Beyond the Salvation Paradigm: Responsibility To Protect (Others) vs the Power of Protecting Oneself

FRDRIC MGRET*

Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

The emergence of the idea of a responsibility to protect has dominated debates about what should be done to stop atrocities. I argue that, despite notable progress, R2P remains embedded in a vision of international rescue as primarily coming from outside, and as such ends up neglecting the very real and often much more decisive role that people individuals, civil society, resistance movements have had in protecting themselves. I argue for a rehabilitation of the role of resistance to atrocities, a better understanding of how the international intervention paradigm may affect it, and a new understanding of the proper role of the international community one of helping people to help themselves in the face of massive violence. Keywords responsibility to protect civil society human security violence intervention

N SOME WAY OR OTHER, the idea of a responsibility to protect (R2P) has dominated debates on what to do to prevent grave atrocities in the last decade. After several years of soul-searching, along with numerous overlapping institutional and academic initiatives, R2P appears as the international communitys best approximation as to what should be done, ideally, to stop the worst types of human violence in their tracks (Evans & Sahnoun, 2002; Thakur, 2002). R2P profoundly renews the debate by developing a full strategy to avert atrocities that goes beyond the old debate on humanitarian intervention. There is undeniably something appealing about the proclamation of such a responsibility. The spectacle of UN debacles in the wake of mass violence has done more to discredit the organization than any of its other failings. R2P draws on a rather noble form of global solidarity, and proposes a more forceful sort of response to the problem of atrocities than has been seen so far. At the same time, it is fair to say that, despite some discrete achievements, the
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promise of R2P has so far failed to materialize in all cases. The example of Darfur stands as a vivid and painful reminder of the inability of mere words to trigger action (Williams & Bellamy, 2005). For all the talk about the international community stepping in to protect individuals from acts of genocide and crimes against humanity, relatively little tangible action has occurred in terms of intervention in the cases where it would matter most, to the point of making the whole idea at times seem a little vacuous (Bellamy, 2005). What are we to make of this failing? The most familiar response is to urge states to rise up to the challenge of meeting their collective responsibility. This leads to ever more pressing calls to achieve global mobilization, as illustrated for example by the Darfur campaign. These calls may yet reach their objective and, if not for Darfur, the international community may one day achieve a higher degree of readiness to confront atrocities. However, these arguments tend to take it for granted that the problem with R2P is one of feasibility, rather than flaws with the design. I want to suggest, conversely, that there may be something fundamentally incomplete with the very vision presupposed by R2P, even if it worked better. My main contention will be that R2P fails because, despite evolutions, it is still too focused on the role of the international community when it comes to the actual commission of atrocities. As a result, it ends up largely neglecting the contribution that local non-state actors, civil society, social movements, indeed victims themselves can make to resist the commission of atrocities. In contrast, I want to make the case for the need to pay more attention to the growing work on how atrocities have historically been averted or at least minimized thanks to the power and resilience of a certain spirit of resistance by victims. The challenge, then, is to find ways to connect this reality with evolving ideas about R2P. In order to address this, I do three things. First, I analyse R2P as embedded in an internationalist discourse that tends to shut out the role of local civil society at or near the point of commission of atrocities. Second, I examine the broad historical record of local resistance initiatives in the context of atrocities (with an emphasis on genocide), with a view to highlighting the potential of resistance. Third, I look at how the internationalist paradigm has sometimes served to demobilize local attempts at resistance, and suggest that the challenge should be to think about ways in which international actors might assist those seeking to protect themselves.

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Some Limitations of R2P

Background The idea of R2P arose against a background of persistent soul-searching by the international community about the ends and means of intervention in a context of systemic failure by the United Nations to avert ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda. In the wake of the Kosovo crisis, a variety of initiatives were launched in an attempt to formulate a clearer concept of when intervention should occur. Following a request by the UN Secretary-General, the Canadian government established in 2000 an independent International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), whose explicit mandate was to build a broader understanding of the problem of reconciling intervention for human protection purposes and sovereignty (ICISS, 2001: 2). The Commission issued a report in December 2001 that framed the concept of R2P for the first time, in the following terms:
Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect (ICISS, 2001: xiii, 91).

The Commission on Human Security, which was set up by the government of Japan, also issued a report in 2003 that supported the broad outline of R2P (Commission on Human Security, 2003: 23, 31, 68, 136). The UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change subsequently released a report in 2004 suggesting that there was an emerging norm of a collective international responsibility to protect and incorporating R2P as part of an overall strategy to confront threats to global security (United Nations, 2004: 66). Further endorsement for R2P is to be found in the report In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, presented to the UN General Assembly on 21 March 2005, in which the UN Secretary-General insisted that the UN must move towards embracing and acting on the responsibility to protect(United Nations, 2005a: 35). Finally, on 20 September 2005, a version of R2P was adopted by the UN General Assembly in the so-called 2005 World Summit Outcome document. Two paragraphs referred to UN member-states willingness to take collective action when needed. The General Assembly affirmed that the international community, through the United Nations ... has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VI and VIII of the Charter, to help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity (United Nations, 2005b: 31). Both preventive and reactive action was envisaged.

