Why moral commitments matter: mapping the ethics and politics of responsible and accountable global governance

Steven C Roach University of South Florida

Abstract Much of the scholarly attention on commitments in international relations (IR) has remained narrowly framed, focusing on how states and other actors make strictly strategic calculations to comply with international norms and/or treaties. The trouble with this rationalist approach is that it oversimplifies the moral basis of commitments. This article offers a deeper analysis of this moral basis as well as the positive ethical values that help to direct and shape the content of the moral commitments of agents in IR. The article argues that the ethical values of sincerity, empathy and sacrifice play a dynamic yet under- studied meta-level role in helping one to interpret and explain the transformative dimensions of moral commitments in IR. The article first develops a meta-level theoretical approach to commitment in international theory and then applies this approach to two particular emergent discourses in international politics: the responsibility to protect and moral criminal accountability.

Introduction

States and non-state actors have committed themselves to meeting a variety of goals and objectives. These include reducing carbon emissions to protect the global environment and diminishing the number of nuclear weapons. But, since the 1990s, much of the scholarly attention has focused narrowly on the rational utility of international commitments, or what agents can expect to gain, rather than the moral and ethical values underlying these international commitments. Ethical and moral commitments involve considerations of and pledges to uphold normative principles and humanitarian norms, including harm reduction, equal treatment and inclusive participation. Sometimes they can take the form of a hard, moral imperative, in which stopping human rights abuses becomes a morally compelling reason for intervention. In other cases, they can reflect soft gestures, or formal, legalistic pledges that never materialize into sincere actions of promoting a public good. Rationalists, for instance, claim that there is a strictly rational basis for explaining the outcome of these soft types of moral commitments (see Abbot et al 2000; McLaughlin-Mitchell and Justyna-Powell 2011; Simmons and Danner 2010; Simmons 2009). Powerful states, in other words, are likely to commit if the benefits of complying do not exceed economic and political costs. From this perspective, commitments are not necessarily sincere pledges; rather, they can be insincere and untrustworthy pledges that expose the unavoidable yet influential calculations of state power (Smith-Cannoy 2012, 5).

Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2016

Vol. 29, No. 1, 309–326, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2014.981249

q 2014 Centre of International Studies

But if states and non-state actors wish to be good standing members of international society, they also must possess compelling moral and ethical reasons for doing so. Moral cosmopolitans argue that the morality of our convictions can be conceived as existing independently of the political resources used to compete in the international system (see Buchanan 2007; Held 2002; 1995; Pogge 1994). While some normative IR theorists contend that collective moral commitments of states remain rooted in either social practice or the awareness of the state’s capacity to deliberate (Erskine 2003; Frost 2003), others develop analyses that are more empirically driven, focusing on the distribution of non-state actors, or non- governmental organizations’ (NGOs’) commitments in developing countries (Rubenstein 2008, 219–222; Rieff 2002). Still others treat moral commitments as a given component of the national interest, which, ipso facto, furthers compliance with treaties, even though the two can and often do diverge (Shalom 2012).

Unlike rational commitments or commitments measured in terms of rational utility, moral commitments require time and effort to develop (or evolve) and sustain. In humanitarian circles, moral commitments can and often do come into conflict with the principle of political neutrality of humanitarian NGOs in conflicts, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (Barnett 2011, 34). The issue here is whether the procedural commitment to neutrality affects or even detaches entities from the substantive moral ends that give meaning to their humanitarian actions. This, in turn, raises an important question: how do ethics underlie and shape one’s moral commitments? Can we understand ethics as the growing interface between the emotive power of one’s moral convictions (or the passion to promote a public good) and the rational utility of one’s competitive interests? And if so, how should we theorize about the role of ethics in converting some of the power of fear and distrust into this positive emotive power associated with one’s moral convictions?

While the literature on international ethics has addressed the ethical andmoral duties for promoting humanitarian norms, there has been little critical analysis of how ethics helps to transform the tension between the moral incentives underlying an agent’s commitment and the political constraints of the international state system. The growing literature on the transformative role of emotive values in IR claims that a wide range of emotions matter in our critical appraisal of the moral and ethical conduct of actors (Fattah and Fierke 2009; Saurette 2006; Mercer 2005; Crawford 2000). These studies, however, are generally concerned with investigating the disruptive effects of humiliation and fear regarding terrorism. While some have begun to analyse the ways in which certain positive emotions, for example compassion, can help to restore lost dignity, such analyses have largely focused on the dual role of ethics in shaping the beliefs of individual agents (including the self-sacrifice of terrorists) (Fierke 2013). What this suggests is that morality, while constituting a source of healing, can also be the very source of instability and polarizing tension in international relations. By ‘instability’, I am referring to the disruption and uncertainty caused by crises and threats that can undermine incentives to promote the public good or compel actors to ignore entirely (in a reckless manner) the political stakes of such a threat.

