1.1 Introduction
Responsibility has become a recent focal point in international politics. Most visibly, we observe distinct policy fields where responsibility has materialised in specific policy norms, such as the common but differentiated responsibility, the responsibility to protect, or corporate social responsibility. Yet, even beyond such explicit translations of responsibility into policy, the issue of responsibility in world politics enjoys increased attention in times of global crises. Who takes or is assigned responsibility for climate change for instance? Under what conditions should the international community take responsibility and intervene in political conflicts? Or which actors should be held responsible for the financial crisis? Questions like these highlight the importance of underlying moral values of global politics and are not just a matter of compliance, incentives, and sanctions (see e.g. Bianculli et al. Reference Bianculli, Jordana and Fernández-i-Marín2015). IR scholarship has begun to pick up on these issues and work has emerged that investigates responsibility empirically (Lang Reference Lang1999; Loke 2015), and theoretically (Erskine Reference Erskine2003; Frost Reference Frost2004; Hoover Reference Hoover2012; Mills and Karp 2014; Beardsworth Reference Beardsworth2015; Gaskarth Reference Gaskarth2015), and draws on other disciplines such as political theory and global ethics or international law (Nollkaemper Reference Nollkaemper2012; Zürn et al. Reference Zürn, Nollkaemper and Peerenboom2012; Weller Reference Weller2015). The increased importance of responsibility has become a central theme in international politics, but its rise and actual instantiation is still poorly understood.
This book attempts to address this mismatch by offering a practice-based approach to study responsibility. Instead of remaining in one policy field, we address the issue of responsibility as a cross-cutting theme, covering security, the environment, and business with the objective of mapping similarities and differences across different policy fields. Building on the conceptual discussion of this chapter, we contend that the analyses that follow allow us to draw broader conclusions about the reference to responsibility in world politics, its origins, workings, and implications. While this is not meant to be a positivist comparative study, by focusing on policy fields in which responsibility has already assumed considerable prominence, we will provide answers to the analysis of international politics more generally. This comprehensive perspective across three – admittedly non-exhaustive – policy fields allows us to identify common issues related to responsibility that appear in all of them.
Locating the topic of responsibility in IR theory is not a simple task. Early works sought to open political interactions to a deeper debate about normative underpinnings and loosen assumptions that are held in conventional governance discussions of accountability (Grant and Keohane Reference Grant and Keohane2005). The discipline often works with a few underlying and accepted assumptions that would either overlook the concept of responsibility altogether or reduce it to mere interest-based compliance (Erskine Reference Erskine2003: 3; Reference Erskine, Reus-Smit and Snidal2008). One of the main questions that needs to be tackled in this respect is about moral agents in IR. Erskine (Reference Erskine, Reus-Smit and Snidal2008) for instance argues that IR is still too state-centric and ascribes too little agency to other collective actors such as NGOs and the like. Erskine (Reference Erskine, Reus-Smit and Snidal2008) goes on to argue that, at the same time as states are perceived as purposive actors they are often seen as amoral. If moral agency is dealt with in IR, she notes, then it is still often ascribed to individual actors/persons. This is because moral agency of collective actors is not easy to deal with and triggers further questions, such as whether we can treat collective responsibility in analogy to individual responsibility and where responsibility should be located in often complex situations (ibid.). Or in other words, how can we address problems in world politics such as oil tank accidents, child labour, climate change, or genocides where there is often no immediate individual actor that can be held responsible?
Theoretical debates surrounding these questions are useful and necessary and will be dealt with in single contributions to this volume explicitly and also more implicitly. Yet, in this book we allow for a broad perspective, where responsibility can be located at the individual (for instance with CEOs, see Chapter 9) and collective level (see Chapter 3), or within groups of collective actors (see Chapter 4) as well as at the intersection of individuals and collective actors (Chapter 7). Owing to this diversity of agency we argue that it is more important to focus on practices of responsibility. By this we mean the ways in which responsibility is enacted and instantiated by what actors do as well as say. Perceiving responsibility as going beyond accountability and the study of rightful behaviour (or norm compliance) not only allows us but requires us to grasp the ways in which agents – individual or collective – meaningfully interact and negotiate responsibility. Such an undertaking is necessary in order to understand what responsibility actually signifies, i.e. how this focal point of international politics is filled with content. Studying processes of negotiating responsibility consequently reveals the different moral values actors attach to it. The book thereby casts a wider net around responsibility in that it addresses not only agency but also questions of community as the site of contestation where agents negotiate the meaning of responsibility.
1.2 The Concept of Responsibility in International Relations Theory
Responsibility is a topic that has been addressed in IR as well as neighbouring disciplines, albeit not as a cross-cutting theme in the way in which this volume does. Discussions in IR as well as in the neighbouring disciplines of law, especially legal philosophy, and political theory highlight different ways in which responsibility matters as a point of reference. These discussions are useful for shedding light to the conceptual uses of responsibility. However, these discussions tend to focus on individual examples and isolated cases, often confined to one policy area such as the ‘responsibility to protect’. They cover less of an emergence of responsibility as a point of reference, which is what the contributions to this volume capture.
That said, we cannot introduce the discussion of this volume without engaging the conceptual groundwork that has come before us. Responsibility is a fairly flexible term. In one of the most widely cited examples, HLA Hart’s treatment of responsibility through the example of a drunken captain who loses a ship serves as a reminder that the particular context in which it is evoked matters (Hart Reference Hart and Gardner2008).1 In particular Hart’s famous discussion highlights a number of different aspects of the ways in which responsibility can be evoked. First, there is the responsibility someone or something has for causing a particular outcome – a sunken ship, for instance. Second, responsibility can be attached to a particular (professional) role, such as being a captain. In this regard, responsibility is addressed in conjunction with a sense of obligation or duty. Legal responsibility, as a third aspect, refers to a range of possible procedures to evaluate causal and/or role responsibility against a given body of legal norms. As a fourth dimension, moral responsibility adds an additional psychological dimension as well as social norms to the ways in which responsibility may play out.
These four dimensions do not form mutually exclusive categories, though, as some of them overlap. Scholars, such as Tony Honoré or Peter Cane, have therefore attempted to add clarification by providing more detailed discussions. Honoré, for instance, rejects Hart’s clear-cut distinction between different realms of responsibility (Honoré Reference Honoré1999: 7). For example, causing a particular event, what Honoré refers to as ‘outcome responsibility’, is linked to a wider set of capacities, which refer to the ability of someone as well as the broader social expectations of a person’s abilities. In other words, the particular case in which we can ask whether someone possesses the general capacity for action or whether there are circumstances that limit capacity, is embedded in a field of normativity, which is marked by the societal considerations of what an ‘average’ person should be capable of. For Honoré, these judgements are reflected in social and legal norms, which both reflect considerations of morality: if one is generally assumed capable of a particular action, then consequences of these actions, even if not intended, may be judged against social and legal standards; in the reverse scenario, those judged to have ‘diminished responsibility’ are not held to the same legal and moral consequences of responsibility (Honoré Reference Honoré1999: 10). The drunken captain is thus not responsible in a sequential sense – first in his role, then legally, and finally morally – but all at the same time, albeit with different emphases. Peter Cane (Reference Cane2002) shares some of Honoré’s criticism towards Hart, but further highlights that responsibility is not only about sanctions and accountability for an unwanted outcome but also carries a proactive dimension. For this reason, Cane distinguishes historic from prospective responsibility (Reference Cane2002: 29–32).
