Coalitions of the Willing and the Shared Responsibility to Protect

Abstract

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, ‘R2P’. 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? In this chapter, I propose ‘coalitions of the willing’ as one (likely provocative) answer to this question, and explore how the informal nature of such associations should inform the judgements of moral responsibility that we make in relation to them. Perhaps most controversially, I suggest that, under certain circumstances, states and other entities each have a duty to contribute to establishing such an ad hoc association.