The Humanitarian Dilemma. Thinking About the Responsibility to Protect, Twenty Years Later

Abstract

Starting from the observation that the doctrine of Reponsibility to Protect has as its main and paradoxical outcome the collective de-responsibility generated by the "post-bipolar" international system born from the 1989 caesura, the essay critically retraces the historical and theoretical stages of the "humanitarian turn" of politics and the complex interaction between political and moral instances still operating today within global politics. According to the author, these must be observed and analyzed beyond any rigid and absolute dichotomy between sovereignty and humanity. The analysis of the disconnection between the ostentatious universalistic demands at the basis of the humanitarian turn of international politics and the strongly inegalitarian, if not openly hierarchical, aspects characteristic of its concrete methods of implementation allow the Author to deal with the contradictions and betrayed promises of the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, exactly twenty years after its first elaboration.