In philosophy, existential questions are linked to the notion of causal or outcome responsibility because they touch on the very essence of agency, but they are also linked with normative questions. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, underscores how agency means being an author of events in the world, which provides a different take on the concept of author-ity (sic), on the one hand, while having to take responsibility for what happens, on the other (Sartre 1956). In his view, this means that even passive acceptance of evil, such as war, makes one complicit in the action – a line of thinking that Hannah Arendt elaborated in her account of political responsibility, which holds that membership in a community makes one complicit with the consequences of its doings (Arendt Reference Arendt1958). Similarly, David Miller has made the case that through neglecting to act and intervene despite holding appropriate capacity, i.e. the absence of causal or outcome responsibility, one may be subject to moral and legal responsibility nonetheless (Miller Reference Miller2001; Reference Miller2007). Possessing agency, it follows, comes at the price that one is subjected to moral standards, perhaps even legal considerations. In global politics, where international law is often less immediately binding on states than national, civil, or criminal law is for citizens, Toni Erskine has elaborated on similar scenarios with regard to individuals as well as collective actors (Erskine Reference Erskine2003; Reference Erskine, Bellamy and Dunne2016).
These multiple layers and overlaps are important but rarely discussed in parts of the global governance literature that focuses on ‘accountability’ as a form of legal responsibility. There exists a growing body of literature that focuses on this term (Grant and Keohane Reference Grant and Keohane2005; Biancuelli et al. Reference Bianculli, Jordana and Fernández-i-Marín2015; da Conceição-Heldt Reference Conceição-Heldt2018), but its emphasis is on institutional mechanisms and defined assessors (compare Lane 2005: 236) at the expense of further aspects of responsibility. However, as recent debates have shown, even matters of who bears responsibility for human rights are not straightforward to resolve with reference to legal obligations. While Thomas Pogge makes the point that states with sufficient capabilities have responsibilities to deliver human rights (Pogge 2005), Onora O’Neill, for instance, takes a pluralist position that seeks to devolve some obligations also to multinational corporations (MNCs) because some hold at least as much financial and other means as some states (O’Neill Reference O'Neill and Kuper2005). In this discussion of differentiated responsibilities of state and non-state actors in global politics, O’Neill’s work pre-empts the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Ruggie Reference Ruggie2011), which contextualises the role of corporations in a set of broader social expectations. While calls for clarification on the accountability mechanisms regarding the role of corporations had been around for some time (De Schutter 2006: 9–16), the Guiding Principles specify the responsibility of companies to respect human rights and remedy potential wrongs, while reminding states of setting the frameworks to help protect the right in the first place. Similar to the Arendtian view that actors bear responsibility towards the community of which they are a part, O’Neill’s argument advocates holding those who can deliver particular outcomes to account, regardless of this being states or corporations, because assumptions about exclusively bad intentions of businesses are as misplaced as about selfish states, in her view (O’Neill Reference O'Neill and Kuper2005: 46ff.). Overall, this perspective serves as a reminder of a richer approach to legal responsibility that does not exclusively focus on rules and regulations but also on issues of feasibility, as exemplified in the discussion of outcome responsibilities of powerful actors other than states. In the context of global politics, David Karp’s work on the responsibility of MNCs makes an elaborate case of why and for which reasons MNCs might hold responsibilities to protect and respect human rights (Karp 2015), arguing that it is not desirable to revert to universalist explanations devoid of context sensitivity.
In this light, it is clear that the dimension of moral responsibility, that Hart viewed in isolation, is one that is present in all of the other fields, because they are not free of normative considerations. However, it is one that matters profoundly, not least because it may be drawn upon to pragmatically identify who should deliver a particular outcome. For David Miller, for instance, bearing moral responsibility is the first of six ways in which one could establish whose task it is to ensure justice of some kind (Miller Reference Miller2007: 100ff.). It revolves around the notion that someone’s action must have displayed a moral fault and led to a particular outcome, such as deliberate and reckless deprivation. Yet, moral responsibility is but one criterion of several that can be drawn upon to arrive at a verdict, the others being establishing outcome responsibility, causal responsibility, benefits, capacity, and community ties.2
In its pluralist search for pragmatic solutions, Miller’s work resonates with some IR theorists who also seek to address responsibility for ensuring a particular outcome. But it is not clear which states are primarily responsible for something, nor to whom. Similar to Miller, Toni Erskine, for instance, links capacity arguments to moral responsibility for humanitarian intervention (Erskine Reference Erskine2001). A middle ground is occupied by English School–inspired approaches which contend that powerful states bear a special and/or moral responsibility to uphold international order (Bull Reference Bull1977; Bukovansky et al. Reference Bukovansky, Eckersley, Price, Reus-Smit and Wheeler2012; Clark and Reus-Smit Reference Clark and Reus-Smit2013; Daase et al. Reference Daase, Junk, Kroll and Rauer2017; Gaskarth Reference Gaskarth2017) based on the mutual recognition of and bearing in mind the less capable states. However, arguments about the responsibility of powerful states have been used by advocates of ‘just war’ approaches as well as co-operation-oriented accounts (Waltz 1959; Keohane 1984) which emphasise the connections between states and their own citizens rather than a broader global community. The argument in this line of thought states that ‘a nation’s survival is its first and foremost responsibility; it cannot be compromised or put to risk’ (Kissinger 1997: 204). Others yet remind us that power, and thus a focus on capacity, is an illusive undertaking to begin with. Given the reality of international negotiations and interaction, which involves multiple actors, it is not always clear who exactly triggered a process and exerted their own influence over others (Ferguson 2015; Holden 2015).
Following these considerations we can conclude that there is no straightforward answer to what responsibility is, as it contains moral as well as legal dimensions, while arguments can be made about who to assign responsibility to and on what basis. Before we propose our own practice-based approach to the study of responsibility, which would be most sensitive to context, we first of all show why such an approach is necessary as responsibility comprises more than the analysis of rule-based behaviour that is the focus in accountability studies.
1.3 The Three Dimensions of Responsibility: Accountability, Morality and Ethics, and Relationality
Responsibility does not only refer to being in charge of something that has happened – after the fact, as it were – but also means that actors conduct their actions following certain (moral) values and take on responsibility proactively. Responsibility further constructs a relationship between an actor – individual or collective – and other social units. That is to say, that how and for what actors take on responsibility is relational and thus shaped by the expectations of others in their environment. We can thus argue that responsibility, as a theoretical concept, exhibits the following three aspects, accountability, morality and ethics, and relationality. A comparison of responsibility with the more often used notion of accountability facilitates a better understanding of this argument.
