Gaza and the failure of atrocity prevention: Placing the responsibility to protect on stronger cosmopolitan foundations

The policy of key liberal Western states towards the latest conflagration in Israel-Gaza highlights the troubling connection between global harms and the failure to prevent mass atrocities. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) against genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing represents the acknowledgement of a cross-border duty to stop significant harm. But there is a problem: states are often themselves complicit in propagating the underlying structures of mass atrocity in other states. This means that there is a conceptual gap in the logic of R2P’s preventive agenda. The result is an R2P doctrine that misses the vitally important point that, for atrocity prevention efforts to be successful, the international community must recognise that harmful state actions have the potential to exacerbate or facilitate atrocities, and therefore part of states’ R2P must be to curb international actions that have a current or potential contribution to instances of atrocity crime. Building on research that seeks to expose the international dynamics of mass atrocity, the article utilises a cosmopolitan lens to explore the potential for connecting R2P’s pillar structure with the cosmopolitan negative duty of harm prevention, aiming to better align R2P with a coherent approach to human protection.