In short, there is the need for a meta-approach that can address the changing ethical dynamics of moral commitments in IR. My aim is to provide such a meta- approach by framing the constitutive role of certain ethics, namely: sincerity, empathy and sacrifice. I analyse two particular emergent moral discourses in

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global politics: the responsibility to protect (RtoP) and moral criminal accountability (the International Criminal Court [ICC]). I argue that this meta- approach can allow us to map the tensions between moral incentives and (the prevailing influence of) political constraints and to investigate the transformative possibilities of working beyond these tensions. In particular, I claim that the ethical values of sincerity, empathy and sacrifice play a dynamic yet under- studied role in interpreting and explaining the possibilities and limitations of moral commitments in IR.

Unlike charity, which often requires the negative emotions of pity, guilt or the giving away of what one has in surplus, sincerity, empathy and sacrifice require something more substantive of actors, namely, a deeper, positive emotive connection to promoting the common good. A deeper, positive emotive link reflects a sustained motive and the relative absence of negative emotions such as guilt; this is how I shall interpret the meaning and preferability of these three ethics insofar as they help to direct agents’ choices and evolving duties in humanitarian politics. Sacrifice, it should be stressed, can reflect an altruistic or selfless motive for promoting moral goods in IR; however, it is not distinctive to or determinative of altruism, since one can be altruistic without necessarily sacrificing one’s standing or status. It should also be emphasized that while states, non-state actors and international organizations may possess different constraints and incentives, they also, to varying degrees, exhibit these traits. Political and structural realists, as we shall see, argue that in an anarchical system states will naturally defect, cheat or seek some advantage over the other. This may be true, but, again, commitments to human rights regimes and other organizations cannot simply be sincere by default, or insincere by rational design. When states or other actors participate in, or are expected to contribute to, some public good, their behaviour is also shaped in some way by the norms and goods embodied in these regimes.

Accordingly, I shall define ‘morality’ as the proper conduct of actors, or how well such actors treat other actors. ‘Ethics’, by contrast, can be defined by howwell actors act in realizing their conduct and treating others well. I shall also assess various factors of power politics, such as geopolitical interests, competition, anarchical constraints and power maximization. In doing, I adopt three criteria to framemymeta-analysis: (1) actors remain unsure of their moral commitments and ethical responsibilities, given the uncertainty of their influence and/or participatory role and impact in global institutions; (2) they fail to uphold their ethical values by pursuing their narrow (self-)interests of maximizing power at the expense of promoting a public good; (3) there is a lack of agreement amongst the relevant actors about what ethical values should be promoted in furthering the moral mission of global institutions. I conclude that a meta-analysis of these above ethical values helps us to better understand the political stakes of the growing intersection of moral commitments and political realities.

The article is organized into three parts. The first part draws on the moral philosophies of commitment to map the moral basis of agents’ convictions and the constitutive ethical properties of such commitments. In the second part, I move on to address the link between morality and the law, by analysing the distributive commitments of NGOs and how the selected ethical values help to influence the political dynamics of humanitarianism, or the strategic, normative basis of peace

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and security. Finally, I apply these constitutive ethics to the normative discourses of the RtoP and the ICC.

The moral basis of commitments

Conceiving moral commitments

‘Commitments’ in international politics refer to the pledges states make to others and the obligations that these pledges entail. Obligations in this context can range from state cooperation with international authorities to states adopting new domestic laws to meet the guidelines of international organizations. At the personal level, moral philosophers refer to these obligations as ‘promissory’ commitments, or commitments that take the form of obligations (Mackie 1977; Velleman 1989). But moral commitments are not simply hollow pledges; they also reflect self-understandings, or why one struggles to preserve the values and beliefs one considers important. One commits to something, in other words, because one values and believes in something, whether this means committing oneself to liberal and conservative causes, such as (not) raising taxes or the duty to avoid cruelty (Lieberman 2007, 183; Marcel 1975; Taylor 1989, 12–14). Moral philosophers articulate these moral dimensions in terms of substantive commitments. Marcel Lieberman (2007, 4), for instance, highlights three features of substantive commitments:

. stability over time and their capacity to be revised and reconsidered

. their guiding force

. their relation to self-understanding and identity

For Lieberman, commitments are based on independent-desire facts; that is, they are guided by a goal that overrides one’s desire. Commitments, in other words, are reducible neither to desire nor to any particular policy. Rather, they exist independently of our desires and emotions. Substantive commitments, in Lieberman’s view, can persist or remain stable over a long period of time, since they reflect the deep-seated values and beliefs that comprise one’s self- conceptions and the capacity of commitments to be revised in relation to these self-understandings or conceptions. Thus, for example, if I am committed to the liberation of a certain people from a region in the world, but then learn that their struggle has involved the systematic torture of their own people, I will likely reconsider my commitment to this cause in light of these facts or practices that no longer conform to my own beliefs of ending torture and fighting corruption. The conflict between my values of fairness and harmful practices may be significant enough to convince me that I can no longer commit myself to such causes, unless I forsake these very values. On the other hand, if I value the absolute need to end the practice of torture, then complying with the demand to end the torture will reflect the strong moral incentive for doing so. Moral incentives in this sense help to bring together moral commitments and enforcement by producing compelling reasons and convictions to cooperate and to deliberate.