Accountability establishes a relationship between an accuser and the accused based on non-compliance with shared rules and regulations. This is based on the observation that someone caused an outcome/event and is thus not only backward looking but also fixed to this specific instance. Accountability is about monitoring and sanctioning and thus about correcting behaviour, which also means that accountability relations are characterised by power, understood as the power to be able to enforce rules and regulations on other actors vis-à-vis the power to avoid sanctions. Responsibility in contrast emphasises the proactive nature of taking on responsibility, not only for outcomes that one might not be accountable for but also related to tasks that lie in the future. Responsibility norms are not corrective but guiding principles that leave space for debate, also about the conditions under which what actor(s) possess the capability to take on responsibility. While capability and power often go together (see the aforementioned capacity argument of specific states with special responsibilities), they are actually distinct. One might be capable of taking on responsibility without having power and also have power without being able to act responsibly. Negotiating the capability to take on responsibility goes beyond a mere power game between enforcer and wrong-doer. This emphasises the relational dimension of responsibility, as it evokes the context in which such debates take place, or – as labelled in this book – the communities of responsibility.
Table 1.1 Conceptual dimensions: Accountability and responsibility compared (adopted from Vetterlein Reference Vetterlein2018: 562)
| Dimensions | Accountability | Responsibility |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | attribution to wrong-doer, sanction | relational, dialogue |
| Content | fixed, causation | broad, discretion |
| Time | backward-looking | future-oriented |
| Mode | corrective | guiding |
| Authority | power | capability |
Responsibility embraces accountability, while accountability is a narrow understanding of responsibility relations. Or put differently, responsibility captures accountability relations too. Focussing only on accountability, a negative duty related to a causal attribution of responsibility for past action, would prevent us from appreciating the concept’s ability to tackle broader challenges in world politics. Erskine (Chapter 4 in this volume) analyses the responsibility of global actors to take on humanitarian action in cases where the UNSC fails to act. To frame debates about legally correct but not legitimate outcomes of our regulatory system in terms of responsibility allows us to open up such questions for dialogue where arguments and justifications can be brought forward with the aim to search for alternative solutions. Similarly, Helga Haflidadottir and Anthony Lang’s chapter in this volume on environmental responsibility serves as another example where the notion of accountability would reach its limits (Chapter 7). Responsibility here is about more general goals to be reached in the future. Such cases are characterised by dialogue and negotiation about what the aim should be, who would be able to take responsibility to reach these aims and on what basis (see Chapter 7).
Following these conceptual considerations, responsibility highlights – beyond accountability – two further dimensions, ethics and relationality. Taking responsibility based on individually held values of what is right or wrong evokes questions of moral agency (Erskine Reference Erskine2003; Reference Erskine, Reus-Smit and Snidal2008) and ethics (Warner Reference Warner1993). Responsibility further entails a relational component, as in responding (or ‘answering’) to claims requiring more responsible behaviour which highlights relations to other actors in the context in which responsibility is taken on. In order to capture the morality and relationality dimension of responsibility, we offer a framework based on two concepts, these are norms and community. First of all, we conceive of responsibility as a policy norm. Park and Vetterlein (Reference Park and Vetterlein2010: 4, emphasis in original) define policy norms ‘as shared expectations for all relevant actors within a community about what constitutes appropriate behaviour, which is encapsulated in … policy’. Usually such policy norms are informed by broader and more fundamental norms such as sustainability for CBDR for instance or human rights for R2P. Following critical norms research in IR (Wiener Reference Wiener2004; Reference Wiener2008; Reference Wiener2014), we argue that while most actors can agree to, and in fact use fundamental norms such as human rights, democracy, or sustainability to justify actions or policies in political debates, their specific meanings are contested once they are supposed to be applied in practice.
In order to grasp the meaning of the responsibility norm, we therefore redirect our analysis to the micro-level where actors negotiate, shape, and adopt or reject such norms based on different moral convictions or beliefs. We secondly contend that policy problems are not solved within traditional divides of the public or the private or mainly in a national context or rather internationally. Yet, we argue that communities of a variety of actors form themselves around policy issues and provide the space where the meaning of norms is negotiated and positions are justified. These arguments will be developed in the remaining sections of this introduction.
1.4 Moral Agency, Policy Norms, and Communities of Responsibility
Claiming, ascribing, or taking responsibility is inherently linked to two sets of interrelated questions, first about the ethics and moral values underlying such claims and attributions and secondly in turn about the group of actors, or the community, where the meaning and the content of such norms is negotiated. Yet, to raise issues about responsibility in world politics in this way, points at first to ‘questions of moral agency [which] are fundamental to the study of world politics [because] [w]ho—or what—can bear the related moral burdens of duty and blame for specific acts and outcomes has serious implications for practice and theory’ (Erskine Reference Erskine, Reus-Smit and Snidal2008: 699). Erskine summarises, ‘a collectivity with a corporate identity (or an identity greater than the sum of identities of its constitutive parts), an identity over time, a decision-making structure, and an executive function that allows it to act on decisions might also be a moral agent’ (Erskine Reference Erskine, Reus-Smit and Snidal2008: 701). Paradoxically, the inclusion of collective actors leads to logical questions about free will and individual agency, which is an inherent liberal perspective. As Kirsten Ainley discusses, these two positions may be incompatible: either causes that may be structural, psychological, biological, or theological can be made responsible for action, or ‘human agents are genuinely free and capable of identifying, deliberating over and choosing between courses of action open to them – a Kantian position, following Kant’s explanation of the individual as an “uncaused cause”’ (Ainley Reference Ainley2008: 2). Ainley argues that the way around this discussion is to acknowledge the social construction of agency – a point that we pick up shortly where we argue that agency is always socially embedded.
Also, Warner (Reference Warner1993) addresses this question of the possibility of moral agency beyond the individual level. Drawing on Max Weber’s notions of an ‘ethic of responsibility’ and an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, he points out that the realist and liberal extrapolation from the individual to the state level has implications for how responsibility can be theorised in IR. According to Warner (ibid.) the problem is the so-called domestic analogy (Suganami Reference Suganami1989). This analogy suggests that ‘as the individual is to the state, each state is to the society of states’ (Warner Reference Warner1993: 435). Following this reasoning, the conceptualisation of responsibility ends up in a situation where a state follows its interests and/or moral values, just as Weber’s charismatic leader, and is only responsible to itself. No objective norm or value are theoretically possible in this scenario. Or, to put it with Warner: ‘Weber’s ethic of responsibility denies the importance of consequences and the possibility of objective norms’ (Warner Reference Warner1993: 431). Responsibility is then left between the Kantian imperative and the will of a nation/state. States are immune against external pressures and free to steer domestic politics which in turn leads to – what Warner (Reference Warner1993: 436ff) calls – Walzer’s paradox, i.e. a situation in which individual actors within a state are not protected beyond their own state.
The alternative would be to conceive of a world community, where everyone is responsible for/to everyone else as in some of those global governance approaches just outlined. As Warner (ibid.) argues, this is not a viable way forward either since norms and moral values do not apply generally, or in his words, because ‘[o]ne cannot arbitrarily decide the parameters of the community of responsibility before deciding for what one is responsible’ (Warner Reference Warner1993: 438). He then continues drawing on Fain (Reference Fain1987) and the idea of a ‘task-theoretic normative community’.3 The idea is that an international political community has moral obligations because the global problems it faces demand co-operation. With global tasks come global responsibilities because some problems cannot be solved individually or by nation states alone. Such normative communities are formed around specific tasks. This means that once we depart from the idea of the liberal and autonomous individual/nation state the concept of community becomes crucial and then, as a consequence, the relationship between a community, the attribution or allocation of responsibility in that community, and specific global problems/tasks. This is to say that responsibility is situated in terms of specific (policy) problems. Following this argumentation, we therefore contend that a practice-based approach to responsibility, that starts from the identification of the specific community that forms around a policy problem, will help us to answer questions about responsibility in world politics. In order to do so, we introduce two analytical tools, norms and community, that help us to operationalise the approach.
