights of noninterference. 

And as the late Adrian Adams said 

of the merits of seeking to re-establish even the 

most fragile bonds between people struggling to 

survive in rural Africa, doing so among states is 

equally imperative, “because otherwise there is no 

hope” (Adams 1984).

Works Cited 

Adams, Adrian. 1984. “The George Orwell Memorial 

Application,” proposal submitted to The 

George Orwell Memorial Fund, London. 

Original carbon located in the Khounghani 

Archives, Khounghani, Senegal. Bello, 

Walden. 2006. 

“Humanitarian Intervention: Evolution of a Dangerous 

Doctrine,” Focus on the Global South, January 

19, 2006. 

Brauch, Hans Günter. 2002. “Climate Change, 

Environmental Stress and Conflict,” 

Presented at Special Event sponsored by 

German Federal Ministry for the 

Environment, Nature Conservation and 

Nuclear Safety, Climate Change and Conflict 

Prevention: Can climate change impacts 

increase conflict potentials? 

http://teocali-yautepec.org/pdf/HGB_ 

ClimateChange.pdf 

Bureau of Intelligence and Research, United States 

Department of State. 2001 Arms and Conflict 

in Africa, Intelligence and Research Fact 

Sheet, July 1, 2001. http://www.state.gov/s/ 

inr/rls/fs/2001/4004.htm 

Collier, Paul and Anke Hoeffler. 2004. “Greed and 

Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic 

Papers 2004 56(4): 563-595. 

de Waal, Alex. 1998. Famine Crimes: Politics & and 

the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa, 

Bloomington, Indiana University Press. 

Egeland, Jan. 2008. “SAHEL: Jan Egeland’s Sahel 

climate change diary,” In Depth: Gathering 

Storm – the humanitarian impact of climate 

change. Humanitarian News and Analysis, United 

Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian 

Affairs. http://www.irinnews.org/IndepthMain.aspx? 

IndepthId=73&ReportId=79718 

Fearon, James and David Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and 

Civil War,” American Political Science Review, 

2003, 97: 75-90. 

Homer-Dixon, Thomas F. 2001. Environment, Scarcity, 

and Violence. Princeton: Princeton University 

Press. Ignatieff, Micheal. 2003. 

“The American Empire: The Burden,” The New York 

Times Magazine, January 5, 2003. 

International Rescue Committee. 2008. Mortality in the 

Democratic Republic of the Congo: An 

Ongoing Crisis, Crisis Watch, Special Report. 

http://www.theirc.org/resources/2007/2006- 

7_congomortalitysurvey.pdf Kipling, Rudyard. 

1899. 

“The White Man’s Burden,” McClure’s Magazine 12, 

February, 1899. 

O’Bannon, Brett. 2006. “Receiving an ‘Empty 

Envelope’: Governance Reforms and the 

Management of Farmer-Herder Conflict in 

Senegal.” Canadian Journal of African Studies 

40(1); 76-100. 

Orford, Anne. 2003. Reading Humanitarian 

Intervention: Human Rights and the Use 

of Force in International Law. Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press. Rice, Susan. 2007. 

“Why Darfur Can’t Be Left to Africa.” New York Times 

Magazine, Sunday, 7 August: B04. 

Roth, John K. 2007. Ethics During and After the 

Holocaust: The Shadow of Birkenau. New 

York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Sawyer, Amos. 2004 “Violent Conflicts and 

Governance Challenges in West Africa: 

The Case of the Mano River Basin Area”, Journal of 

Modern African Studies 42(3): 437- 463. 

Valentino, Benjamin. A. 2004. Final Solutions: Mass 

Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. 

Ithacha, Cornell University Press. 

Weiss, Thomas. 2006. “Humanitarian Intervention after 

Kosovo: Commentary,” in Mertus, Julie and 

Jeffrey Helsing (eds.) 

Human Rights and Conflict: Exploring the Links between 

Rights, Law and Peacebuilding, Washington, 

D.C: United States Institute for Peace, pp: 209- 

216.