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The idea has since been endorsed by the Security Council both in a general way, through a thematic resolution on the protection of civilians in armed conflict (United Nations, 2006a), and operationally in Resolution 1706 on Darfur, which mentions the World Outcome Summit documents resolution in its preamble (United Nations, 2006b). The Structure of R2P Although formulations of R2P have varied, there is arguably a deep structure common to all of them, along with a propensity to reproduce some of the biases of the humanitarian intervention debate even as one seeks to transcend them. At the heart of that structure is a tendency to pit against each other two main actors: the state and the international community. The starting point of almost all statements on R2P is, in accordance with deeply held beliefs about international order and law, a ritual recognition of the role of the state. A More Secure World emphasizes that the new security consensus is that the front-line actors in dealing with all the threats we face, new and old, continue to be individual sovereign States (United Nations, 2004: 1). Indeed, one of the foundations of the responsibility to protect is obligations inherent in the concept of sovereignty (ICISS, 2001: xi). For ICISS (2001: 17), the responsibility to protect resides first and foremost with the state whose people are directly affected. As the 2005 World Summit Outcome document puts it, Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity (United Nations, 2005b: 30). The General Assembly, following ICISSs (2001: 17) insistence on the need to help states build capacity to protect their populations, has proclaimed its intention to encourage and help States to exercise their responsibility to protect (United Nations, 2005b: 30). There are very good reasons why this should be the case. The state is best placed to take action to prevent problems from turning into potential conflicts and also best placed to understand them and to deal with them (ICISS, 2001: 17). Indeed, much UN action has been geared toward reinforcing the states ability to deal with threats, as exemplified for example by the SecretaryGenerals efforts in Kenya. However, if states always fulfilled their responsibility to protect their populations, the debate on R2P would not have arisen. Behind these references to the role of the state lies the very real possibility that the state will fail, even with the support of the international community. In fact, the corollary of state responsibility is that whenever states behave irresponsibly, they risk relinquishing their claim to exercise sovereignty untrammelled (Cohen & Deng, 1996). From there, the key question is who should step in when the state is deficient (Pattison, 2008). There is little doubt that the international community is the big winner in the process, since it is the actor primarily called upon to

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intervene in cases of state failure. Indeed, at the heart of the debates on R2P lies one that deals with the legitimacy of initiatives by the international community or one of its incarnations. The World Summit Outcome document, for example, mentions the international community, the United Nations and regional organizations (United Nations, 2005b: 31). The focus is, if anything, on transcending the state from above, through some form of col lective will. R2P is an emerging norm of a collective international responsibility to protect (United Nations, 2004: 66; my emphasis). A tremendous part of the policy and scholarly conversation on R2P is focused on issues of international authority and process, along with the need to overcome the reluctance to intervene. The risk, then, is that R2P will remain embedded in what one might call a paradigm, of salvation, one quite characteristic of earlier debates on humanitarian intervention (Pasic & Weiss, 2006), in which those who rescue are outsiders (Seybolt, 2007) and those who are saved are others (Orford, 2003) or strangers (Wheeler, 2000). The Blind Spot of Salvation: The Victim as Resister The project, rooted as it is in deep assumptions about the right actors of the international system, is always at risk of excluding certain actors, particularly victims of atrocities themselves. The risk is that civil society will have a role only in calling for and legitimizing international intervention. ICISS (2001: 17) is maybe one of the only R2P sources that expresses the view that right intention is better assured with multilateral operations, clearly supported by regional opinion and the victims concerned (my emphasis) and suggests the need for an evaluation of the issues from the point of view of those seeking or needing support. The literature also evidences an interest in soliciting local approval from the narrow angle of determining an international interventions prospects of success (Gizelis & Kosek, 2005). ICISS was notable, it is true, for seeking to transcend the internationalist bias by paying much more attention to the role of civil society. Civil society appears in its report under two principal guises, but closer scrutiny shows that even there the transcending is only partial. First, civil society has a role in helping prevent atrocities. ICISS (2001: 17, 19) speaks of the responsibility of communities and emphasizes that when solutions are needed, it is the citizens of a particular state who have the greatest interest and the largest stake in the success of those solutions, and that a commitment to helping local efforts to address both the root causes of problems and their more immediate triggers should be at the heart of international efforts. Second, civil society is seen as a partner in the post-conflict stage. ICISS (2001: 45), for example, has made the case for achieving local ownership and strik[ing] a balance between the responsibilities of international and local actors in post-conflict

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societies where what is at issue is devolving responsibility back to the local community. It also insists that international authorities must take care not to confiscate or monopolize political responsibility on the ground, and underlines the need for local actors to take over responsibility (ICISS, 2001: 45). However, what these pre- and post- scenarios seem to miss is something more like the stage of actual commission of atrocities. Despite notable openings to civil society in the ICISS report (which do not find much of an equivalent in the much shorter World Summit Outcome document), it is as though formulations of R2P all stopped short of recognizing that victims (or intended victims) of atrocities might have a role in averting atrocities at the point when they are being committed. Whereas neighbouring branches of the international discourse (e.g. conflict mediation, development) are increasingly explicit about the need to forge direct relations with civil society actors even at the height of conflict (Pfaffenholz, Kew & Wanis-St. John, 2006), R2P seems marked by a reversal to the high politics of international intervention in times of unfolding crisis. This is no doubt partly a result of a broader difficulty in engaging non-state actors in conflict settings, although that difficulty should be mostly apparent with the perpetrators of atrocities (Kwesi Aning, 1999). But, it also results from a particularly humanitarian way of constructing victims as essentially passive, depoliticized and in need of international intervention. The victim is cause, object, but never actor or subject. The vision of civil society proposed is one that is very civil, in that civil society is seen as having a role primarily in the safeguarding of the orderly functioning of society while atrocities can still be averted, rather than a more pugnacious one involved in defiance, resistance, civil disobedience or struggles against oppression. There is no mention, for example, of civil society acting in ways that could be conceived as unlawful or clandestine. Anne Orford (1999: 695) is one of the few persons to have noted that
missing is any sense of the agency of the peoples of the states where intervention is to be conducted. There is no sense in which these peoples are understood to be themselves actively working to shape their communities and their world, except to the extent of seeking the protection of the international community.

Although this comment was made before the R2P debate, it still rings partly true today. Even more improbable in terms of R2P formulation is the idea that the international community might have any role in stimulating, encouraging or supporting local resistance, or that it should, at the very least, be wary of the degree to which its own interventions might negatively affect domestic efforts. Among all the measures recommended to assist victims of atrocities, not one R2P instrument even suggests in passing the possibility of assistance for example, to resistance movements that would be other than classically humanitarian. ICISS (2001: 30), for example, identifies a dozen things

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the international community should do before it considers intervening militarily (including economic, political and diplomatic sanctions), none of which involve any support of local forces of resistance. Even the anti-imperialist critique of humanitarian intervention often seems to fall into the trap of ignoring resistance (Bauer, 2007), more obsessed as it often is with great-power interference and the need to protect sovereignty than it is with solidarity with local actors bearing the brunt of local oppression.

The Power of Resistance

Challenging this view of what is happening in and what is required during atrocities, I want to suggest the possibility of an alternative understanding of R2P, one that is rooted not in the international communitys ability to act but in the will of victims and civil society more generally to resist persecutions. Rehabilitating Resistance There is a considerable gap between contemporary normative debates about what the international community should do to save people, on the one hand, and the reality of what we know about how people have historically been saved, on the other. This gap is in part a disciplinary gap: whereas international policymakers and international lawyers are by training resolutely focused on the international, historians have done a considerable job in the last 50 years of rediscovering the many and multifaceted forms of local resistance to atrocities. It is of course the case that in some situations only a major international military effort has put an end to atrocities (the obvious example being the Holocaust and the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany), and intervention by the international community has at times contributed indirectly to saving considerable numbers of people (through the interdiction of territory or the provision of protection). But, apart from the fact that in some cases it is non-state groups that have entirely stopped atrocities (e.g. the Rwanda Patriotic Front in Rwanda), there is a difference between the ultimate goal of wholly stopping atrocities and the intermediary, but no less significant, goal of minimizing their impact while a more definitive cessation is achieved. This is especially the case since it has often taken a long time at least too long to put an end to mass atrocities. It is at this micro level that people have made a considerable contribution to combating and limiting atrocities, thus ensuring that as many as possible survived to see the resolution of the larger situation giving rise to those atrocities. By resistance I mean not only organized movements but also the many spontaneous and diffuse ways in which a whole range of private actors from