We consider responsibility to be a policy norm that has become a focal point in international politics over the recent decades. To perceive the three policies discussed in this volume as policy norms allows us to emphasise the fact that policies always relate to a broader set of values, which in turn allows us to highlight the normativity of responsibility. While the near-classical definition holds that ‘[n]orms are collective expectations about proper behaviour for a given identity’ (Jepperson et al. Reference Jepperson, Wendt, Katzenstein and Katzenstein1996: 54), we contend the positivist turn of sociological institutionalism that followed this definition. Siding with Warner’s discussion, post-1990 it is not clear what kind of collective and what kind of identities international politics consists of. It would therefore be problematic to follow the binary logic of much of compliance-oriented research that asks whether a norm is implemented and/or followed or not (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Boerzel Reference Boerzel2001; Raustiala and Slaughter Reference Raustiala, Slaughter, Carlsnaes, Risse and Simmons2005; Hansen-Magnusson et al. Reference Hansen-Magnusson, Vetterlein and Wiener2018). Rather, as critical constructivist approaches to norms have pointed out, it is interaction on the ground that matters most for pressing questions of world politics because norms do not exist independently from human instantiation.
In fact, that scholarship has questioned whether norms are meaningful beyond the limits of the specific social community where they emerge. That is, the assumption that a particular norm entails a clearly defined meaning, that is universally valid, is questioned (Walker Reference Walker and Der Derian1995 [1989]; Reus-Smit Reference Reus-Smit2004; Wiener Reference Wiener2004), and tested by pitching universalist meanings of fundamental norms against contingent interpretations that reflect particular normative structures of meaning-in-use (Weldes Reference Weldes1998; Milliken Reference Milliken1999) in selected contexts. Empirical research found out that when enacted outside the boundaries of stable social communities the implementation of fundamental norms was contested based on different meanings according to their respective social constitution. In other words, compliance with specific rules and regulations on the ground was contested (Wiener Reference Wiener2008; Liese Reference Liese2009; Puetter and Wiener Reference Puetter and Wiener2009; Venzke Reference Venzke2009; Geis et al. Reference Geis, Müller and Schornig2010; Park and Vetterlein Reference Park and Vetterlein2010). It is thus possible to say that the norm of responsibility is brought to life through the involvement of actors that form communities around specific issue-areas. With ‘communities’ we mean ‘spaces of norm negotiation’ where the actors’ practices of justifying, taking care, naming, shaming, blaming etc. take place. These communities might form around physical locations, like a courtroom or a convention summit, or more broadly as a discursive arena that does not actually involve the immediate contact between actors. We therefore do not limit the locality of moral agency to either nation states or at the global or personal level, but allow for a variety of spaces where responsibility is negotiated and instantiated. What matters is the discursive interaction between actors as well as the practices through which responsibility is put into use.
While this approach may seem to hold similarities with a ‘community of practice’ approach (Wenger Reference Wenger1998), we would like to caution against the manner in which it has become prominent in IR. Here, when talking about interaction around a specific issue area, researchers often refer to the idea of an epistemic community which forms around specific expertise (Adler and Haas Reference Adler and Haas1992; Adler and Barnett Reference Adler and Barnett1998; Adler Reference Adler2008). Additionally, practices are referred to as competent performances, which refer to patterns of meaningful action (Adler and Pouliot Reference Adler and Pouliot2011: 3). In this account the potentially problematic boundaries of a community are not subject to discussion, nor are potential changes in practices a result of a learning process (Hansen-Magnusson Reference Hansen-Magnusson2014; Ringmar Reference Ringmar2014). In this book however, the contributors do not begin the inquiry with assuming that, first, the meaning of responsibility is already given, and second, that certain communities pre-exist. In our understanding, responsibility is negotiated as a norm in communities that form around the practices of actors. This may result in a communal understanding but not to the extent that it results in a community of practice which is marked by a clear delimitation and within which the object of reference has become common sense, yet continues to evolve. As new actors may emerge and make claims towards the community, its boundaries are as much in flux as is the understanding of responsibility.
In sum, introducing the two analytical tools, policy norms and community, allows us to address responsibility in a way that avoids some of the shortcomings addressed previously and rather embraces responsibility in its broad understanding as relational and inherently normative, as outlined in Section 1.3. The contributions to this book follow this broad perspective. The three historical accounts for each policy field trace long-term developments over time, using formalised and institutionalised references to responsibility as anchoring points of their narrative. They zoom into the flux of time at historical landmarks, specifying how responsibility mattered and thanks to whom, and thus revealing the underlying values. They also inform us about moments of contestation when alternative pathways might have been possible. Responsibility becomes meaningful through the background of prior understandings. That said, however, the embeddedness of agency does not exclude the possibility to act and reason in novel ways once one has entered a space within which the meaning of responsibility is at stake. It is therefore important to not only consider a historic trajectory of responsibility as the first chapter for each policy area will do, but also specific situations in which responsibility is evoked and negotiated. The community concept is important here as it allows us to operationalise the space where such negotiations take place without being too prescriptive and assigning policy authority to specific or even formal actors such as IOs or epistemic communities. Some of the contributions will explicitly focus on identifying a community and the way it has formed around a specific issue area, describing who is involved and who is not, including the historical trajectory of the constellation and possible changes to inclusion and exclusion.
The book addresses the issue of responsibility as a cross-cutting theme. It covers the fields of security, environment, and business with a view to mapping similarities and differences across seemingly different policy areas. The analysis resulted in three crucial observations: first, across all three fields we can observe a convergence in terms of an increased formalisation of responsibility in guidelines, directives, and treaties. We secondly can show that in all three cases responsibility entered the policy discourse not as the preferred choice but through a series of compromises. Finally, the works in this book reveal that across policy fields, responsibility claims are increasingly justified by references to human rights. These will be detailed now.
1.5 Responsibility as a Cross-Cutting Concept in IR Theory
1.5.1 Policy Convergence: The Rise of Responsibility
The historical accounts across the three policy fields reveal differences, but also one crucial similarity, that is an increased formalisation of responsibility in guidelines, treaties, and laws over the course of the last three decades. The processes differ however with regard to timing: in the field of security, responsibility entered the discourse later than in the other two governance areas. Before formalisation set in, the respective fields of security, environment, and business underwent a process of discursive reconstitution which shares the same intellectual point of departure for all three fields, that is the 1987 Brundtland Report. That report occupies a key position to explain the shift towards responsibility in all three fields. Its author managed to couple the spheres of economics and environment and provided the blueprint for a changed understanding of security, too. The Brundtland Report marks the preliminary pinnacle of a series of reports, such as ‘North-South: A Programme for Survival’ and ‘Common Crisis: North-South’ by Willy Brandt (Reference Brandt1980; 1983) and ‘Common Security: A Programme for Disarmament’ by Olof Palme (Reference Palme1982). Already those reports attempted to take a broader view of state-oriented security, highlighting the need for disarmament and the parallel improvement of social and economic conditions around the world (see also Chapters 2, 5 and 8, in this volume). They were triggered by an apparent need to reinvigorate a global debate about state co-operation, which had been halted as a result of Cold War confrontations during the 1970s. In different constellations, these reports addressed themes of peace, security, development, and the environment, though it was not before the Brundtland Report’s coining of ‘sustainable development’ that hitherto separate ideas were subsumed within a single concept.