Ronald Dworkin, for example, argues that the moral content of commitments reflects two essential demands: (1) to seek equal respect and treatment under the law (procedural), (2) and to pursue the ends of happiness, peace and well-being; ends that constitute what it means to live well, live peacefully and to forge

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enduring mutual respect (Dworkin 1978). The former presupposes the latter insofar as fairness is necessary for pursuing these substantive ends and enabling someone to be recognized for what they can contribute to the common good (see Taylor 1989). ‘Procedural’ commitments, as I have indicated, refer to the pledges agents make to uphold the procedures of fair treatment and/or fairness involving equal treatment and participation. In international politics, states commit themselves to such procedures because they value and believe in the organization’s mission of promoting peace and security, as well as its ability to uphold the principles of this mission. Their consistent and stable desire to serve a common good as collective agents is fundamental to understanding their incentives for deliberating and carrying out their responsibilities and policies (Erskine 2003, 6–7).

Moral commitments, therefore, are a fundamental feature of international justice and the law. As Allen Buchanan (2007, 81) puts it: ‘A moral philosophy of international law that takes basic human rights as fundamental—rather than the sovereignty states—thereby reduces the tension between justice and peace by supporting peace within states through the observance of human rights norms.’ Still, a global prosecutor’s commitment to justice can also lead to the issuance of arrest warrants that ignore or downplay the effect of his commitment on the peace arrangement within states. While Buchanan concedes that sincere commitments to justice need not be absolute—that there may be minor injustices that need to be tolerated in order to promote the primary goal of human rights protection—he does not explicate the types of injustices, or how power politics trumps justice in various crisis situations. In short, his normative claim that we ought to treat justice in terms of a common morality across and within states begs the question of how political power justifies the very legal principles (such as non-interference) that can suppress and even disrupt one’s moral commitments. In other words, the rational utility of commitments lies not simply in the fear of being isolated or attacked, but in the way in which positive emotive and ethical values shape the rational strategies of peace and security (see Mercer 2005).

Constituting moral commitments

Moral commitments, then, arise from the strategic desire and capacity to pursue the common good, offering us a stable and long-term vision of our substantive and political objectives and goals. Power politics, as I have suggested, can affect the desire and pursuit of these goals by reinforcing the distrust of others’ good intentions, thereby diminishing the moral incentive and desire to pursue these goals. This is why, I claim, we need to assess the broader scope of meaning of ethical values, namely, sincerity, empathy and sacrifice; for such values allow us to understand how the underlying strategic nature of commitments materialize in IR.

One could argue that charity and generosity are ethical values that serve an important normative function. But such ethical values can and often do involve giving away what one has in surplus; having enough resources to aid others can expose a delimited or restrictive attachment to those one seeks to help. By ‘delimited’, I am referring to how pity and guilt can presuppose a kindness born from one’s elevated position over the recipient, not a deeper, positive emotive

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connection to the recipient (in which the purpose is to actively advance the recipient’s well-being). We do not, in other words, say that one’s charitable act of kindness comes from one’s strict identification with this recipient’s desires and goals for advancement. Charity, in this sense, reflects the duty to meet the basic survival needs of people, not to empower the recipient or to advance the opportunities for overcoming the conditions of their suffering. This is not to downplay the importance of charity. Rather it is to say that a deeper positive emotive link is how we can interpret the positive orientation and preferability of sincerity, empathy and sacrifice, insofar as these values help to gauge and direct agents’ choices and action in relation to the changing duties and internalization of norms in humanitarian politics. From this view, one can treat empathy as an inextricable element of moral commitment, since it presupposes (as I interpret it) the positive orientation of compassion, that is, how one’s giving to the sufferer can be linked to the desire to see the recipient overcome the conditions of his or her suffering.

Sincerity, empathy and sacrifice, then, require something more of actors: a deeper emotive connection to the common good. As we shall see, these three values are not only reflexive in nature but also constitute the elements of what Ronald Dworkin refers to as ‘moral filters’. In Dworkin’s view, we need to forge the strength of ‘reflective convictions’ of judging and determining the sincerity and goodness of our convictions that inform and dictate our actions, whether or not they violate the need for presumptive respect of others (Dworkin 2011, 108). What this suggests is that moral commitments in international politics are never pure expressions of the beliefs and values they embody; they also require trade- offs between the ethical actions of agents (that is, individuals, states, NGOs and international organizations) and the maximization of power interests. Let us turn, then, to the particular importance and attendant trade-offs of my three selected ethical values.

The meaning of ‘sincerity’ in IR can be difficult to pinpoint. States may express their sincerity to commit to a human rights treaty, but then feign that sincerity when it does not serve their political interests. United States (US) President Bill Clinton’s signature of the Rome Statute, the ICC Treaty, in December 2000 was for all intents and purposes a hollow pledge, especially given his proviso that the US Senate would never vote on it (Roach 2006). A substantive, sincere pledge by Clinton in this case would have meant two things: signing the treaty midway through his second term so that he would have more time to devote to its possible ratification, and declaring that he intended to persuade opponents in the US Senate of the value of the Rome Statute. My use of the term ‘sincerity’ stresses morally motivated actions that directly involve and lead to that agent’s intended contribution to a particular public good, such as legal accountability, environmental protection and/or collective security (see Roach 2005b). A state acting sincerely in this sense would be one that actively gives up something of its own in exchange for promoting a public good; one that resolves a conflict between a narrowly perceived security need or threat and a compelling collective moral interest to serve a public good. For example, South Africa’s action to terminate its nuclear weapons programme under the political and moral leadership of Nelson Mandela illustrates how South Africa resolved the conflict between its collective vision for peace and security and the narrowly perceived need for atomic weapons.

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In this respect, sincerity expresses the desire to stay true to one’s beliefs, especially if this means a commitment to alleviating the suffering of civilians. As such, it reflects a decision or action that stems from one’s deeper, underlying convictions. Such faithfulness does not exclude one’s admitting to one’s wrongs; in fact, to be sincere is to be willing to admit to errors and mistakes made, to take responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. This is what Dworkin (2011, 8) means by the moral flexibility of our commitments, that is, a willingness to revise our moral and political goals so that our pursuit of these goals does not become self-serving. From this perspective, sincerity is ultimately about accepting that we can be wrong, and that we accept our fallibility (see Talbott 2005).

But sincerity can also exact a price on our commitment, leaving us vulnerable to the vagaries of power (see Macgill 2012, 34). Insincerity or its equivalent, dissembling, may be necessary to maximize power so that we can achieve peace and even security in the long(er) term. Insincere commitments, in this sense, reflect ex ante pledges of achieving greater security. The political goal of insincerity and/or preserving the power of the leader is supposed to serve as the ontological means of adjusting to temporal changes, free of any fixed moral (regulative) ideal. Hence it is designed to facilitate one’s capacity to adapt to and control for the flux and/or constant changes of our political environment and society. In this way, a short-term amoral conception of commitment advocates a willingness to feign or dissemble our true intentions in order to achieve the most desirable outcome (see Machiavelli 1971). By this account, one must be able to act immorally (even cruelly) in order to preserve one’s power. In IR, it is often this need to act insincerely for political gain that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of our moral convictions. One could argue, then, that on the one hand, this may be the most challenged of our three ethical values in regard to states and international organizations’ moral commitment, since sincerity is supposed to demonstrate the positive influence of our moral goals; that is, to build the public trust in the exercise of authority. On the other hand, there are nowmore moral and legal humanitarian norms in IR, such as the RtoP, which have evolved precisely because more actors perceive the long- and short-term value of remaining true to their moral convictions, or what they believe matters most in terms of promoting public goods and cooperation on issues related to peace and security.

Still, this evolutionary process of norms remains uneven not only geographically, but also agentially. This is why we need to distinguish between the degree(s) of influence among the actors involved. Human rights NGOs, for instance, demonstrate what we consider a high degree of sincerity. But even here it is important to take stock of the tension shaping this ethical value and its projective influence on the moral commitment of NGOs. Some NGOs, most notably the Red Cross, have had to learn to balance their moral commitment to relieve the suffering of people against the Code of political neutrality. The question that arises is whether remaining neutral in extreme cases of conflict is an absolute prerequisite for remaining true to one’s convictions about relieving suffering. Genocide can challenge the sanctity and integrity of this Code by allowing complete irresponsibility and irrationality to go unchallenged. For this reason, such extreme atrocities require evaluation of the integrity of the Code, that is, to uphold trust under all conditions, except for instances where this trust is innately undermined. From this perspective, it becomes implausible to support

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such a Code, especially when doing so can mean the silent support of the very atrocities that contradict the essence of the moral mission of the Red Cross.

We also must be willing to sacrifice some of our beliefs to preserve and promote the integrity of our moral commitments. ‘Sacrifice’, as broadly understood here, is the willingness to incur short-term costs for future mutual benefit. It is born from a strong conviction, or need, to incur such costs in order to realize a public good. As Benedict Anderson (1991) argues, it can be closely linked with national identity and national loyalties. National loyalty, as he points out, is undying and borne from fatalism, the resignation to one’s mortality. It symbolizes our willingness to die for a cause that lies at the root of our humanity, our mortality. Threats to our mortality nonetheless become immanent to our existence; they demonstrate, in some contexts, the inherent need for painful trade-offs between security and human rights, or the willingness to forsake certain civil rights in order to receive the benefits of security. The idea, then, is that each one of us must accept a minimal, acceptable level of pain as a precondition to resist the temptation of embracing a distorted ideal or pure society. As George Kateb (2011, 181) states:

[s]ome kinds and degrees of pain and suffering some anxieties and risks, failure and losses are built into leading free lives. That is the price of honoring individual status and hence human dignity. The brave new world and societies that tend in its direction disregard human rights in the name of painlessness and contentedness. What is more, if the whole world were to tend in the same direction, human dignity would be on the way to extinction.

