La responsabilité de protéger et l’intervention humanitaire :
de la reconceptualisation de la souveraineté des États à l’individualisme normatif

The increasing number of internal conflicts in the Post-Cold War era propelled to the foreground the concern for individuals.  Though international peace and security historically constituted the pillars of the world institutional system, the opportunity arose to establish an effective and cross-boundary human rights protection regime.  According to humanists, humanitarian intervention was the necessary evil to bring an end to the human sufferings caused by ethnic and religious differences.  Nevertheless, this kind of interference is still nowadays perceived as a neo-colonialist action and goes against the highest international relations norms, namely the state sovereignty and the non-intervention principles.  This thesis’ issue lies within the controversy between states’ rights and universal human rights, which are two conflicting ends the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) tried to reconcile along with elaborating its responsibility to protect concept.  The field of this paper is political science in international studies, but the focus is above all on political philosophy notions and stakes, particularly on ethics of international relations.  The goal is to build a critical and theoretical thinking about the Responsibility to Protect conclusions, particularly regarding the just cause and appropriate authority criteria.  In accordance with our interpretation of the ICISS moral justification conditions for humanitarian intervention – criteria derived from the just war theory’s concern for jus ad bellum – the commission’s stance is split into a progressive cosmopolitan view and a more conservative one that promotes a world order constituted by sovereign states.  On one hand the commission separates itself from international law, putting forward an ethical duty to stop the massive human rights violations beyond borders.  At the same time it is afraid of excessive interferences, as shown by the establishment of a relatively high just cause threshold and the appointment of a multilateral body in charge of legitimizing the intervention.  This dialectical paper’s first objective is to describe and place the ICISS recommendations into the just war tradition.  Then, the purpose is to sum up the tacit philosophical premises of the ICISS report in relation to its choice to preserve a firm non-intervention norm from which no derogation is permitted, except in case of exceptional circumstances.  From that we identify three arguments: the acceptance of moral and cultural relativism; the requirement of respecting political communities’ autonomy and independence on account of a communitarian conception of state sovereignty, the prerequisites for tolerance and the assigned responsibility advantages; finally, the fear of an international order disruption on the basis of classical realism postulates.  Ultimately, we challenge each one of these ideas adopting a cosmopolitan and consequentialist reasoning.  Adhering to the normative individualist discourse, we propose to broaden the ICISS just cause so that it includes systematic fundamental human rights violations and to support coalition or individual state intervention, insofar as it produces the desired humanitarian benefits.

Keyphrases: Jus ad bellum, Humanitarian intervention, Responsibility to protect, Just war, Human rights, State sovereignty, Consequentialism, Cosmopolitanism, Jus ad bellum