The Brundtland Report ultimately achieved two outcomes. It first evoked a moral compass with a strong sense of obligation and positive responsibility. Secondly, it did so in a manner that linked the governance domains of economics and environment. It built on achievements by the 1972 Stockholm Conference that sought to specify rights of the individual, such as the right to adequate food, housing, safe water, or family planning. This merging of two distinct governance areas (environment and economics) into one (sustainable development) later formed the intellectual blueprint also in the area of security. Security became less tied to states and more towards the relation between people and the international community.
Along with the expanded remit of the three governance areas came an increase in formalisation of the new responsibility policy. To start with security, R2P has been predominantly shaped by multilateral treaties for some time. Responsibility in the field of security had been largely treated as separate from questions of state sovereignty and more as a corollary of interstate conduct. The efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross were the first attempts to formalise responsibility through the humanisation of interstate warfare. As Adam Bower shows in his contribution (see Chapter 3), the 1997 mine-ban treaty follows the precedents set by the Saint Petersburg Declaration of 1868 and the 1907 Hague Convention. The humanisation of warfare amounted to an effort to regulate state-to-state conduct with particular responsibility towards different categories of people, expressed in the distinction between soldiers and civilians. It was this formalisation of interstate relations, though, that proved difficult to change and frame responsibility as something that involves the community of states and citizens of a third state. Despite the legacy of Brandt and Palme and new attempts to reframe security by Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Reference Boutros-Ghali1992), Gareth Evans (Reference Evans1993), and the 1994 UN Development Report, it was only during the latter half of the 1990s that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons Francis Deng attempted to redefine the basis of state sovereignty in terms of a positive responsibility that would recalibrate the relations between a state, citizens, and the international community. On the basis of this discursive reconstitution R2P became formalised through the ICISS Report and the 2005 World Summit despite prevailing contestation over its exact implications.
Given the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to argue that because of the formalised nature of interstate relations, the coupling of sovereignty with responsibility was more difficult to imagine and to formalise than in the other governance fields, and hence accounts for the time lag. R2P was fully enacted for the first time in combination with Chapter VII of the UN Charter in UN Security Council Resolution 1973 in 2011. However, the actual application remains contested following the way the mandate was enacted. Brazil for instance has proposed its own understanding of the role of the international community in this constellation as ‘Responsibility while Protecting’. This signals disagreement on the legal side of responsibility regarding accountability and obligation while in principle acknowledging the ethical dimension. In fact, the debate over the formal constitutionalisation of R2P is ongoing (Welsh and Banda Reference Welsh and Banda2010).
Unlike in the field of security, environmental issues were regarded as a local concern and not subject to state-to-state relations for quite some time. Global treaties have only recently become the significant medium to formalise responsibility, taking into account the new approach to environmental governance as sustainable development. Robert Falkner’s overview highlights how most activities were initially organised locally and an exchange between environmentalists within their networks and between activists and scientists was hindered by wars, by global distances that made communications difficult in pre-internet age, and by a lack of global awareness (see Chapter 5). This changed by the late 1960s when anthropocentric concerns and post-material values gained a foothold in politics. The emergence of environmental social movements, some of which eventually led to Green parties (Goodin Reference Goodin1992), coincided with the founding of NGOs, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. These developments provided the broader setting for the 1972 Stockholm conference, which proved crucial in hindsight, establishing a common and special responsibility of states for global environmental affairs: paragraph two of the Stockholm Declaration speaks of a ‘duty of all Governments to protect and improve the human environment’ to ensure well-being and prosperity around the world, while paragraph seven ‘demand(s) acceptance of responsibility by citizens and communities and by enterprises and institutions at all levels’ to achieve long-term improvement and preservation of the environment, laying particular emphasis on ‘local and national governments’ to contribute to the international co-operation necessary to address regional and global problems.
Despite these attempts to broaden the definition of environmental issues, the move towards formalisation did not progress much before the 1990s and once sustainable development became a known concept. As shown in the respective chapters by Helga Haflidadottir and Anthony Lang as well as Virginie Barral, the 1992 Rio Conference and the ensuing UNFCCC established differentiated responsibilities of states, depending on their capacities, referring to values of environmentalism as well as property and possession in the area of economics (see Chapters 6 and 7). We therefore argue that the reconsideration of environmental governance as linked to economics enabled the formalisation of responsibility as it allowed states to compromise on aspects such as differentiated capabilities. Several further treaties and declarations have followed since Rio 1992, further specifying the tasks associated with these responsibilities, such as binding aims to reduce CO2 emissions in the Kyoto Protocol and the 2007 Bali Conference. It was not until the 2015 Paris Conference (COP21) at which parties were guided by principles such as ‘equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ and agreed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels (Article 2).
Finally, in the field of business, the UN Guiding Principles signify a more formalised way to set out the obligation of MNCs to respect human rights. Bearing in mind that the field had been closely tied to the concept of sustainability since the late 1980s, the Guiding Principles formalise the conduct of MNCs, tying companies into the fabric of global politics. This development of a social dimension of sustainability was successfully endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council after an extensive consultation process involving MNCs that lasted several years and underwent several loops of negotiation. As the respective chapters by Alvise Favotto and Kelly Kollman (Chapter 9) as well as Hevina S Dashwood (Chapter 8) show, CSR is no longer merely something that unions and NGOs demand from MNCs. Rather, it plays an increasing role in management decisions, communication, and company conduct. In this sense, it has become a formal – or institutionalised – part of the business world, even though, as Grahame Thompson reminds us in Chapter 10, there is considerable space for manoeuvring regarding the constitutionalisation of businesses in global politics and influencing their objectives.
1.5.2 Policy Communities: Responsibility as Compromise
Summarising the rise of responsibility and its increased formalisation across all three policy fields also provides evidence for the involvement of different actors who come together in communities of responsibility. The chapters in this book provide information about how abstract and broad claims to responsibility are negotiated in these communities. It is possible to identify a number of distinct traits across the three governance fields, while there are also parallel developments. First, in all fields we witness the interaction between states, non-governmental organisations, and other actors, though with different roles and to different degrees. States are key actors throughout, but they mattered more centrally in the field of security than in the other two. Second, two different mechanisms can be identified in the way in which responsibility is negotiated: first, state-to-state negotiations at global summits that lead to agreements, often influenced by political ideas and initiatives by individuals such as Brandt, Brundtland, Deng, or Evans; and second, reflexively organised stakeholder processes, characterised by delegation of authority and participation. Tracing these developments also reveals one common characteristic across all fields, that is that responsibility came about as a compromise. In this regard, we identify two ‘negotiation models’ which explain two kinds of shift in authority. We discuss these mechanisms and negotiation models in turn.
