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Abstract
From a practitioner’s perspective the intervention explores how digital technologies have enhanced the capacities of policy-makers in anticipating and responding to atrocity crimes including through development and access to sophisticated technologies to collect and verify evidence of crimes for justice and accountability. Digital technologies have also provided perpetrators with enhanced tools to target populations with greater precision and commit atrocities against them. The intervention argues that the harm perpetuated by digital technologies can be mitigated by holding developers of these technologies accountable for creating operating environments that are safe and by naming and shaming governments that use new technologies to target populations.
Abstract
Atrocities do not happen in a vacuum and incitement to discrimination, hostility, and violence is one of their main drivers – offline and now online. But states continue to disagree about how to deal with inciting speech. Under international law, there is much debate about whether obligations to prohibit incitement, such as the one found in Article 20(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, applies universally to all states. This article finds common ground in the overlooked human right to be free from incitement to discrimination, reflected in Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and binding on all states under customary international law. It gives rise to common but differentiated responsibilities to refrain from and protect individuals and groups from different forms of incitement. In the digital age, this right can be protected by a range of online content governance measures that this article explores.
Abstract
While longstanding critiques of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) as a Western interventionist doctrine are well known, this intervention argues that a new form of backlash politics to the R2P is emerging from key Western states that have long been its strongest advocates and supporters. This intervention argues that this trend is disconcerting in that it risks returning to an international politics of complacency whereby states are no longer willing to acknowledge or accept responsibility to assist populations from mass atrocities occurring within the borders of a foreign state. Two strategies are advocated to counter this trend among governments. First, is to emphasise the successes as well as acknowledge the failures of R2P. Second, to clearly articulate how it is in every country’s own national interest to respond decently to conscience-shocking atrocity crimes occurring elsewhere.
Abstract
Nearly two decades after its formal endorsement by the international community, the Responsibility to Protect is stuck in a quagmire reminiscent of the contentious politics that both preceded and precipitated it. A once ambitious effort to transform notions of responsibility and practices of accountability regarding civilian protection and atrocity prevention, R2P has stagnated to such a degree that some have dismissed it as a dead letter. This research diagnoses the primary cause of that stagnation while also proposing a way forward for resuscitating R2P’s normative aims, via a return to R2P’s origins as an accountability mechanism for the provision of human rights and security.
Abstract
Selectivity is often understood as global powers using military intervention in certain humanitarian crises but not in others based on perceived strategic interests at stake. Though the scholarship has acknowledged selectivity’s practice, more disputed has been its ‘problematic’ ascription. Critics have correctly identified selectivity as a problem of hypocrisy, while advocates have construed it as necessary and even pragmatic. Importantly, however, both camps have premised selectivity as a problem of ‘inaction’ towards ‘non-intervened’ crises. In contrast to this existing ‘bystander complicity’ paradigm of selectivity, this article argues that selectivity must be reinterpreted as a problem of global power ‘active complicity’ to better understand and appreciate its problematic ascription. The proposed active complicity paradigm reveals the neglected colonial and imperial underpinnings within selectivity. It destabilises and challenges the idea that global powers simply ‘stand by’ as onlookers to disassociated, faraway crises, and instead highlights their key role in enabling and perpetuating them.