The Responsibility for Peace (R4P): Understanding the study of peace from a global justice and development perspective.

From Firenze University Press Journal: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Politica

Blagovesta Tacheva, University of Leeds

Garrett Wallace Brown, University of Leeds

Alexandra Bohm, Open University Law School

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have brought the theme of war and peace back to the centre of political debate. Once again, we hear revela-tions that war is a natural event of international relations and that the various attempts to avoid it with the instruments of law and diplomacy have failed. In this current environment, discussions about justice remain dominated by themes of retributive and criminal justice, with their more transformative cousins of transitional, restorative, distributive, and resti-tutive justice deemed as mere fantasies. What is essential, we are told, is military alliance, proxy war, greater arms supplies, redlines, allied diplo-macy, readiness for intervention, and stronger symbolic gestures of unity. From this ‘hawkish’ point of view, peace is perpetually elusive, idealistic, and potentially dangerous. However, the literature on global justice has traditionally been equally unsatisfactory in terms of its study and pursuit of peace. Most advocates of global justice have traditionally focused on immediate conflict condi-tions while suggesting that humanitarian military intervention to protect mass violations of human rights is a moral duty.1 In arguing for humani-tarian intervention, many advocates for global justice also claim there is a right to intervene in these situations and that those in a position to effec-tively respond must do so. Again, the logic often underpinning this posi-tion is more akin to criminal and retributive justice, where conflict must be ended, and the perpetrators brought to justice, before there can be the establishment of peace.2 According to many global justice and cosmo-politan scholars, what is required is immediate moral action in the face of human rights abuse, to end conflict and restore a condition of domestic justice via post-conflict peacebuilding. It is from this position that the aim of a more lasting peace may one day be possible.As suggested, this is equally unsatisfactory, and it favours two ques-tionable assumptions. First, this proposal assumes that the mere absence of conflict equates to the foundational condition required for lasting peace. This is questionable because although subduing violence is a neces-sary condition for immediate peace, it may not be a sufficient condition for lasting peace. Second, it assumes that what triggers action is a moral ‘responsibility’ to intervene in cases of mass violence and human rights abuse within an already existing cycle of violence, but not an equal moral ‘responsibility’ for preventative action to reduce the social and economic structural conditions that underwrite cycles of violence in the first place. According to many scholars of global justice, it is paramount to halt physical violence, with other considerations holding a secondary, but still important, normative position. This is the logic underwriting frameworks such as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), despite its increased lip service on the need for better ‘prevention’ measures.3It is from this backdrop that we seek to introduce what we call the Responsibility for Peace (R4P), which represents a new conceptualisa-tion of the relationship between global distributive justice, development, and the study of peace. To explore this new concept, the article is divided into six sections. Section One provides a brief overview of general trends within peace studies to identify existing areas where addressing structur-al conditions of violence are implicitly or explicitly understood as crucial for generating lasting peace. We are particularly interested in notions of positive peace. In Section Two we make the link between global distribu-tive justice and the study of peace, arguing that a properly oriented under-standing of global justice should better address the structural conditions that underwrite violence. Section Three outlines the key international framework on existing global responsibilities to prevent and protect vul-nerable populations, the R2P, while Section Four explores the relationship between underdevelopment and mass atrocity crimes, arguing that there is a prima facie connection between the two. Section Five re-examines the R2P, considering recent United Nations claims that prevention and devel-opment are inherently linked, which demonstrates that recent policy has come to accept that peace and development are mutually inclusive. In Section Six we reflect on R2P’s potential to act as a peacebuilding instrument, ultimately concluding that it is an overstretched norm that can-not adequately accommodate peacebuilding, thus requiring its focus on short-term protection, but which also highlights a lacuna necessitating a Responsibility for Peace. The article concludes by outlining what this R4P approach requires conceptually and its implications for the study of peace. Ultimately, we argue that global justice demands refocused moral commitments to jus ante bellum (establishing global justice before war) and that this necessitates greater focus on the study of positive peace mechanisms, the identification and reform of structural injustices (against structural violence), and a retooled emphasis on human-centred development that can transcend existing legacies. It is this triangulation that we label the Responsibility for Peace (R4P), which operates both prior to, and independently of, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/rifp-2411

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