Gaza and the failure of atrocity prevention
Placing the responsibility to protect on stronger cosmopolitan foundations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8911713 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R S Illingworth (0000-0003-2162-0455, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Publication date | 2025-03-31 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cooperation and Conflict (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-8367 • E-ISSN: 1460-3691 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00108367251321440 |
| OpenAlex | W4409001037 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 67 |
The policy of key liberal Western states towards the latest conflagration in Israel-Gaza highlights the troubling connection between global harms and the failure to prevent mass atrocities. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) against genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing represents the acknowledgement of a cross-border duty to stop significant harm. But there is a problem: states are often themselves complicit in propagating the underlying structures of mass atrocity in other states. This means that there is a conceptual gap in the logic of R2P’s preventive agenda. The result is an R2P doctrine that misses the vitally important point that, for atrocity prevention efforts to be successful, the international community must recognise that harmful state actions have the potential to exacerbate or facilitate atrocities, and therefore part of states’ R2P must be to curb international actions that have a current or potential contribution to instances of atrocity crime. Building on research that seeks to expose the international dynamics of mass atrocity, the article utilises a cosmopolitan lens to explore the potential for connecting R2P’s pillar structure with the cosmopolitan negative duty of harm prevention, aiming to better align R2P with a coherent approach to human protection
Criminology · International law · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Responsibility to Protect · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Health and Conflict Studies · International Law and Human Rights · Law
Making and Unmaking Nations
Ain’t that a Shame? Hypocrisy, Punishment, and Weak Actor Influence in International Politics
Negative Duties, Positive Duties, and the “New Harms”
Bounds of Justice
Justice and Feasibility
Debunking the myth of the “robust control regime”
Ideology and Mass Killing
Silent Accomplice
Hypocrisy and Human Rights
Sovereignty
The Power of Human Rights
Geopolitics and Genocide
Norm Robustness and the Responsibility to Protect
The French Connection
Sovereignty, Choice, and the Responsibility to Protect
The Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect
The att and War Profiteering
The Arms Trade Treaty
R2P and Prevention
Self-interest, transitional cosmopolitanism and the motivational problem
Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish
Gaza and the Political and Moral Failure of the Responsibility to Protect
Humanitarian disintervention
Theoretical challenges to understanding the potential impact of the Universal Periodic Review Mechanism
Israel’s war on Gaza and the violation of children’s rights
Security as Practice — Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War
Exploring the UK's Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention
Decolonizing the Responsibility to Protect
The Responsibility to Protect
Anti-cosmopolitanism, pluralism and the cosmopolitan harm principle
Legitimising liberal militarism
A War They Both Are Losing
World Poverty and Human Rights
The organized hypocrisy of ethical foreign policy
Does R2P matter? Interpreting the impact of a norm
The Responsibility to Protect and the use of force
Unbowed, unbent, unbroken? Examining the validity of the responsibility to protect
The responsibility to prevent
From comparative to international genocide studies
Foreign Policy as Social Construction
Property Rights and the Resource Curse
Citizenship, Humanity, and Cosmopolitan Harm Conventions
The International Responsibility to Protect in a Post-Liberal Order
J’accuse! Does Naming and Shaming Perpetrators Reduce the Severity of Genocides or Politicides?1
Challenges to the Liberal Order
The limits of sovereignty as responsibility
The Futility of Genocide Studies After Gaza
From Reaction to Resilience in Mass Atrocity Prevention
Introducing Jus ante Bellum as a cosmopolitan approach to humanitarian intervention
The Responsibility to Protect in a world of already existing intervention
Framing
Security cosmopolitanism
Security cosmopolitanism
Recognizing injustice
Halting genocide in a post-liberal international order
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |