The Responsibility to Protect in the context of the continuing War on Terror. A study of liberal interventionism and the Syrian crisis.

The insistence in some quarters that states live up to an international responsibility to protect foreign populations from mass atrocity has historically had a complex relationship with the 'realist' insistence that states have a primary responsibility to promote the interests of their citizens. This was exposed in contemporary history by the failure in the 1990s to prevent the crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Rwanda. UN reports indicated these failures stemmed from a lack of political will rather than an insistence that states did not have a responsibility to protect humanity.

In response, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS, 2001) sought to clarify state responsibility and create a new norm (or expectation) that international society would intervene to protect civilian populations from mass atrocity if states 'manifestly failed' to do so. This became known as the Responsibility to Protect or R2P.

Even then, however, a realist discourse that prioritises the security concerns of the state clashed with a humanitarian discourse, including attempts to widen state responsibility and build political capacity to prevent mass atrocity. Not only did the events of 9/11 divert attention from the ICISS report, the US War on Terror, which included interventions against 'rogue' states such as Iraq, revived a long-standing concern among non-western and post-colonial states. The concern that R2P would be used instrumentally to support unwarranted security interventions appeared justified when the US invaded Iraq in 2003.

In the post-Iraq era the US and its allies remained committed to R2P and combating the al Qaeda threat. The violence in Syria, however, set these priorities on a collision course. The humanitarian situation clearly triggered R2P because the Assad regime was 'manifestly failing' the Syrian population. Yet the realist insistence that western states should not intervene against Assad's regime because there was a risk that would assist groups affiliated to al Qaeda again complicated the humanitarian response. A counter-proliferation narrative that emphasised the need to protect the chemical weapons taboo and to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, especially to Iran, also complicated the response.

In this context the specific aim of the research is to understand and assess how liberal governments navigated this ethical dilemma by studying the foreign policy discourse of liberal states.

It has three objectives:

1) to interpret the foreign policy discourse in the US, the UK and France as it related to the events in Syria from January 2011 to December 2013. The research will provide an understanding of how the security-based discourses of counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation influenced the implementation of R2P.

2) to address the difficulties of establishing a normative framework that can assess liberal foreign policy. The project will draw on contemporary moral and political philosophy to ask whether theory can deliver solutions to the ethical dilemmas states confront, or even a stable set of normative criteria like 'good international citizenship' to assess foreign policy actions. In the absence of a single normative framework this aspect of the project will identify a plurality of frameworks that can be used to assess state practice during the Syrian crisis.

3) to put the emprical findings of objective 1 together with the theoretical findings of objective 2 to make a normative assessment of liberal state behaviour during the Syrian crisis and to set these findings in historical context to examine how this may have changed over time.

Finally, the project will disseminate its findings through academic journals, engage non-academic users, primarily parliamentarians, through workshops and policy seminars and seek to generate policy impact with reports published by a well-placed Westminster-based think-tank.

The research will create knowledge that will have an impact on the following non-academic beneficiaries:

- Whitehall policymakers. The project will be of particular interest to the UK government given its commitment to 'promote a shared understanding of R2P' (FCO: 2011, 4-5). The knowledge produced will, in this respect, complement the P-I's ESRC funded seminar series project which indentified this policy need in the context of the normative challenge posed by the emerging powers (or BRICS) Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) researchers were involved in the drafting of that funded proposal and have been consulted about this proposal. They have already been invited to participate in the events funded by the seminar series grant, which will run alongside this research project. The FCO's researchers will be sent the working papers that will be produced as part of this current proposal (see planned outputs). Specifically, Paul Bentall of the Multilateral Research Group at the UK FCO has helped to focus the research questions to be addressed by this project. Further discussions with the Multilateral Research Group have taken place concerning the possibility of co-hosting an event as part of the seminar series. This opens up pathways to impact for the findings of this project. Subsequent publications will be of interest to various UK government departments including the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence.

- Parliamentarians. In August 2013, the House of Commons voted against the government's proposal that the UK should support the use of American military force in response to the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, Syria. The debate demonstrated how Parliament was responding to a deep public interest in how governments conceived of the UK's global role and the responsibilities that went with that. Parliamentary inquiries have been established to learn the lessons of the August crisis (Foreign Affairs Select Committee, 2013; Defence Select Committee 2013) and the PI has contributed written evidence, which was published by the first of these in October 2013 (Ralph 2013b). Further evidence of Parliament's interest is the citation of the PI's Foreign Policy Centre reports by the Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander (Alexander and Kearns 2013, loc.1319). The proposal will build on these insights and networks, which talk directly to Parliament's interests and enable the P-I and his team to provide further policy relevant evidence based on rigorous interdisciplinary inquiry.

-Think-Tanks and NGOs. The research will be of interest to the following think-tanks: the Foreign Policy Centre (where the PI is Senior Research Associate), the Henry Jackson Society and the United Nations Association (UNA). These are already collaborating with the PI as part of the ESRC seminar series and the PI has been commissioned by UNA-UK to write an interview-based report for mid-2014 on R2P and British foreign policy. Other interested groups include the International Coalition for the R2P, Chatham House, Royal United Services Institute and human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

-Media. Questions concerning mass atrocity and international intervention, including the Syria crisis, attract a lot of media attention. The research will be of interest to journalists and the PI has a track record of providing comment in this area. He has written for The Guardian's Comment is Free, BBC News, MSN News, the Yorkshire Post. The team regularly contributes to blogs such as LSE Blog and Leeds Security and Justice blog. The research will coincide with the 10th anniversary of the 2005 United Nations World Summit, which is commonly seen as the moment international society adopted R2P. This will generate a demand for retrospective commentary, which this research team will be able to meet by building on its network of media contacts.