1.5.2.1 Mechanisms
A first mechanism is interaction between states at summits or within the context of the UN system that result in written agreements. Ideas, emanating from policy reports or initiatives of (former) politicians were picked up and translated in more binding conventions and treaties. Their understanding is often enriched by the presence of NGOs who take on a crucial role as norm entrepreneurs (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998; Keck and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink1998). Regarding the field of the environment, the respective chapters by Helga Haflidadottir and Anthony Lang (Chapter 7) as well as Virginie Barral (Chapter 6), have listed several key summits in this respect, such as Rio 1992, the 2007 Bali Conference, and the 2015 Paris Summit. These summits, which were closely monitored by NGOs, serve as a reminder that states ultimately yield the capacity to adopt contracts and that intergovernmental arenas are the place in which they meet. Similarly, in the field of security, the rise of responsibility was led by efforts of non-governmental organisations’ appeals to the moral responsibility of states. These appeals preceded the codification of what a good state can and cannot do in times of war. It is in these codifications that signatory parties acknowledge their obligation to refrain from using certain weapons – an acknowledgement that was aided, as Adam Bower (Chapter 3) shows, by a re-evaluation of the relation between humanitarian costs of the use of the weapons and potential military gains.
A second mechanism refers to the involvement of stakeholders. Our understanding of the term comprises all groups that have a stake in a particular issue. It hence refers to more than the naming/shaming relation between NGOs and states, which is often not formalised. The prime example for our purpose can be found in the field of business, where MNCs had been invited to closely co-operate with states. As the respective chapters by Hevina S Dashwood (Chapter 8) as well as Alvise Favotto and Kelly Kollman (Chapter 9) show, responsibility has gained a strong foothold in business governance over the past two decades. This development is closely linked to the rise of multinational corporations as global actors, which in turn prompts a debate about their status as political entities (compare Grahame Thompson, Chapter 10, in this volume). When read together, the chapters on business governance show a shift in strategy over time: initially, naming and shaming by NGOs prevailed to an extent that the rise of responsibility as a policy norm meant that corporations assumed responsibilities for the health and safety of workers (e.g. the ILO’s 1919 convention on fair working conditions). Increasingly states began to recognise the effects of industrial production outside their own territory, which resulted, for instance, in the 1979 Convention on Transboundary Air Pollution. But it was not until the consultative involvement of MNCs in the development of the 2011 Guiding Principles that responsibility became a lasting feature in economic policy discourses. This procedure echoes the creation of the 2010 ISO 26000, which is the Social Responsibility guidance standard.4 The continuous involvement of stakeholders in the process of developing the principles and standards, which mention accountability and human rights, allowed for an ongoing reflection on its content. This practice of inclusion has been identified as enhancing the legitimacy of the norm in the absence of a constituted polity (Hahn and Weidtmann Reference Hahn and Weidtmann2016).
1.5.2.2 Negotiation Models
Within these mechanisms, how was it possible for actors to formalise responsibility? Our analysis of these communities shows that responsibility came about as the compromise solution in the negotiations. We can identify at least two features which help understand this development. For one, there is a compromise between independent actors. This type is particularly salient in the area of environmental governance, as the main achievements rest on interstate negotiations and ensuing treaties and conventions, happening to a lesser extent also in the area of business governance. We can term this interaction the ‘bargaining model’ since it is marked by negotiations between independent actors. For another, we can identify what could be termed the ‘stewardship model’, which describes a transfer of authority. It prevails particularly in the field of security.
The ‘bargaining model’ refers to a compromise between actors, specifying the nature of responsibility vis-à-vis a particular object, such as the environment, and the curbing of policy options and, consequently, potential decisions with regard to common-pool resources. According to this model, the compromise that was struck was aided by the changed political situation of the time, which was marked by a period of multilateralism that followed the Cold War. As described in the chapters by Virginie Barral (Chapter 6) as well as Helga Haflidadottir and Anthony Lang (Chapter 7), the agreement on CBDR ensured the widest possible participation between developed countries from the global North and industrially less advanced countries from the global South. While the pursuit of economic development was a common denominator between countries, by the time of the Rio Conference the general discourse demanded that it be at least ‘sustainable’, thereby restricting the space of possible policymaking. As the authors make plain, this compromise thus impacted on prevailing norms and values: it involved accepting a constraint on state sovereignty and the right to property (i.e. the untaxed use of common-pool resources like air and water) while strengthening values associated with environmentalism and global justice. In the field of business we can observe another, softened version of this bargaining model, especially following the stakeholder consultation preceding the Guiding Principles. This is a softened version since MNCs do not have the same formal capacities as states, yet their economic significance in global politics ensured them an invitation to the table. They were treated akin to states bar the formal validation of the Guiding Principles, ensuring that economic activity be curtailed by aspects of sustainability (compare also O’Neill Reference O'Neill and Kuper2005).
The ‘stewardship model’ follows from Grahame Thompson’s discussion on how economic governance should move forward (Chapter 10). While this model also addresses the curbing of policies, its main feature is the transfer of authority. Thompson makes this point in his suggestion to alter the raison d’être of the corporation from maximising shareholder revenue towards benefitting the social context in which it operates. Aided by appropriate legal frameworks, this would transfer ultimate control over the workings of the corporation to an independent panel, thereby altering the accountability structure within the organisation (which is responsible) as well as within the space in which it operates (what it is responsible for). It would more fully realise the compromise formed by the UN Guiding Principles in which multinational corporations’ responsibility towards their shareholders is reconciled with the guarantee for workers’ rights and appropriate economic conduct. This includes a limitation (if not elimination) of negative externalities.
The ‘stewardship model’ is operating more fully in the security field, however. Here, the compromise struck involves advocates striving to maintain sovereignty of the state along the lines proclaimed by the ‘myth of Westphalia’ and those advocating individual rights. The former would suggest that states possess external sovereignty vis-à-vis other states given the absence of a higher authority to which they could be held accountable, and they would possess internal sovereignty regarding any domestic affairs, including relations to their citizens. While authors like Glanville (Reference Glanville2014) demonstrate that such arrangement was never as clear-cut, the concept of internal and external sovereignty was only explicitly challenged during the late 1990s by Annan and Deng. They questioned whether state-citizen relations were an exclusively internal affair, arguing that there was a collective responsibility for human well-being. In this instance of power transfer, sovereignty is taken away from the state and placed into the hands of the international community, which assumes the role of a steward with the responsibility to protect citizens of other states. Much like Grahame Thompson would like to see authority over the doings of a firm transferred to an independent panel, international society takes on the role of steward for protecting people from genocide.
Ultimately, these two negotiation models about the emergence of responsibility as a policy compromise are not meant to provide more than heuristic guidance, i.e. they are not supposed to hold generalisable, theoretical explanatory sway. Yet, they do indicate a trend that when new actors begin to play a role in global politics the position of existing ones changes the nature of their relation. This happens when stewards appropriate a new role. At the same time, the object around which their interaction unfolds changes as well, such as the move from conservation to preservation.