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civil society (individuals, resistance movements, organizations, churches) have opposed, thwarted and simply avoided attacks. Resistance has been, perhaps above all, that of the victims themselves. Although often not considered as part of resistance, there is a case that in a situation of impending massacre, merely heeding ones survival instinct to escape capture, often at huge personal risk and cost, is in fact an act of resistance. Individual and collective escapes have, at any rate, had a significant impact on the mitigation of atrocities. In some cases, such as the Bielski otriad in the Byelorussian forests, entire communities were recreated in difficult but safe conditions (Tec, 1998). In addition to escape, countless acts of disobedience, defiance, insubordination or sabotage can have an effect on the ability of the state to execute killing plans. Jacques Smelin (1989) has theorized these forms of civil resistance as having played a crucial role in Nazi Germany, and has since extended the argument to other genocidal scenarios (Smelin, 2008). In the killing fields of Cambodia, even stealing rice on a small scale from collectivized property might prolong ones life and the lives of others through the ordeal, and thus constitute an act of resistance (Ngor & Warner, 2003). There are, in addition, many instances of violent insurrections against genocidal threats. From the insurrection of the Warsaw ghetto (Tzur, 1998) to the heroic resistance of 50,000 Tutsis in the hills of Bisesero (Verwimp, 2004); from the armed opposition of Armenians at Musa Dagh and Van (Werfel, 1934: 16121613) to the desperate attacks by Chams against the Khmer Rouges (Kiernan, 2002); from the fierce resistance of the Peshmergas during Anfal (Rabil, 2002) to the trenches of the Patriotic League in Sarajevo (Ljubijankic, 1996). Some of these efforts were doomed, but also had a larger resonance and served as inspiration to others. These forms of resistance were often supported by countless efforts and private initiatives by ordinary citizens: gentile families hiding Jewish children; Danes ferrying Jews to Sweden (Paldiel, 1993); Hutus protecting Tutsis (Jefremovas, 1995); Arab civilians bringing assistance and even rising against the deportation of Kurds during Anfal. Foreigners who were in a position to help at times went to great lengths to assist escape from atrocities: Spanish Blue Division soldiers (Bowen, 1998), diplomats like Raul Wallenberg and Sempo Sugihara (Paldiel, 1993: 252255, 319324), or some foreign priests in Rwanda (Janzen, 2000). Often, relatives (especially those which, because of different group affiliation, were not targeted as such) and the family provided a precarious but occasionally decisive rampart against persecution (Mam, 2006), as in the case of non-Jewish German women married to Jewish men who demonstrated on the Rosenstrasse at the height of the war (Stoltzfus, 1998). Civil society beyond the immediate scene of atrocities often mobilized efficiently not only or not so much to press for intervention but to bring assistance directly to victims of atrocities. Some, such as Johannes Lepsius in the case

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of the Armenian genocide, sought to document ongoing atrocities, relaying information from the interior to often disbelieving publics abroad (Lepsius, 1980). There was also the role of well-meaning insiders, however isolated these might have been: Oskar Schindler, a card-carrying member of the Nazi party (Paldiel, 1993); Kurt Gerstein, a German SS Officer (Hbert, 2006); the Interahamwe member who warned Romo Dallaire of impending genocide (Piiparinen, 2007); Arab tribesmen and even Iraqi army personnel who protected Kurds from executions during Anfal (Nolen, 2003). Finally, although this is rarely highlighted as something that the international community should more systematically draw lessons from, more organized efforts by non-state actors have in some cases largely single-handedly stopped genocides. The best example of this is the Rwanda Patriotic Front, whose defeat of the Rwandan government and assorted militias effectively put an end to the Rwandan genocide. A similar argument could be made about the role that the Bosnian-Croat federation had in finally putting an end to ethnic cleansing (I return later to the role that well-conceived foreign assistance had in that case). Of course, it is very difficult to know how many potential victims of atrocities were saved by these actions. In absolute terms, the numbers are certainly not negligible, though they will often pale in comparison to the total of victims. The point is a more subtle one, however. Of all those who escaped atrocities while atrocities were being committed, a very large proportion owed their rescue to themselves, the courage of ordinary strangers or resistance movements. During World War II, for example, those who lived to see the day when Nazi Germany was defeated did not do so because the Allies bombed the railroads to Auschwitz (they famously did not), but thanks to their own sense of survival, organization and resilience. In Rwanda, those who survived the genocide did so because they had managed to escape detection until the Rwanda Patriotic Front defeated the government. In all the examples referred to above, therefore, resistance by the victims of atrocities and by civil society more broadly has proven to be possibly the most significant factor in limiting, pushing back or even stopping atrocities. Conversely, the absence of resistance to atrocities by society is notoriously one of the key factors that permits the commission of such actions (Goldhagen, 1996; Gushee, 2004: 121). In Praise of Resistance There are many reasons to defend the importance of local resistance as at least a first step in the reduction of atrocities, and one that should be taken into account in international policy formulation. Some of the arguments can be framed in terms of efficiency. In most of the cases surveyed here, the prob

Nathan Tec (1986), for example, estimates that 80% of the Jewish survivors in Poland he studied had benefited from the help of strangers.

