Humanitarian symbolic exchange: extending Responsibility to Protect through individual and local engagement

Moral common sense frames the relationship between privileged and at-risk populations underpinning contemporary Responsibility to Protect (R2P) discourse. This article develops an alternative by considering the relationship between archetypes of would-be rescuers and victims through Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of symbolic exchange. Baudrillardian analysis connects personal morality and affective intersubjective symbolic exchange with the politics of international order. This leads, first, to an argument that current foundations for advocating R2P risk participating in a problematic moral economy of symbolic exchange between would-be rescuers and victims. Nonetheless, and secondly, the article deploys symbolic exchange to develop suggestions for partially re-figuring R2P’s humanitarian impulse by engaging ‘locally’ – both through one’s self (in the ethical relation suggested by Emmanuel Levinas) and with diverse forms of political order (following Jacques Rancière’s conception of politics). Doing so supports moves to engage a wide array of individual actors in a more interactive and less hierarchical form of R2P, to drive deeper consideration of local complexities of R2P through engagement with diverse local forms of political order, and to develop a more inclusive understanding of ‘humanity’ in order to bolster R2P’s normative foundations.