This normative idea of maintaining a minimal threshold of pain underscores the common political struggle of reducing serious harm, especially in the long term. This, of course, has become a common theme in international environmental studies, principally by way of the precautionary principle. This principle holds that it is better to act on limited scientific certainty than face the exponentially and potentially uncontrollable consequences and costs in the future. In short, we have to be willing to accept and experience some political costs, such as relative political instability, if we are to stay true to the practical difficulties and requirements of realizing our moral objectives, such as making strong concessions on human rights protection, or, in the case of states, of checking and challenging self-interested positions of maximizing power at the expense of other states (such as unilaterally acquiring territory, as Russia has done in Crimea and now, it seems, in eastern Ukraine). ‘Sacrifice’, as understood here, refers to the willingness to challenge and move beyond these self-interested positions by actively identifying with and embracing the requirements for realizing a public good.

Can we realize such goods without feeling empathy for others? In most cases, no. As I have already mentioned, empathy is an important precondition for realizing the efficacy of moral commitments (or realizing the transformative outcomes in practice and law), since it furnishes agents with a positive source of motivation and a compelling interest to accept and internalize the costs of being sincere and making (self-) sacrifices. As such, ‘empathy’ is an emotive value in which we share in or identify with the pain of the others as our own. In his book, Empire of humanity, Michael Barnett writes that many organizations and individuals display what he calls a ‘passion for compassion’, suggesting that there is an inner moral core of commitments to human rights, or of servicing the

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needs of individuals suffering the ill-effects of war and natural disasters (Barnett 2011, 34–37). This ‘passion for compassion’ can be traced back to the early Enlightenment era. As Lynn Hunt (2007) argues, it first emerged into the public discourse in the middle part of the eighteenth century, at a time when many thinkers called for the abolition of harmful and unjust institutional practices, including slavery, torture and war. This is not the place to elaborate on these Enlightenment struggles to end these practices but it should be noted that the emergence of empathy as a recognized ethical value reflects the importance of linking our political and moral convictions with the improvement of society. An attack on our societal values can also be an attack on all who share these values.

In short, these three ethical values show how a deeper regard for other actors can involve the incentives and positive-oriented motivations to treat others well. This is not to say that such values allow us to transcend the constraints of the anarchical international system, or even the opportunities of states to maximize their power and gain advantage over other states within human rights regimes. States will always defect or seek to withdraw from regimes that do not serve their own interests or that pose a threat to them (such as Kenya’s current attempts to withdraw from the Rome Statute). What it does suggest, though, is that such values can interact with politics in ways that test and strengthen the moral incentives to commit to a wider, more holistic vision of peace and security. In other words, if we assume that there are incentives to cooperate with authorities, then, as I have argued, sincere intentions, empathy with victims’ suffering and the sacrifice of some state sovereignty can address an important gap in our understanding of the changing political dynamics of moral commitments: namely, that some emotive values can assume an important rational function (or larger visionary strategies) in realizing and sustaining our commitment to a new set of moral principles. If this is true, then we need a more expansive meta-vision of moral commitment to understand and resolve the tensions and conflicts between promoting public goods and the reality of serving one’s competitive interests.

Morality and the law

Commitments in IR often involve two distinct and often conflictual aspects: a legal and a moral claim. Under international treaty law, member states consent to abide by a treaty by ratifying the treaty (Steiner et al 2007). Ratification confers obligations and duties, which in turn require states to pledge their support (cooperation) to the regime. Still, the fact that states commit legally by signing and ratifying a treaty does not mean that they will support the actions, decisions and/ or demands of an organization. This is especially true of the most powerful states, which may abandon or reinterpret their commitments to a principle because of a conflict between their geopolitical interests and the perceived threat posed by the jurisdiction or authority of an organization (such as the US withdrawal from the Rome Statute in 2002).

But if the strategic value of commitments is reducible to their rational utility or rational components of calculation, then one necessarily assumes that ethical and emotive values cannot play any meaningful role in our explanation of state cooperation; that they are either misleading or disruptive variables (see Abbot

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et al 2000; McLaughlin-Mitchell and Justyna-Powell 2011; Simmons and Danner 2010; Simmons 2009). But this analytical narrowness elides an important normative issue: whether the strategic commitments to abide by the law are not themselves discursive elements of our moral convictions in promoting peace and security. Richard Price (2008, 6–8), for instance, claims that IR rationalists and constructivists have yet to address effectively the normative question of how we should act. Moral commitments in this sense are important precisely because they reflect the strategic possibilities of extending peace and security not simply to states but also to individuals within them. But it is also this ethical issue that reflects the problematic role of neutrality in moral commitments: when the possibilities of moral intervention and their attendant strategies are ruled out in favour of building presumptive trust.