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lem has been a lack of or very tardy international intervention. However, even the most rapid intervention could probably not arrive until several weeks after massacres had started, which, in the case of Rwanda, would have been too late (Kuperman, 2001: viii; 2004: 65). As Kuperman (2004: 64) puts it, most violence is perpetrated faster than interveners can realistically arrive to stop it. The great strength of local civil society is that it is in a sense always already there, and that its efforts at resistance will often have begun in direct response to patterns of violence. Perhaps most importantly, threatened groups tend, all other things being equal, to have more of a vested, incontrovertible interest in defending themselves than the international community has in rescuing them. This is not to say that victims of atrocities may not go through agonizing dilemmas about whether to resist, and if so when and how; indeed, passivity and collaboration of victims has been an element in the commission of numerous atrocities (Hilberg, 1985: 10301044). But, while the international community may dither at length at little real immediate cost to itself, targeted populations are confronted with life-and-death decisions that have a tendency to spur some of them at least into action. Although civil society resistance is certainly not automatic, it is often more likely to occur than big power consensus. Moreover, local groups often benefit from considerable knowledge of the terrain and a considerable ability to organize rescue and resistance operations. If states have occasionally considered resistance movements to be crucially efficient in the waging of war (consider, for example, the role of resistance movements throughout occupied Europe during World War II), then they should also extend that recognition to cases where civil society is fighting back atrocities. Beyond efficiency, however, there are a number of potentially more principled arguments in favour of putting more emphasis on resistance. Averting atrocities requires complex arbitrages between different goals. Contrary to a certain vision of intervention that sees the political problematique as one primarily of international authority, these decisions often have complex domestic distributive impacts that border on the tragic: Who should be saved first? Should some be sacrificed so that others can be saved? Should one contemplate some measure of appeasement in order to increase the chance of saving some? Given that victims of atrocities are the ones who will have to live with the consequences of these decisions, there is a powerful argument that their empowerment should be an integral component of any strategies aimed at mitigating atrocities. All in all, the resistance paradigm offers a view of fighting atrocities that is more decentralized, bottom-up, empowering, people-based and spontaneous, where international intervention runs the risk of being centralized, top-down, paternalistic, state-based and institutional. Against a vision of the victim as an object of international intervention or a mere humanitarian inter-

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locutor, it reintroduces the idea of the victim as a subject of his or her fate, a political actor in his or her own right, capable of harnessing unusual energies and determination to the pursuit of survival. This sense of renewed agency of the individual in the international system may also make better sense of evolving intuitions about the growing role of non-state actors (Rajagopal, 2003), theories of the right to resist oppression (Dunr, 2005) and the cosmopolitan ends of international association.

Reconciling the Local and the International

The normative debate could be left here. After all, the point of resistance to atrocities is that it may simply happen. Indeed, it may happen all the more when the international community is not doing anything about a given situation, leading a population to consider that it has no choice left but to take matters in its own hands. Moreover, one can see such efforts as being entirely detached from what the international debate is and should be about. One might think, for example, that international policy makers should not involve themselves in issues of individual or group resistance that ultimately lead onto the path of interference in domestic affairs. I take issue with this partly on normative and partly on practical grounds. At the normative level, once one has established that there may be at least a certain international legitimacy to resistance, it becomes difficult to pretend that it is nonetheless not the international communitys concern. Failure to put the question of resistance at the heart of international preoccupations means an inability to, for example, think about whether certain forms of resistance are more legitimate than others, and has sometimes left the issue open to simplifications (most recently those of gun-liberalization enthusiasts who argue that distributing weapons to genocide victims is the best way to avoid atrocities; see Kopel, Gallant & Eisen, 2006). The challenge, however, is not to uphold one paradigm (resistance) entirely at the expense of the other (salvation), but to understand their mutual dependence and discover the best way to articulate them together, given that in practice both will almost always coexist. In particular, the impact of the international on resistance should be thought out carefully on account of both the negative impact that international intervention has sometimes had and the positive impact that it could have.

This is not the place to respond to this article and others in the same vein, except to say that although they have the merit of raising a number of issues in a straightforward fashion, the almost automatic link they draw between resistance and gun ownership obfuscates a large part of the debate.