Conference Partners 

Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics 

The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics promotes critical reflection and constructive 

debate about the most important ethical questions: What is right, just, and good, 

and what must human beings do — now and in the future — to meet their moral 

responsibilities? The Institute seeks to explore with DePauw University students the 

moral challenges of the 21st Century and encourage them not to remain silent in the 

face of injustice. A generous gift from Janet W. Prindle ’58 funded the construction 

of a state of-the-art facility that houses the Institute which bears her name. 

(The West Africa Regional Bureau) 

the United Nations Office for the Coordination 

of Humanitarian Affairs 

OCHA’s mission is to mobilise and coordinate effective and principled humanitarian 

action in partnership with national and international actors in order to alleviate 

human suffering in disasters and emergencies, to advocate for the rights of people in 

need, to promote preparedness and prevention and to facilitate sustainable solutions. 

DePauw University Honor Scholar Program 

The Honor Scholar Program plays a pivotal role in DePauw’s commitment to 

excellence in a liberal arts education. It is designed to give talented students a unique 

opportunity to participate in intellectually challenging discussion-based courses. 

DePauw University Conflict Studies Program 

Conflict Studies is a major that brings together a number of academic disciplines 

that focus on conflict as one of their organizing concepts. Because of its ubiquity 

and significance in human life, the study of the process and resolution of conflict is 

increasingly claiming a central place in the study of conflict development in general and 

peaceful change in particular. 

Conference Organization Committee 

Brett O’BANNON, Associate Professor of Political Science, DePauw University 

Sharon CRARY, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, 

DePauw University 

John ROTH, The Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, 

Claremont McKenna College 

Robert BOTTOMS, Neal ABRAHAM, Linda CLUTE, Sarah HUGHES, 

the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics Faculty Advisory Committee 

and the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics Student Advisory Committee

Panelist Biographies 

Karen Koning AbuZayd ’63 

Commissioner-General, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in 

the Near East (rank of Assistant Secretary-General), former chief of mission for UN High 

Commissioner for Refugees in Sarajevo during Bosnian War; served UNHCR in: Sudan for 

Ugandan, Chadian and Ethopian refugees (1981-1989); Namiba (1989); Sierra Leone (1990- 

1991); Geneva as Director of South African Repatriation Program. 

Marion Arnaud 

Program Officer for the Responsibility to Protect-Engaging Civil Society Project at the 

Institute for Global Policy, M.A (Conflict, Development and Security) Leeds University, UK 

(thesis on the Responsibility to Protect and Darfur), multiple projects in Latin America. 

Séverine Autesserre 

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University; 

Former Post-Doctoral Scholar, Program on Order, Conflict and Violence, Yale University 

(2006-2007); Independent Advisor, Action Against Hunger, Democratic Republic of Congo 

(2005-2007), Doctors without Borders; DR Congo (2001, 2003, 2004), Kosovo (2000). 

Assefaw Bariagaber 

Professor and Chair, The Whitehead School of Diplomacy & International Relations, Seton 

Hall University; Consultant United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; Faculty 

Consultant for the Secretariat of the Dialogue Among Civilizations Project, 

UN General Assembly; Secretary, Eritrean Studies Association (2004-Present). 

Carol Berger 

Ph.D. Candidate, Oxford University (on the Role of Ethnography in Understanding Conflict 

and Ethnicised Violence in Sudan); Commonwealth Scholar, and President of the Oxford 

Anthropological Society 2007-2008; Foreign Correspondent based in Sudan (1982-1987), 

Egypt (1987-1993). 

David Chandler 

Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster, founding editor of the Journal 

of Intervention and Statebuilding; author of Empire in Denial: The Politics of Statebuilding (Pluto 

2002); From Kosovo to Kabul (and Beyond: Human Rights and Intervention (Pluto 1999); Bosnia: Faking 

Democracy after Dayton (Pluto 1999).

Catherine Dumait-Harper 

Board Member, Action Against Hunger/Action Contre la Faim and the French Heritage 

Language Program; former UN Representative of Médecins Sans Frontièrs (1993-2005); 

Expert Program Fellow at Tufts University, Center on War and Famine (2004); Fellowship 

Program in Peacemaking and Preventive Diplomacy, Austria (1999). 