NGO principles and distributive commitments

As already mentioned, non-state actors can also be considered alongside states, since the incentives and constraints, while different from states’, reflect the opportunities to reconcile moral objectives with peace and security. Non- governmental organizations, in this sense, exhibit a deeper, more developed moral core of commitment, since their mission in most cases is to advance a cause ignored by states or other organizations. There is a range of principles that determine how NGOs are expected to deliver and distribute assistance. These include, as Michael Barnett (2011, 145) states: ‘the right of victims of natural and man-made catastrophes to receive aid, neutrality and independence; abstinence from meddling in the internal affairs of states, governments and their parties, adherence to medical ethics and an unwillingness to air any political opinion regarding the causes of the emergency’. Over the years, NGOs have had to balance their political commitment to ending suffering against the principle of neutrality. Barnett points to the personality and character of Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF), to illustrate how a passionate and militant dedication to the principled ideals of universality and fraternity can misdirect or unduly conflict with the politics of ending human suffering. In his view, Kouchner’s politics were born out of an unmediated desire for direct action. It was, as Barnett puts it, ‘a politics that fought injustice, not through the old style of protest, but instead through direct action on behalf of the victims of the world’ (2007, 145). But one could also argue that the Red Cross Code1 was born from the need for discipline and restraint, without which NGOs might not be able to apply this hands-on approach.2

For some, however, the politics/neutrality debate can obscure the direction of these commitments, or how they can be properly distributed. Jennifer Rubenstein (2008, 217), for instance, argues that analysing the principles and commitments of NGOs can also ‘generate an improved description of the practices that are the

1Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief.

2When, for instance, in 2008 the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC authorized an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, the government of Sudan immediately drove out all NGOs from Darfur, the western region of the country.

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context of those principles and commitments’. She identifies a range of distributive commitments, including maximizing harm reduction, equality and participation. She shows how physical and psychological constraints on funding distribution entail a wide range of distributive commitments. The diverse implementation and application of these commitments explains the ongoing process by which NGOs direct their professional goals of delivering their services. Non-governmental organizations, in other words, may experience the conflict between operating neutrally and actively reducing harm, but this does not necessarily reduce or impinge upon their professional commitment to distribute resources fairly.

Still, the problem with this empirical approach is that it ignores the moral holism of commitments. By breaking down and reducing their elements into their constituent parts, we also lose sight of the holistic vision of peace and security that constitutes them. And yet it is this strained holistic vision or metaphor of peace that underscores the tensions between the passions and the political constraints imposed by the Red Cross Code. As I have tried to show, sincerity, empathy and sacrifice arise from and determine these tensions in ways that help us to understand the delimitations of dogmatic ideology, the fear of threats and self- serving interests (I shall address this in greater detail in the next section). From this perspective, the moral incentives to promote a public good presuppose the need of the agent to enhance its moral legitimacy and accountability through dialogue and deliberation (see Habermas 2006). As the venues for such dialogue, global institutions become the practical repository of knowledge and norms, which are the theoretical basis upon which we interpret the evolving links between these incentives and the actions that extend peace and security to shared moral objectives/missions, such as human rights protection.

Making peace and security

Extending the principle of peace and security to human rights protection also exposes the stark and/or static tensions between the self-serving interests of powerful states and the agent’s moral incentives. For example, the United Nations (UN) Security Council’s veto, which constitutes perhaps the most well-known procedural constraint, allows the geopolitical interests of the most powerful state to predominate over or suppress such incentives. My aim in this section is to analyse how the above three ethical values can help to reinforce the moral incentives against these political constraints and to shed light on the moral possibilities of reducing the prevailing influence of geopolitical interests. I do so by examining the moral and political discourses of the RtoP and moral accountability.

Humanitarian intervention and peace and security principle

The failure to enforce human rights norms in cases such as Syria only reinforces the need to conceptualize what can and cannot be filtered in regards to the uncertainty and the maximizing of power produced by our political commit- ments. It also highlights the problem of extending the peace and security principle in a consistent and reliable manner to human rights issues, such as peacekeeping

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and humanitarian intervention (see Roach 2005a; Rieff 2002; Franck 2003). For Michael Walzer (2011, 70), an effective extension lies in the convergence of legal duty and charity or justice, or what he calls ‘two-in-one’. Here he argues that the intrinsic connection between the procedural duty to intervene and justice (charity) remains ambiguous. The UN, in other words, does not intervene in order to be kind and charitable to people affected by violence; it does so because it is its legal duty to protect civilians against harm. What this highlights, though, is arguably the emergence of a new discourse on protection, from the right to intervention to a responsibility of protecting innocent civilians (Deng 1996). The idea here is that any political commitment to a regime of humanitarian protection needs to stress not only the capacity to react, but also prevention and peacebuilding. The RtoP report issued by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 seeks to address not only the politicizing effects of states or power maximizing opportunities, but also the political commitment (or will) to stop human rights abuses: where prevention, reaction and peacebuilding efforts can constitute an integrated range of measures designed to reduce the uncertainty of any politicizing effects and to link the political will with a larger, more sustained moral commitment (ICISS 2001). The UN Secretary General’s (Ban Ki-moon) Five-Year Action Agenda, for example, now provides a wide-ranging, long-term implementation plan (UN 2013), consisting of measures that require the sacrifices of developed states (such as investment in poverty programmes) and sincere pledges by developing states to be resilient in their efforts to redistribute income and to institute civil society measures.

