Limited number of lunches available for registered guests until 12:30pm on day of event.

About the event: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has been invoked over one hundred times since its formal endorsement by the UN General Assembly in 2005. Although R2P was designed to protect populations around the world from mass atrocity, it is selectively applied to societies outside of the North. Cases of inaction are also observed over atrocities in the South that would otherwise qualify for intervention by UN standards. Why does the international community intervene in some cases and not others? I argue that R2P betrays a racialized bias whereby the legal principle of sovereignty is transformed into a conditional privilege withheld from most non-European countries all else equal. Debates over a peoples’ capacity for self-rule are historically framed or even justified by racism. Since R2P restores a similar debate wherein state sovereignty becomes contingent, it can affirm prevailing beliefs about race and capacity for self-governance as a means to political ends. I examine R2P cross-nationally by matching countries on characteristics that likely drive intervention. Using UN resolutions and original data on mass atrocity events, I measure the relationship between country racial majority and the decision to intervene. The results suggest that R2P is disproportionately invoked over societies racialized as non-white. To address variation in R2P invocation over countries in the South, I examine a set of cases qualitatively and show that inaction by the international community is racial as it is strategic. A theory of race deepens understanding of the contradictory values that cohere to shape international law and intervention. 

About the speaker: Bianca Freeman is a 2024-2026 UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD from UC San Diego Political Science in the summer of 2024. Bianca’s research focuses on the politics of race and racism in international law. In her dissertation and book project, she examines norms and agreements between states as legal outcomes of racial hierarchy in world politics. Bianca has published or has work forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science, Security Studies, International Studies Review, International Politics, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. 

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