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The Potentially Negative Impact of the International Intervention Paradigm on Resistance The international interventionist agenda can have a negative impact on the spirit of resistance merely by ignoring that dimension. What is ignored internationally is typically deprived of that gloss of legitimacy that comes with things international. But, more concretely, there are at least two typical ways in which the salvation paradigm can affect the prospects of civil society resistance. The first is what I would call demobilization of local resistance. In this respect, one phenomenon that is still little studied but that is of considerable importance is the way in which the excessive focus on the response of the international community, particularly on forceful intervention in times of crisis, can also have a powerfully demobilizing effect on efforts at local resistance. The whole idea that the international community will take seriously its responsibility to protect can lull victims into a false sense of security and push them to defer efforts at organizing resistance (the risk of moral hazard). The Tutsis who ran for UNAMIR cover in the early days of the Rwanda genocide learned this at their expense. Who knows how many victims of the Holocaust were lured by the false sentiment that the Allies would not let this happen. An interesting metaphor, in this respect, is the tale of what happened to the Bisesero Hills Tutsis upon the arrival of a small detachment of Operation Turquoise forces. As hundreds left their hiding places, they were informed by the French that they did not have enough ammunition to protect them, and that their detachment would return later. By the time it did, most of those who had abandoned the relative safety of the hills for the plains had been slaughtered (Smolar, 2005: 5). Many years earlier, a very similar fate had awaited those Armenians who had successfully fought back several Turkish battalions at Zetoun. After entrusting their fate to the German consul in Alep who, serving as an intermediary with the Turks, promised them their lives if they put down their weapons, they abandoned their mountains only to be massacred to the last one. The second is the opposite risk, namely radicalization. Apart from potentially debilitating civil society, intervention can also have the effect of radicalizing parties and of triggering violent action. As argued by Alan Kuperman, the most counterintuitive aspect of humanitarian military intervention is that it sometimes may cause the very tragedies it is intended to prevent. Especially in a context where some groups are convinced that the international community would intervene to protect them from retaliation, armed rebellions have been encouraged. The tragedy is that as events played out, these armed challenges did provoke genocidal retaliation, but intervention arrived too late to save many of the targets of retaliation (Kuperman, 2004: 65).

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How Resistance Could Benefit from International Support One argument might be that since resistance happens anyhow, it is not in particular need of international support. However, the fact that resistance will often manifest itself without international assistance and indeed has often manifested itself most clearly in stark cases of international abandonment does not mean that it cannot benefit from such assistance. Efforts at local resistance to atrocities have often called for some form of international support, but have found it very hard to obtain such assistance (as opposed to the occasional success in obtaining intervention). Jewish escapees during World War II notoriously found closed doors and very little assistance from the Allies; German interior resistance found it extremely hard to obtain outside support; Bosniac resistance was crippled by the UN arms embargo. James Satterwhite and others have shown how the Kosovar Albanian campaign of nonviolent resistance to Serbian repression was not met with any substantial support from international organizations, something that may have doomed it (Satterwhite, 2002; see also Vickers, 1998: 281287). In Bisesero, statistics show that Tutsi resisters managed to stave off the inevitable longer than any comparable group in Kibuye province (Verwimp, 2004) and could probably have saved large numbers with only a modicum of international help. There are also a few cases where states encouraged non-state actors to rebel, only to then abandon them to their fate, the most obvious example being the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions in post-Gulf War Iraq. Here, not only did efforts at resistance not benefit from international assistance, but non-state groups got the worst of both worlds: international incitation to rebel, without the support. Conversely, one can speculate that some form of international support would be a key resource in the success of resistance movements indeed that resistance to genocide on a large scale can only succeed ... with international assistance (Weitzman, 2005). International support has certainly been a key ingredient in the success of general resistance movements (i.e. those not specifically geared towards atrocity prevention but, instead, typically part of a more general war effort). I return to what could be done more concretely to prop domestic resistance to atrocities in the next section.

How Intervention Might Benefit from Rethinking Itself as Founded on the Spirit of Resistance
The logic that the international community should support resistance movements is also compelling from a purely international point of view. There are obviously material and symbolic costs involved in the international

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ommunitys supporting local resistance efforts, including diminished conc trol and a more humble, secondary role. However, if the international community is, as it claims to be, truly committed to atrocity prevention, these costs are outweighed by the benefits. There is, first, as I have argued, an efficiency gain in situations where the international community has often proven very bad at making good on its promises. Especially in a context of increased scepticism about humanitarian intervention and Global South distrust of R2P, new ideas are needed to establish protection on a solid footing. Putting more emphasis on local efforts might assist in resolving the perennial difficulty of distinguishing between just and unjust intervention by adding a piece to the vexed puzzle of right intention (the idea that for a humanitarian intervention to be legitimate it must be in good faith that is, not based on some ulterior motive but fundamentally for the benefit of those rescued) and satisfying the last resort requirement (as endorsed, notably, in ICISS, 2001: 29, 31). In many ways, the idea of a much more substantial contribution of local resistance to averting atrocities is one of the missing pieces to the R2P puzzle. Surely, if it were resistance movements themselves that solicited intervention, or if intervention arose after every conceivable effort had been made to assist such movements, then such action would appear in a very different light. In the case of Darfur, for example, there is evidence that at least part of the organized Darfuri resistance is keen on an international intervention. One would think that Western supporters of intervention would emphasize this (subjective) fact, but they hardly ever do (instead emphasizing that intervention is objectively the right thing to do). This is a bizarre instance of ignoring the local even when the local might prove a powerful legitimizing factor for the international agenda. Conversely, in a case where an international humanitarian intervention clearly cannot avail itself of any substantial local support, or totally fails to do anything to explore how it could support and strengthen resistance, one may be in a better position to see through the illegitimacy of certain interventions. Finally, one might argue that deferring to local solutions first is increasingly consonant with a deeper principle of international regulation today that tends (in other fields at least) towards subsidiarity (or complementarity). Emphasizing the role of resistance can help us better conceptualize international intervention as a truly last resort, where the international communitys current understanding of a last-resort focuses only on what can be extracted from the state.

