This State of Independence Shall Be: Africa, the West, and the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

It is argued today that African states largely endorsed the principle of the responsibility to protect and the establishment of the international criminal court (ICC) only to reverse course in equally great majorities at the moment of implementation. This supposed reversal —particularly around the indictment of Sudan’s Omar al Bashir and the intervention in Libya, has surprised human rights groups and would-be humanitarians. The latter entities had expected African populations and elites to uniformly embrace the ICC and the responsibility to protect as salutary normative developments for a continent beset by civil wars and human rights violations. The reactions to the supposed African “reversal” are misguided at best.
The majority of Africans do not object to the normative underpinning of the new humanitarian regimes. It is my contention that Africans generally object to evolving gaps between, on the one hand, the discourses and doctrines of human security, humanitarian intervention, and the responsibility to protect and, on the other, the practices of intervention under humanitarianism. These gaps are not merely happenstance. To postcolonial sensibilities, they are the result of long Western traditions in which the imperial right of intervention has blended seamlessly with moral predicates of humanitarian intervention —and now the responsibility to protect. To me, the African positions in these regards illustrate a continuing struggle for decolonization of international law and morality as they pertain to political subjectivity, global democracy, justice, and international existence or life. As a note of caution, I wish to indicate that I do not intend to speak for a uniformly-defined Africa and/or for all African entities. Nor do I wish to conflate the official West and authoritative decisions made by Western leaders with the sentiments and traditions of all constituencies of what might be called The West.