The Honorable Gareth Evans 

President and CEO, International Crisis Group; Foreign Minister of Australia (1988-1996); 

co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty; member 

of the Secretary-General Kofi Anan’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change 

(2003-2004). 

Jerry Fowler 

President, Save Darfur Coalition; founding director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial 

Musuem’s Committee on Conscience; director of the film A Good Man in Hell: General Romeo 

Dallaire and the Rwanda Genocide; former special litigation counsel, U.S. Department of Justice; 

former legislative counsel for the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights. 

Hervé Ludovic de Lys 

Head of Office, West Africa Bureau, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian 

Affairs, a department of the United Nations Secretariat whose mission is to mobilize and 

coordinate effective and principled humanitarian action in partnership with national and 

international actors in order to: alleviate human suffering and disasters in emergencies, 

advocate for the rights of people in need, promote preparedness and prevention, and 

faciliate sustainable solutions. The Bureau supports the fifteen countries of the Economic 

Community of West Affrican State plus Mauritania. 

Brett O’Bannon 

Associate Professor of Political Science, DePauw University and principal symposium 

organizer. He researches in the areas of conflict management in rural Africa, regime 

transitions and Gender and Development. He also leads the Khounghani Archives project, 

an in situ archive in the Upper Senegal River Valley that is preserving and digitizing the life 

work of late anthropologist Adrian Adams. His current focus is on the structural sources of 

conflict and on conflict early warning systsems that are responsive at the root cause level. 

Panelist Biographies

Panelist Biographies 

Anne orford 

Professor and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the 

Melbourne Law School, Melbourne University, Australia, where she also holds a Chair of 

Law. She researches in the areas of international law and legal theory, with a particular focus 

on the legal legacies of European imperialism. Her publications include the books Reading 

Humanitarian Intervention: Human Rights and the Use of Force in International Law (CUP, 2003). 

Professor Orford has held visiting positions at Lund University and New York University. She 

is on the Advisory Boards of the Journal of Intervention and State-Building, the International Feminist 

Journal of Politics, the In-Spire Journal of Politics, International Relations and the Envrionment, and the 

Melbourne Journal of International Law. 

John Roth 

The Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the Founding Director of the 

Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna 

College, where he taught from 1966 through 2006. In 2007-2008, he served as the Robert 

and Carolyn Frederick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Ethics at DePauw University in 

Greencastle, Indiana. In addition to service on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council 

and on the editorial board for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, he has published hundreds 

of articles and reviews and authored, co-authored, or edited more than forty books. In 1988, 

Roth was named U.S. National Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and 

Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 

Jeremy Sarkin 

UN Special Rapporteur/member of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and 

Involuntary Disappearances; an Attorney of both the High Court of South Africa and the 

State of New York. He has served in various capacties including acting judge in the Cape 

High Court (South Africa), advisor to civil society organizations at the Inter-Congolese 

Dialogue (talks to find a resolution and draft a Constitution for the Democratic Republic 

of the Congo). He is still currently the legal advisor to the Paramount Chief of the Herero 

Community in Namibia. 

Amos Sawyer 

President of the Interim Government of National Unity in Liberia (1990-1994), after 

which he became Executive Director of the Center for Democratic Empowerment in 

Liberia. Since 2006, he has been the Chairmen of the Governance Reforms Commission 

in Liberia. He has served in numerous academic positions including Dean, College of 

Social Science and Humanities, University of Liberia. He is currently co-director of the 

Workshop on Political theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. He also serves in 

the position of Coordinator for the Consortium for Self Governance in Africa.

Thursday, March 5 

8:00 p.m. 