Both the ICISS report and the High-Level Panel use the expression unable or unwilling, which has become closely associated with the idea of complementarity; see ICISS (2001: 11, 17, 29, 33, 49, 69); United Nations (2004: 66).

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What Can Be Done? Some Thoughts about Prospects

There are several ways one could conceive of support for local civil society. One should be wary of the possibility that third states should on their own provide support to civil society, because of the spectre of interference and the long history of states supporting violent groups that had very little to do with a last-ditch effort to avert atrocities. The more likely solution, therefore, is that it is the international community that should endorse the obligation to assist. At the very least, and following a sort of do no harm principle, the international community should be wary of the ways in which its modes of intervention might weaken, delegitimize or otherwise hamper local resistance initiatives. The international community should also be aware of the distributional effect its failure to support certain resistance efforts has on local dynamics, particularly the risk of encouraging violent at the expense of nonviolent movements. The risk that the prospect of humanitarian intervention will trigger action by armed groups in the states concerned, in particular, militates strongly for the international community [to] reward non-violent protest movements, rather than armed rebellions (Kuperman, 2001: 66). This is true at least in the preventive or early stage of atrocities, although support of armed resistance may eventually become the only solution. Timing, however, will be crucial: precocious support for armed resistance may precipitate more violence, whereas delayed support for violent resistance will come too late. Concretely, in terms of direct assistance, there are many steps that could be taken, although these will differ in nature from one context to another. In some cases, support will indeed mean military assistance, especially when the international community feels that it is itself incapable of intervening or too hamstrung to do so. Military support is the most sensitive option and may not be suitable for all situations, but the point is that it has at times achieved striking results. Bosnia and Kosovo provide good examples. Of course, in both of these cases the goal may not have been simply to avert atrocities as much as to reach a genuine end to the conflict, but US/NATO support tipped the balance of forces to the point of equilibrium, and the end of civilian massacre was one effective result. The decision to support non-state groups militarily (and how to do so) should depend, in particular, on the determination of such groups to fight at least significantly to prevent atrocities and protect populations; their ability to do so in a way that is compatible with humanitarian values; their chances of success; and the risk that use of violence might precipitate a harsh reaction from the state. Although there is much concern about how the spread of weapons fosters insecurity, there is also a case that it is rather indefensible to deny vulnerable groups the means to protect themselves even as the international community is helpless to prevent the flow of weapons to the oppressors (Polsby & Kates, 1997).

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It may be, in this context, that re-evaluations of the role of certain armed groups, particularly civil defence forces, will be in order, especially in extreme circumstances where they may represent the lesser evil. Although the international discourse concerning such groups is typically negative, and the militianization of security is often rightly associated with increases in violence as well as significant post-conflict difficulties (Ero, 2000), it is important not to underestimate the extent to which some groups are largely defensive in nature; may act and be seen as providers of security locally by certain constituencies, including the most vulnerable (Mazurana, 2004); and may be in a position to offer credible deterrence against atrocities. It may be that what is needed in some cases is an international realpolitik of protection, one more willing to create the conditions for active defence, including to use a type of metaphor popular in the study of conflicts fighting fire with (the right kind of) fire. If anything, the decision to support such groups should be based on their ability to provide protection rather than on some general bias against non-state violence. Although international engagement with such groups to ensure that they respect humanitarian norms is well under way, considering them as a harm to be minimized is not the same thing as seeing them as actually having a positive contribution to make. However, perhaps more importantly, discussions about armed groups should not overshadow the real needs of individuals, particularly those engaged in nonviolent strategies, in terms of international assistance that is not military. First, political support could enhance the legitimacy of at least organized groups. One is reminded in particular of the role that the UN General Assembly had in the 1960s and 1970s, to great effect, in promoting the cause of national liberation movements. It is also important to remind ourselves of the radical solitude of many victims and rescuers and the extremely unlikely odds these face in standing up to an oppression that often advances with the mask of legality and officialdom (Fogelman, 1996: 89). Strong signs of external support can be a welcome validation of their cause. Political support of local resistance might also, in cases where a sovereign has turned against its people, help efforts at undermining the states authority over its army and police forces, for example by encouraging defections. Second, in situations where atrocities are committed with a degree of secrecy, there is considerable need for information directed specifically to populations about the imminence of dangers. It may in some cases be necessary to shake citizens sense of disbelief about what actually threatens them an approach that was adopted by the Allies during World War II, but only very rarely and in this respect new technologies offer unprecedented potentials. Third, the international community might facilitate avoidance strategies and escapes. There are a few isolated examples of successful international assistance by states (e.g. the French fleet rescuing the Armenians at Musa Dagh; see Bloxham, 2007) and non-state actors (e.g. the flotilla that went to the rescue of Cambodian boat

