Strategies & Decisiveness: What Is Implied by a “Timely and Decisive Response” for RtoP Situations

Reflecting upon United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon\u27s recent report concerning the third pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP), on the timely and decisive response, two items become clear to me. First is that the third pillar is inherently coercive in nature, even though the report and many RtoP pundits stress that it entails more than merely sanctioning the use of force. Second is that this is unsurprising if we recall that the purpose of RtoP is to ensure the protection of particular human rights (rights against: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing) and that having a right against others necessarily entails, in Kant\u27s words, an authorization to use coercion. I draw these two conclusions from the report\u27s emphasis on developing a strategy and the continued employment of the terms timely and decisive response. Both the terms strategy and decisive are militaristic in character, and so imply a coercive means to the realization of political ends