Friday, March 6 



and THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT in the Post-Iraq Era 

Opening Address by the Honorable Gareth Evans 

President and CEO, International Crisis Group, former Australian Foreign 

Minister and co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State 

Sovereignty 

“The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All” 

Introduction: Brian CASEY, DePauw University President 

Location: Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, Auditorium 

8:00 a.m. Registration - Continental Breakfast 

Location: Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, Auditorium lobby 

8:30 a.m. Panel 1: Case Studies in Conflict Analysis: 

Understanding Intervention in Africa 

Séverine AUTESSERRE, “R2P in the Congo: the failure of prevention” 

Assefaw BARIAGABER, “Endemic Conflicts and Intervention in the Horn 

of Africa: Has Anything Changed since the End of the Cold War?” 

Amos SAWYER, “The Governance–Conflict Connection in West Africa” 

Panel Discussant: Rebecca UPTON, Associate Professor of Sociology 

and Anthropology, Director of Conflict Studies, DePauw University 


9:45 a.m. Coffee and Refreshment Break 

10:00 a.m. Follow-Up Roundtable: 

African Conflicts and the ‘New’ Interventionism 

Roundtable Moderator: Brett O’BANNON, Associate Professor of Political 

Science, DePauw University 

11:30 a.m. Luncheon Plenary Address: Karen Koning AbuZayd 

Commissioner-General, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine 

Refugees in the Near East 

“Toward the Secretary General’s ‘Responsible Sovereignty’: Operational Experience 

in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” 

Introduction: Robert BOTTOMS, DePauw University President Emeritus, 

Director of the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics 

Location: The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, Great Room

Friday, March 6 

1:00 p.m. Panel II: Global Civil Society 

and the Protection of Human Rights 

Marion ARNAUD, “The Responsibility to Protect–Engaging Civil Society” 

Catherine DUMAIT-HARPER, “Raison d’état and Intervention: Implications for 

International Humanitarian Law” 

Jerry FOWLER, “From ICISS to World Summit 2005: ‘Responsibility’ (and Darfur) 

Lost in Translation” 

Panel Discussant: Sharon CRARY, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, 




2:30 a.m. Follow-Up Roundtable: Friends of R2P? 

Roundtable Moderator: John ROTH, Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, 

Claremont McKenna College 


4:00 p.m. Panel III: International Society, Sovereignty 

and the Responsibility to Protect 

David CHANDLER, “The Gap between Policy and Practice: 

Unraveling the Paradox of R2P” 

Brett O’BANNON, “Bringing the African State in: The Structural Foundations of a Human 

Protection Norm” 

Jeremy SARKIN, “Why the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a Doctrine or 

(Emerging) Norm is on the Decline: The Role of Principles, 

Pragmatism and Shifting Patterns in International Relations 

Panel Discussant: Gordan VURUSIC, Instructor of Political Science, DePauw University 


5:15 p.m. Coffee and Refreshment Break 

5:30 p.m. Follow-Up Roundtable: Friends of R2P? 

Roundtable Moderator: B. Welling HALL, Assistant Professor Department of Politics, 

Earlham College 



and THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT in the Post-Iraq Era

Saturday, March 5 

9:00 a.m. 



and THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT in the Post-Iraq Era 

Continental Breakfast 

Location: The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, Auditorium lobby 

9:30 a.m. Panel IV: Reaching the Tipping Point? Whither 

Prevention and Rebuilding in the R2P Norm 

Carol BERGER, “R2P in the Congo: the failure of prevention.” 

Hervé LUDOVIC DE LYS, “Mobility, Climate Change and Human Protection: 

The Case of the Sahel” 

John ROTH, “Crying Out for Action: Do the Dead Say Anything about the Responsibility 

to Protect?” 

Panel Discussant: Rich CAMERON, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, 




11:00 a.m. Follow-Up Roundtable: 

Advancing the Agenda, but on What is There an 

Emerging Global Consensus? 

Roundtable Moderator: Jeremy ANDERSON, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, 


12:30 p.m. Luncheon with Closing Plenary By Anne Orford 

Professor and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities 

at the Melbourne Law School, Melbourne University, Australia 

“The Responsibility to Protect and the Limits of International Authority” 

Introduction: Brett O’BANNON, Associate Professor of Political Science, 


Location: The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, Great Room

Imperfect Duties? - Professor David Chandler's Website

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?