Part III Regimes and Doctrines, Ch.41 Theorizing Responsibility

Subject(s):

Human rights remedies — Humanitarian intervention — General principles of international law — Sources of international law

This chapter divides responsibility under international law into three theoretical interpretants. The first is the hard core of responsibility doctrine, namely the doctrine of state responsibility, a main topic of the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) since its early establishment. The second interpretant springs from the rise of human rights law discourse in the international arena since the 1960s and 1970s: the never-quite-solidified semi-doctrine of humanitarian intervention that has warped into the (non-)doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) — which has always been the most politically powerful or, at least, the most prominently debated among international legal responsibility concepts. The third sort of international legal responsibility is a catch-all category for the remainder of the duties that imply responsibility and beyond—the response-ability of international law—a category that most obviously transcends, challenges, and pierces openings in the dogmatic and managerial conceptions of law and its responsibility.