Now, whether or not this shift from the right to intervene to the RtoP is simply putting old wine in new bottles remains an open-ended issue. Indeed, many critics of the RtoP argue that the RtoP norm—which is designed to protect innocent civilians at risk from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing—remains a self-serving duty, an extension of liberal inter- ventionism (Chandler 2004; Kuperman 2008). It could be argued that Russia’s and China’s veto of the UN resolution mandating the use of military force to stop human rights abuses by Assad’s regime in Syria was directed at the ‘Western’ self- serving mission of the Libyan intervention (which they vetoed as well); that in this case, China’s and Russia’s insistence on upholding the legal principle of non- interference could be considered as trumping legal responsibility. But one could also argue that, in disguising their own political aims, both states allowed their narrow, self-serving geopolitical interests to suppress the moral incentive to stop the abuses, to the detriment of the population at risk.

Structural or offensive realists might argue the same point: that moral intervention would lead to a political power vacuum and greater regional instability (Mearsheimer 2001). The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US, for example, could be treated as an unguided and unlimited moral commitment, an imprudent use of power to achieve a moral end. But realists’ deep scepticism of any positive influence of morality in an anarchical system begs the question of whether sincerity and sacrifice can have any role to play in reinforcing and structuring the moral incentive for stopping abuses in a region where collective intervention initiated outside the legal scope of the UN could have prevented the chaos, not to mention the continuing carnage in Syria (and surrounding areas); where the emergence of the Islamic State in Syria (ISIS) currently threatens the interests of both neighbouring countries and world powers.

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What this particular example suggests is the need to develop or stress the moral groundwork of incentives and responsibilities. Here proponents of the RtoP have stressed the importance of the ‘just war’ tradition framework of the RtoP (via the RtoP report), namely the themes of war as an option of last resort, legitimate cause and probability of success. To be morally committed to the RtoP, in this sense, means two things: a pledge to act on these principles in a strict and deliberative manner (with wide-ranging consensus) and to commit to what the RtoP report stressed was the systematic need for prevention and/or the moral duty to prevent such crimes happening in the first place. As I have suggested, this a priori moral view does not focus on the political nuances and parameters of the emergent normative basis of the RtoP, or on why, for instance, the Secretary General’s office has felt obliged to produce a Five-Year Action Agenda to operationalize the moral parameters of the RtoP. Norm-based constructivists would argue that the UN’s action, or the RtoP norm development, reflects the final stage of norm dynamics in IR: the internalization of values (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). But there is little, if any, study of how certain ethics and discursive considerations have influenced the shifting political dynamics of this normative trend (Müller 2004). What is more, norm-based constructivists tend to stress the neutral role of such institutions, or their ‘not exercising power but instead serving others’, rather than showing how ethics and politics interact in ways to produce a long-term vision of peace and security (Barnett and Finnemore 2005, 175).

Moral accountability and justice

This lack in the constructivist literature on the RtoP brings us to the ICC. The adoption of the ICC reflects the collective efforts to end the culture of impunity in which state leaders used national amnesty laws to evade accountability for their crimes. The ICC—which became fully operational in July 2002 and operates independently of the UN—is a permanent standing international court. Its mandate is twofold: to hold jurisdiction to investigate, prosecute and punish the very worst perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide; and to ensure that no such perpetrator will remain immune from international investigation and prosecution. An important feature of the ICC’s jurisdiction is the principle of complementarity, which requires the ICC prosecutor to defer to national courts, unless the national court remains unwilling or unable to investigate and prosecute in a genuine manner. Under this principle, the ICC is expected to provide technical assistance to national courts and to exercise its discretionary power in strict accordance with its Rules of Procedure and Evidence (see Kleffner 2008; Roach 2013; Roach 2011).

Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of this discretionary power is serving the international interests of justice and common standards of morality or accountability (see Article 53 of the Rome Statute [ICC 1998]). The ICC prosecutor’s substantive commitment to justice reflects, in this sense, a wide scope of discretionary power or visionary scope of justice (of ending the culture of impunity), which continues to conflict with the particularism of states’ demands. In recent years, the conflict has highlighted the complex political overtones of selective justice (Kaye 2011; Glasius 2006).3 A growing number of African states, in

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fact, see the ICC’s interventions in Africa as discriminatory. In the summer of 2011, the African Union passed a resolution requesting all member states to ignore the arrest warrants against Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi and his sons. The motion stated, among other things, that the ICC was ‘discriminatory’ against African nations and had failed to investigate crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan (New York Times 2011, 10). It encouraged its members not to cooperate with the ICC so long as the ICC restricted its scope of investigations to Africa.

