The Politics of Selective Humanity: Western Intervention, R2P, and the Silence over Gaza
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), adopted in 2005, emerged from the international community's reckoning with the failures of Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. It proposed a new relationship between sovereignty and humanity, promising protection from atrocities would exist as a right inherent to human life rather than a concession granted by power, with the international community imagined as a custodian of life rather than a passive witness. Two decades later, that vision has revealed its limitations. R2P now serves less as a testament to collective responsibility than as a mirror showing the fractures in how the world distributes attention, urgency, and care.
From the outset, its universality rested on fragile foundations, with the moral authority of R2P dependent on political will aligning with its ethical obligation. In practice, interventions have often followed the patterns of interest rather than the magnitude of suffering. What was intended as a symmetrical architecture of duty has appeared fractured. The invocation of R2P exposes the distribution of influence as much as the presence of compassion. Its promise was never insulated from the realities that govern states, where hierarchy determines whose suffering is recognized and whose can be postponed or ignored.
The 2011 intervention in Libya makes this tension visible. NATO’s campaign, authorised under the pretext of imminent protection, was hailed as R2P’s first trial. Within months, the operation shifted from protection to regime change. The doctrine’s authority became entangled with strategic expedience. Disorder followed, and confidence in R2P eroded. When Syria soon descended into violence, caution replaced conviction; the lessons of Libya became a rationale for inaction. Humanitarian responsibility was measured more against precedent, less than by the scale of suffering and the fear of repeating past errors. What had been a framework for moral action became a tool assessed through its failures.
The situation in Gaza illuminates the selectivity of intervention with acute clarity. Since October 2023, bombardment and blockade have erased neighbourhoods, hospitals, and schools. Civilian life has endured conditions that meet multiple thresholds under the Genocide Convention of 1948, a measure regarded as customary international law. Yet the language of responsibility has receded. States that once spoke urgently of protection now confine themselves to measured statements of concern and restraint. Obligation has yielded to distance. Silences demand interpretation, and the absence of action is as telling as words themselves.
This silence reflects an enduring asymmetry with moral urgency distributed according to alliance, proximity, and perceived legitimacy. Atrocities committed by adversaries provoke immediate response. When committed by allies, attention is procedural, delayed, diluted. The aspiration of universality has become conditional, revealing empathy as selective and contingent on power rather than principle. These implications extend beyond Gaza; the very credibility of humanitarian norms depends on their consistent application. When principles are applied unevenly, they become tools of justification rather than constraint. In Gaza, protection has been inverted; civilian suffering is rationalised as strategic inevitability. Legality has become a shield for complicity, and silence operates as tacit consent. The architecture of moral order bends to convenience, its authority subject to the discretion of those who wield power.
R2P was designed to forestall this normalisation of cruelty. Its decline shows how tightly it remains entwined with the politics it sought to regulate. The power to invoke protection and the power to deny it reside within the same hands. Moral responsibility merges with strategic calculation. The ethical horizon of intervention is bounded by interests. In this context, the force of R2P is revealed in restraint as much as in action, measured by what is withheld and what is allowed.
Across the Global South, the pattern is recognised. States long sceptical of Western intervention view R2P as a mechanism of selective sovereignty. Gaza has confirmed that view. The vocabulary of humanity is fluent in some arenas and silent in others. Its uneven application exposes a hierarchy in which some suffering commands attention and other suffering is permitted to continue. The distance between rhetoric and reality defines contemporary international ethics.
The fragility of R2P mirrors the instability of liberal internationalism. The rules-based order relies on consistent enforcement rather than the mere existence of norms. When legality and morality are applied unevenly, the system ceases to function as a framework of rules and becomes a structure of exceptions. Each discretionary invocation erodes institutions and undermines confidence in justice. Trust diminishes when adherence to principle depends on convenience, leaving the notion of impartial governance uncertain.
Humanitarian language persists, yet it has drifted from practice. Responsibility, protection, and rights circulate like currency, symbols of credibility rather than instruments of action. Proportionality is invoked amid destruction, displacement, and starvation, creating tension between word and reality. In Gaza, the dissonance is stark. To speak of duty while civilian areas are reduced to ruins turns moral language into ritual. To speak of protection while lives are erased participates, however subtly, in its suspension.
Silence has weight, preserving the illusion of order while concealing decay. From Rwanda to Aleppo, expressions of regret arrive belatedly, articulated in the language of lessons learned. Gaza will likely join this lineage, not as a tragedy unforeseen but as one witnessed and rationalised in real time. The ethical cost of observation without intervention is recorded in actions withheld.
To witness suffering and interpret restraint as moral complexity is to participate in its perpetuation. The selective application of humanitarian principles creates an architecture in which atrocity endures. R2P, once imagined as the horizon of global morality, now functions as its mirror. It reflects the distance between professed values and the realities the world allows. Principles and power coexist uneasily, with morality dependent on the structures that determine whose suffering is seen and whose may be tolerated.
When future historians turn to this period, they will encounter its artifacts preserved in full: its statements, its debates, and most shamefully, its silences. They may see a world fluent in the language of humanity yet hesitant to speak it into action. They may observe that the framework intended to protect was measured against selective responsibility, leaving its promise incomplete but its record undeniable. They may conclude that the doctrine conceived to prevent silence became, in its most articulate form, an illustration of it. And perhaps, in their judgment, they will not look kindly upon those who, in witnessing destruction, chose distance over duty.
Image courtesy of Jonathan Brady via PA Archive, ©2019. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
