‘Coalitions of the willing’ and the shared responsibility to protect

1. Introduction There has been widespread support for the idea that the so-called international community has a remedial moral responsibility to protect vulnerable populations from mass atrocities when their own governments fail to do so. Moreover, military intervention may, when necessary, be one means of discharging this proposed ‘responsibility to protect’ or, more colloquially, ‘RtoP’. But, where exactly is this responsibility located? In other words, which body or bodies can be expected to discharge a duty to safeguard those who lack the protection of – or, indeed, come under threat from – their own government? A particularly pressing context for this question arises when the United Nations (UN) is unwilling or unable to act, and there is no one state to fill the breach, no ‘agent-of-last-resort’ to invoke Michael Walzer's phrase (along with all of the controversy and potential risks that he acknowledges reliance on such a protector entails). This chapter will examine ‘coalitions of the willing’, or temporary, purpose-driven, self-selected collections of states, and sometimes non-state and inter-governmental actors, as one (likely provocative) answer to this question. It will also explore how the informal nature of such associations complicates, and should inform, the judgements of moral responsibility that we make in relation to them. In undertaking both tasks, it will offer a practical and demanding account of shared responsibility in world politics. Moreover, it will illustrate the importance of two crucial, preliminary steps towards this volume's stated goal of determining how responsibility is to be distributed between agents in cases of concerted action: i) analysing how our expectations of discrete agents – and our evaluations of their acts and omissions – should be recalibrated when they participate in (or are in a position to participate in) a cooperative endeavour with other agents; and (as a second step made possible in part by the first) ii) clearly identifying the relevant agents amongst whom duties might be allocated or blame apportioned. I will begin by briefly recounting what I call a ‘model of institutional moral agency’ in order to explain why it is conceptually coherent and necessary in practice to assume that moral responsibilities can be borne by formal organisations (such as states, multinational corporations (MNCs) and intergovernmental organisations), but why it seems theoretically and practically problematic to talk about the moral responsibilities of informal associations.