Meanwhile, the US, Russia and China have showed little willingness or openness to allow a global court to investigate their military personnel or to surrender any of their officials to the ICC.4 For its part, the ICC has showed little credible commitment to taking on these interests. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the ICC, and Fatou Bensouda, the current prosecutor, have not pursued investigations in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, or in other areas where these powerful countries have interests.5 Thus, on the one hand, the ICC’s discretionary power remains restricted by geopolitical interests. On the other hand, the ICC has used its independent powers to open up investigations against state leaders. Despite the many accusations of selective justice that have accompanied these assertive actions, one could argue that the ICC has shown a determination to sacrifice its credibility as an impartial and legitimate court in order to promote the moral end of accountability (Roach 2009). Moreover, some powerful non-party states have shown restraint in curbing or challenging the ICC’s determination, while targeted states-parties such as Uganda have been largely sincere (albeit resistant in various ways) in their commitments to cooperate with the ICC.6

In short, the ICC’s determination reflects its commitment to serve the moral interests of international justice (Moreno-Ocampo 2008). Bensouda, for example, (who comes from Gambia) has begun, along with certain states on the Security Council, to draft resolutions that would authorize the ICC to open investigations in Syria and other parts of the world, including Ukraine and North Korea, to uphold the ICC’s commitment to justice. Whether or not Russia and/or China elect to block these investigations, the ICC continues to show its willingness to

3One could argue that the discursive shift in international criminal justice has its roots in a broader interpretation of its charter principle of promoting peace, or extending it to war crimes and humanitarian intervention. UN Security Council Resolution 827, for example, established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which appeared to be a normative proxy for committing troops (or worsening the violence), and designed to strengthen Security Council members’ political commitment to addressing the atrocities of the Yugoslav Wars.

4As permanent members of the Security Council, all three can use their veto to block (or influence) a Security Council referral of a situation in their state or states where they have interests.

5 It should be noted that the ICC (Office of the Prosecutor) has conducted preliminary reviews in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories, Syria, North Korea and Colombia; however, these are only preliminary inquiries and not investigations. In the cases of North Korea and Syria, opening an investigation will require Security Council approval, an outcome that seems in doubt given China’s and Russia’s interests and priorities.

6 The US and China, for example, refrained from vetoing such a resolution, preferring instead to abstain. The US, it should also be noted, abstained on the condition that all military personnel of non-state parties engaged in the peacekeeping operation were provided immunity from ICC prosecution.

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work closely with or to reach out to the victims on the ground. Through its rapidly developing outreach programme established in 2007, ICC officials have made efforts to work closely with local people, by building communal coalitions and informing local populations of its proceedings at The Hague. Together with its outreach programme and Victims and Witnesses Unit, which allows victims to participate in legal proceedings and be compensated, the ICC has allowed empathy for the plight of affected individuals to sustain and direct its commitment to justice (see Roach 2010).

But, again, the question of whether the ICC has made the needed sacrifice to reconcile its moral commitment to justice with the political reality of big power interests remains to be answered. As we have seen, the ICC’s unwillingness to confront the most powerful states’ interests has led some developing states to question its moral commitment to fair, unselective justice. This, however, should not suggest that geopolitical interests will permanently constrict the ICC’s jurisdictional scope. Rather, certain states will need to make their own sacrifices (delegation of authority) to justice, by reconciling their own power interests with the interests of international justice, thereby transforming political constraints into moral ones in the area of legal accountability.

Conclusion

Over the past several years, human rights scholars have assessed the growing importance of insincere commitments in determining state cooperation with human rights treaties. The trouble with this rationalist approach is that it assumes that morality and sincerity remain unreliable variables for assessing the emergence of human rights norms and the ethical dynamics of long-term commitments to promoting public goods. In this article, I sought to redirect attention to the moral basis for commitments in order to understand the ethical requirements for realizing and fulfilling these commitments. While the literature on international ethics has addressed the ethical and moral duties for promoting humanitarian norms, there has been little critical analysis of how ethics helps to balance the moral incentives underlying an agent’s commitment against the political constraints of the international state system. For this reason, I addressed how the moral discourses of the RtoP and the ICC exposed the developing tensions between these incentives and political constraints, while furnishing the theoretical basis for evaluating and reinterpreting the normative and practical strategies designed to mitigate the prevailing influence of political constraints on these moral incentives.

Thus, in the context of the RtoP, I explained how the UN Secretary General’s Five-Year Action Plan reflected a sweeping strategy of implementing the RtoP. Not only does it expand the practical definition of responsibility, but it also requires states to resolve the conflict between state sovereignty and the threat to human security. In regard to the ICC, I showed how the ICC’s obligation to serve the interests of international justice constituted an important feature of its moral commitment. I argued that in pursuing heads of state, the ICC prosecutor has had to sacrifice some of the ICC’s credibility as a reliable court of last resort, and that, in spite of political obstacles, including the Security Council veto, the ICC’s own moral commitment and empathy for victims, along with states’ sincerity to cooperate with the ICC via the complementarity principle, remain largely intact, if

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not enhanced. I therefore concluded that the resources and initiative exist to continue working towards stable and stronger moral commitments and to resolve, among other things, the moral predicament of imposing international justice in a world in which advantages and benefits tend to accrue to the powerful states.

Notes on contributor

Steven C Roach is Associate Professor of International Politics in the Department of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida. Among his books are Critical theory of international politics (Routledge, 2010), Governance, order, and the International Criminal Court (Oxford, 2009), International relations: the key concepts (Routledge, 2008), Critical theory and international relations: a reader (ed) (Routledge, 2008), and Politicizing the International Criminal Court: the convergence of politics, ethics, and law (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Email: [email protected]

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