Trust or Perish? The Responsibility to Protect and Use of Force in a Changing World Order

As part of the roundtable, “The Responsibility to Protect in a Changing World Order: Twenty Years since Its Inception,” this essay asks the reader to consider the role that trust, distrust, and ambivalence play in enabling and constraining the use of force under pillar three of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). Drawing on interdisciplinary studies on trust, it analyzes the 2011 military intervention in Libya for evidence on how trust, distrust, and ambivalence help explain the positions taken by member states on the United Nations Security Council. In so doing, it challenges the mainstream view that the fallout over Libya represents a shift from trust to distrust. We find this binary portrayal problematic for three reasons. First, it fails to take into account the space in between trust and distrust, which we categorize as ambivalence and use to make sense of the position of Russia and China. Second, it is important to recognize the role of bounded trust, as those that voted in favor of going into Libya did so on certain grounds. Third, it overemphasizes the political fallout, as six of the ten elected member states continued to support the intervention. Learning lessons from this case, we conclude that it is highly unlikely that the Security Council will authorize the use of force to fulfill the RtoP anytime soon, which may have detrimental implications for the RtoP as a whole.