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people) of efforts to at least escape atrocities. Temporary protection of refugees, as exemplified by the Humanitarian Evacuation Programme to airlift threatened Kosovars, is an interesting precedent (Fitzpatrick, 2000), but more might be done in terms of helping exfiltration when a population is captive of a government, as well as provision of temporary asylum (Darcy, 2007: 2). Fourth, material support of groups involved in resistance to or escaping of atrocities may be particularly welcome. Historically, all underground railways have required substantial amounts of money, if only to enable individuals to bribe their way to safety. More generally, several issues seem at stake. First, there is a need to think not only in the strategic terms of stopping atrocities once and for all, but also pragmatically in terms of mitigating them continuously through whatever means are available. Second, there is a need to think in terms of much closer political, operational and even military liaison between the international community and a diversity of informal actors involved on the ground in resisting atrocities in other words, persisting with what R2P recommends in the pre- and post-conflict stages vis--vis civil society, but in ways that entertain the possibility of much more confrontational policies towards the state. This calls for a new sense of internationallocal partnerships based on shared intelligence and decisionmaking. Third, there is a need to think less in traditional humanitarian terms, and more in robust political/human rights ones. This means understanding that victims of atrocities are less in need of humanitarian assistance than of protection, and in particular require help to help themselves, whether through nonviolent or violent means. Fourth, what is required is a willingness to go beyond official humanitarian assistance and state consent, to occasionally assist victims in more clandestine or covert ways that alone can ensure that aid does not become hostage to the regime responsible for the atrocities.

Conclusion
In an address given to the UN, Kofi Annan warned that if the collective conscience of humanity could not be found in that organization, there was a grave danger that it will look elsewhere for peace and justice (quoted in Deutscher, 2005). While it is not very clear where Kofi Annan thought humanity might turn, I have tried to argue that there are dangers in investing too much hope in the ability of the international community alone to avert atrocities. It is important, instead, to draw from history some of the hard-learnt lessons of how atrocities have actually been minimized or brought to an end, and to think further about the internationallocal interface. I have suggested, in particular, that we need to re-evaluate the role that targeted groups have

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had in resisting mass atrocities through a multitude of acts of individual and collective, nonviolent and violent, spontaneous and organized resistance. These lines of resistance are not the final answer to all cases of atrocities, and they are not as such exclusive of international interventions, but they do have the potential to substantially recast the debate about the nature of such interventions. The argument is a call to start from what is here, the huge, powerful force of human resilience in the face of atrocities, instead of starting from what might be some hypothetical vision of a cosmopolitan community of mankind dictating its will to states. It is open to debate, of course, what the historical record of resistance efforts has been, but the point is that resistance often achieved less than it might have because it was neglected or abandoned, so that the current challenge is to think of better ways in which it might be supported. In suggesting a new rapport between the international community and populations in peril, the argument developed here may in fact make better sense of cosmopolitan aspirations underlying R2P than a more top-down approach. Although there will no doubt be many obstacles to the international community moving in the direction of greater support of civil society resistance to atrocities (for example, the dangers to sovereignty and the risk of interference), there is certainly room for an argument that the international system cannot endlessly uphold the rights, security and dignity of the individual as the paramount goal of international association while simultaneously denying the individuals substantial agency in securing these especially in situations where the international community is effectively leaving populations largely to their own devices. Surely humans, as it were, have a considerable role in human security, and in fact the denial of that role can be seen as a source of insecurity itself. Maybe the challenge should be less to think about when resistance might be justified because the international community fails to intervene. Rather, assuming that resistance to atrocities is always legitimate, the question should be how international intervention itself should always be subsidiary to the failure of local efforts and every attempt to support them internationally. Surely supporting internal resistance efforts is not a worse encroachment on sovereignty than overcoming the latter by invasive force. And, by the time the threshold of labelling a government dangerous for its population has been reached, it would seem only a small step to taking sides more resolutely with the targeted population. Recasting international intervention as at least in part international intervention in support of self-rescue and resistance efforts may not solve the problem of collective will, but in some ways it may alleviate it by helping to pull out of the to intervene or not to intervene dichotomy and more explicitly outlining an intermediary strategy.

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* Frdric Mgret is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, McGill University, and the Canada Research Chair in the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. He served as a blue helmet in Sarajevo in 1995. His current research focuses on international justice, peacekeeping, and the idea of resistance in international law and relations. Funding for the research behind this article was provided by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The author is grateful to Amar Khoday for invaluable research assistance.

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