1.5.3 Policy Foundation: Human Rights as the Common Point of Reference
The third observation reviewing the rise of responsibility in the three policy areas covered in this book is the recent reference to human rights when negotiating responsibility across all three policy fields. In fact, we argue that the rise of the human rights discourse has enabled a turn to responsibility. Researchers have long since shown how human rights came to matter within particular countries (Risse et al. Reference Risse, Ropp and Sikkink1999) following the establishment of specific rights such as the provision covered by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Insights from the chapters of this volume go further in that they underscore the particular normative impact across policy areas. In this regard, we argue that the link to human rights provides argumentative clout for NGOs as well as states to hold others to account or to shame/blame them into engaging in particular behaviour, while it also provides enabling conditions, as some of our authors argue. In other words, because human rights are well established as a normative principle, speaking of responsibilities of someone and for something commands attention and seems to be key in the attempt to induce a sense of appropriateness.
Let us consider the different policy areas one by one, tracing how the link between responsibility and human rights has been achieved and how it plays out in practice. In the field of security, the link between human rights and responsibility has probably been best documented for some time. As the chapters by Benjamin de Carvalho (Chapter 2) and Adam Bower (Chapter 3) highlight, the argumentative push to consider security in terms of human security (rather than, for instance, from a national interest point of view) has been fundamental to this development. This is apparent in the attempt to humanise international warfare, for instance by banning certain weapon systems, as well as in the attempt to alter the understanding of state sovereignty. Arguably, then, the move towards human security was aided by the series of commissioned reports since the early 1980s, as discussed, as they address security in a more holistic manner, that is not from the perspective of individual nation states. While we wish to caution against a teleological reading of this development, a breakthrough was reached with the ICISS report headed by Gareth Evans, while the 2005 World Summit retracted some of the positions from 2001.
These developments, spurred by atrocities committed during the 1990s in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, have potentially lifted human rights out of the state-bound context, which was the subject of the 1999 investigation into The Power of Human Rights, and into the international arena: since the first decade of the millennium state sovereignty has been formulated in terms of a responsibility to protect citizens from genocide. The shift in the locus of sovereignty towards international society, that we addressed in our discussion of the ‘stewardship model’, means that the international society assumes responsibility to protect and ‘save strangers’ (Wheeler Reference Wheeler2002) when a state fails to do so. The successful passing of UNSC Resolution 1973 shows that the link has gained traction. Thus, overall, the internationalisation of human rights occurred parallel with strengthening the positions of individuals in global politics (compare Gholiagha Reference Gholiagha2015), while the concept of responsibility provided the compromise to reconcile individual rights and state sovereignty.
In the field of environmental governance, by contrast, the jury is still out whether human rights can be successfully linked to climate change although attempts are well under way. As the chapters by Virginie Barral (Chapter 6) as well as Helga Haflidadottir and Anthony Lang (Chapter 7) discuss, the OHCHR has established that climate change affects the full set of human rights, that is a right to life, adequate food and housing, health, and self-determination. But still, courts have rejected holding states accountable for their contribution to global warming, such as attempted by the Circumpolar Conference in front of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights regarding the United States’ role. Yet, as the District Court of The Hague ruled in 2015, the Netherlands, at least, are under obligation to take measures to control emission targets, while the higher regional court in Hamm, Germany, will move forward to hear the case of Peruvian farmer Saúl Lliuya against energy company RWE for its contribution to climate change.5
This successful attempt to establish legal accountability aside, there is an important difference to the field of security when it comes to the link between human rights and responsibility. States have differentiated responsibilities regarding the measures taken to tackle the causes of climate change. By contrast, human rights in the field of security are not to be treated through a differentiated approach and are set as absolute, meaning that states cannot differentiate ‘how many and which’ human rights they implement. This implies that we need to be precise: human rights come with a range of responsibilities – towards justice and the rule of law as well as towards various social rights; and they rest with different actors as well. Some of the responsibilities are to be fulfilled without limitation whereas others leave room for differentiation. What we see here is a different treatment of questions of justice and the rule of law, on the one hand, and sustainable development as the common denominator between economic and environmental governance, on the other.
The differentiation in the field of environmental governance is part of eliminating negative externalities from economic activity, and the proximity between these two fields was shaped not least through the concept of sustainable development. Thus, the initial underlying value of CSR and CBDR was sustainability. Also, the Brundtland Report did not immediately establish a link to human rights. As detailed in the chapter by Hevina S Dashwood (Chapter 8), it took several attempts to establish the connection between CSR and human rights: starting with the initiative by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 2000 ‘Voluntary Principles’ that responded to human rights abuses by MNCs of the extractive sector during the 1990s, via the failed attempt to establish the ‘norms to protect human rights’ in 2003, it was not before the successful stakeholder consultations in the run-up to the UN Guiding Principles in 2011 that the link was made. As the case study by Alvise Favotto and Kelly Kollman (Chapter 9) suggests, human rights are increasingly embraced by MNCs. Further, Grahame Thompson (Chapter 10) shows that MNCs are increasingly interested to leave a positive imprint of their doings by engaging with local communities and in philanthropy. These activities signal a growing sense of obligation towards providing the communities in which they operate with access to resources, education, etc., which can be viewed as strengthening the human rights provisions entailed in both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.
In sum, we can see how the link to human rights has managed to provide specifics to what it is that an actor is responsible for and who such an actor is in the first place. In other words, once it has become clear that people have rights to clean water or air, those whose activities impact on it have a moral as well as a legal obligation to ensure its provision. Once security became an issue of human rights, sovereignty became linked to ensuring people’s well-being and the responsibility of a global community. There is considerable variation in the way the human rights discourse enabled the responsibility discourse, though: while the link between responsibility and human rights has paved the way for MNCs to participate in global politics, the ‘international community’ remains a rather vague entity. Its boundaries and remits are subject to debate in morality and law.
Based on these findings, in the final chapter of the book we reinforce the argument that IR scholarship should embrace responsibility as a concept that bridges questions of politics, law, and ethics. Matters of right and wrong cannot be solved by a focus on existing regulations and treaty provisions alone. We contend that it is necessary to engage in ‘virtue ethics’ instead.
1.6 Book Overview
The book is structured in three sections which provide an in-depth discussion of the rise of responsibility in three policy fields: security, environment, and business. Each of these sections contains three chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of the rise of the respective policy norm and highlights critical junctures as well as relevant policy communities crucial for promoting the norms. The second chapter then zooms in on these policy communities to provide an account of how responsibility is negotiated and what responsibility practices are at play. The final chapter of each section provides bridges from International Relations towards political theory and international law, emphasising the underlying values of responsibility and thus the struggles over interpretation of the respective policy norms.
The first set of chapters concerns the field of security and here in particular the responsibility to protect vulnerable people from being harmed by the forces of sovereign states. Benjamin de Carvalho’s chapter (Chapter 2) traces this policy norm as a product of the late 1990s and the lack of international response in the humanitarian crises of that time. He carefully describes the situation with regard to R2P prior to the UN reform movement of the late 1980s and the attempts at redefining the rights of states vis-à-vis individuals during the 1990s. One of which, ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, became successful in redefining the rights and duties associated with state sovereignty before the emergence of the concept of R2P. This norm was eventually adopted by the UN World Summit in 2005. The chapter shows how R2P emerged as a compromise, yet, in spite of its fast rise in world politics, it is far from being a widely shared policy norm in practice.
