Global Ethics and the Power Relations of Responsibility

Abstract

<p>In response to humanitarian crises within sovereign nation-states, many voices in global politics have begun to frame their arguments in terms of a responsibility to uphold basic human rights. The most prominent example of this theme is found in the idea of the responsibility to protect, an international framework for crisis response developed by an international commission and consolidated at the United Nations. A major challenge to this frame of thinking is the traditional disjuncture between the concept of ethico-political responsibility, on the one hand, and nation-state sovereignty on the other. A critical investigation of the ethical and political impulses articulated within the doctrine of the responsibility to protect demonstrates that much of the emergent consensus surrounding the responsibility to protect framework is premised on ideational and normative ambiguity. Part of the reason for this is the complexity of the idea of ‘responsibility’. This project seeks to explain some of the contestation of the responsibility to protect by first developing, and then applying, a conceptual framework that differentiates between monological impulses of ‘being responsible’ and more socially embedded practices situated within relational regimes of accountability and answerability.</p>