Adam Bower (Chapter 3) engages with issues of responsibility in the area of regulation and (more rarely) elimination of conventional weapons. The question of responsibility comes to the fore as one of a human war or, to put it differently, legitimate warfare. For this reason, international disarmament can be seen as a potent site of contestation over the meaning and limits of responsibility in world politics. What does it mean to behave responsibly in using armed force, and for what actions can one be held responsible; who gets to set these standards, and thus counts as a responsible member of international society; and to whom are obligations owed? Bower investigates these questions by looking at the pressures of banning antipersonnel mines. He argues that the international society pursues two competing notions to the question of legitimate weapons. Both share the moral reasoning for preventing unnecessary sufferings of people yet diverge when it comes to the causal reasoning concerning the origins of humanitarian crises and, consequently, how far the freedom of state conduct should be constrained by humanitarian concerns.
Toni Erskine engages in issues of R2P and asks the crucial question where moral responsibility can and should be located at the international level (Chapter 4). At the core of R2P lies the question between state sovereignty and the protection of people that the international community must answer before deciding about intervention. The official arena for such decisions is the United Nations (UN). Yet, what happens in situations when there is no UN mandate while at the same time we know of a humanitarian crisis? Drawing on (political and social) philosophy, Erskine sounds out the possibilities and limits of moral agency of informal groups, so-called coalitions of the willing. She derives conditions under which groups can be bearers of moral agency and thus would have the obligation to form a body that is able to take a decision to intervene. She argues that in such cases of shared responsibility, responsibility is not reduced but rather to the contrary the expectations of each member of the group are enhanced given that together as a group they are able to achieve more than through single action.
The next set of chapters investigates the notion of responsibility in the environmental sector. Robert Falkner’s chapter provides the historical background, showing how responsibility entered the environmental policy field and how its meaning changed over time (Chapter 5). The chapter describes the ideational context in which environmental ideas and norms emerged and the three main notions of environmentalism that provided ideational possibilities for the formulation of state environmental responsibility. All three follow different connotations of responsibility from ethics, to obligation, and pure interest. Falkner traces the origins of organised environmentalism in the nineteenth century to the post–Second World War era and modern environmentalism, over to the gradual globalisation of the global environmental responsibility norm from Stockholm to the 1992 Rio ‘Earth Summit’. By doing so, he does not only show how the norm gets diffused throughout international society since Stockholm but also how its meaning evolves and changes, taking on board the concerns of, in particular, developing countries, where the challenge is to balance environmental protection with economic development.
The principle of differentiation, more firmly established at the Rio Summit, is the subject of the next chapter, and looks at the common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) of countries from an international law perspective. In this chapter, Virginie Barral explores the meanings and practices of the notion of responsibility in international law, using the example of the principle of CBDR (Chapter 6). The main argument put forward is that the competing conceptual groundings attributed to the principle of differentiation as well as the variety of its practical legal translations provide the ground for a broadening of the understanding of the notion of responsibility in international law. The chapter does not only review these competing meanings, it further assesses the relationship of the principle to international law and details some of the ways in which it is used to influence legal content by investigating the practical legal translations of the principle.
The third chapter on the environment takes the clue directly from Barral by acknowledging that the principle of differentiation in the international legal response to climate change is an important normative principle and provides both a legal and moral discourse for addressing the issue. Helga Haflidadottir and Anthony Lang however argue that because it is part of an international legal treaty, the problem becomes one for states to address (Chapter 7). While they acknowledge that states must play a key role in addressing climate change, they develop the notion of political responsibility, drawing on political philosophy, to allow for a broader understanding of responsibility that would also open up the potential actorship to individuals for instance and thus make more room for alternative modes of political action. In fact, instead of locating responsibility either on the individual level or at state level, the concept of political responsibility provides an alternative because it anchors responsible behaviour in a community. Following Arendt’s considerations, they contend that political responsibility derives from one’s membership in a community rather than solely from causal responsibility for the commission of harm. At the global level, it can mean constructing public space where different actors within the international community engage in active political participation. It thus links the individual with the level of the state.
At the beginning of the third section, Hevina S Dashwood’s historical account of the emergence and development of CSR tells the story of this policy norm as one of shifting responsibilities between the public and the private sector (Chapter 8). The rise of corporate responsibility as a global norm can be traced to the 1970s and the advent of globalisation, a time of deregulation and the decreasing responsibility of the state for specific social policies in one part of the world. Many global companies were participating in a rapidly increasing array of ‘voluntary’ governance arrangements also in other parts of the world, often to fill in for a non-existing public sector. The author argues that CSR achieved global normative status in the late 1990s, with regional and sectoral variation in degree but also with regard to who is assigned responsibility and for what. This global status however, does not mean that companies have universally adopted the policy norm. Instead, there is a back-and-forth pushing in terms of the assignment of responsibility between the public and the private sector over time, with a trend towards more re-regulation currently. Dashwood is tracing this evolution of the meaning of CSR and thus providing a clear picture of the community of actors who negotiate the norm over time and by doing so taking, ascribing, and claiming responsibility.
Dashwood’s chapter sets the scene for the following two chapters on responsibility in the corporate world as they zoom in on different aspects of the consolidation of CSR as a policy norm. Alvise Favotto and Kelly Kollman set out to answer the question how corporations define their social responsibilities in the early twenty-first century and to what extent these definitions have changed in light of global campaigns to improve multinational corporations’ (MNCs) human rights and environmental practices (Chapter 9). They first of all show the increased structuration of the CSR field by tracing the interaction of actors and the increasing regulation in this area. This is the starting point for the actual analysis of CEOs in Germany and the United States, and their reaction to those changes in the so-called sustainability communities which they are part of. Drawing on a data set they can show how managers take on CSR as it is discussed in their respective communities. This signifies not necessarily an increase in CSR activities but an increased awareness, maybe even socialisation processes and the possibility for internalisation, of the normative environment in which companies are embedded amongst a specific group of people, that is managers, who are crucial decision-makers in this respect.
Finally, Grahame Thompson’s chapter addresses a more conceptual question with regard to responsibility of MNCs in the global economy (Chapter 10). He argues that companies have become political actors and outlines the problems this development has brought about. That is, while taking over crucial tasks in the public sphere, companies are not organised democratically internally nor are they subject to systematic responsibility claims externally. He develops the notion of the ‘constitutionalization’ of corporate matters, a political process of the formation of corporate responsibility, rather than moral claims for it, that takes place via political struggles at the intersection of internal corporate governance and external corporate environment.
The volume closes with a brief outlook for further research on the role of ethics in world politics (Chapter 11). The chapter provides an argument to include responsibility in the tool-box of IR scholarship with a particular focus on highlighting the role of ethics in world politics. Questions about causal or remedial responsibility prevail in governance fields other than the ones we covered in this volume, and they continue to matter in the fields of security, environment, and business. Policies result from political choices which cannot be reduced to questions of law and legality because they are deeply ethical. We therefore propose a further engagement with the emergent ‘virtue ethics’ literature and show how the insights of that scholarship offer fertile ground for analyses of world politics.
