Fourth Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Doctor Who and Humanitarian Interventions – How a Time Lord foreshadows the Responsibility to Protect

[Dr Shannon Zimmerman is a lecturer with Deakin University. Her research investigates peace and stability operations, specifically how peacekeepers protect civilians in conflict environments characterised by asymmetric threats.]

Introduction

If pop culture is the audio-visual result of politics, then Doctor Who, the long-running science fiction series, provides prescient political commentary on evolution of the moral and legal arguments around humanitarian intervention. Premiering in 1963, Doctor Who follows The Doctor, a seemingly immortal Time Lord who travels through time and space. Inevitably, the kind-hearted Doctor becomes entangled in major historical and international events as they attempt to protect the human race. These well-intentioned interventions violate the Time Lords First Law of Time, which prohibits interference in events and acts as a thinly veiled allegory for the principle of non-intervention. How the Doctor justifies their interference, and the response they receive from those around them, serve as an apt illustration of the ever-changing attitudes towards the legality and justifiability of humanitarian interventions.

Very early on in the series, it is established that the Doctor feels a moral obligation to fight injustice where they see it, regardless of where in the universe it occurs. This leads to a series of high stakes interventions where the Doctor partners with the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT). This mirrors the work of the then nascent United Nations and its Maverick second Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld was deeply invested in the United Nations’ mandate to protect the world from another global war and he leveraged the institution and its fledgling peacekeeping abilities to manage conflict in the Suez (1956) with the First United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF I) and the United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC) (1960). While the Doctor’s interventions established them as the protector of Earth, these successful missions cemented the UN’s role as a legitimate guarantor for international peace and security. Unfortunately, Hammarskjöld was killed when his plane mysteriously went down while on mission in the Congo in 1961. In an eerie parallel, the second iteration of the Doctor is forced to regenerate (the Time Lord version of death) as punishment for his interference in earth’s affairs.

As the freeze of the Cold War deepened, the UN then entered a phase of limited engagement where human rights became subsumed under the seemingly inviolable rule of sovereignty. The organisation successfully shepherded many countries to independence but often only delivered them into the grip of strong men who maintained power through blatant disregard for human rights. Regimes like those led by Idi Amin in Uganda and Pol Pot in Cambodia, resulted in the deaths of millions of people. Rather than supporting responses to these atrocities, the Cold War humanitarian interventions by India in Bangladesh (1971) and Vietnam in Cambodia (1978) were roundly condemned as illegal.

Echoing this condemnation, the Doctor is once again put on trial for his intergalactic meddling, this time by the High Court of the Time Lords (1986). The viewer is presented with a litany of negative consequences that have resulted from the Doctor’s unsanctioned interventions. However, this time, the Doctor puts forward a strident defence of their actions, illustrating the changing norms around foreign intervention at the end of the Cold War. The Doctor condemns the Time Lords for their bureaucratic passivity in the face of atrocity crimes and proudly declares, “While you have been content merely to observe the evil in the galaxy, I have been fighting against it”.  The High Court eventually accepts the Doctor’s argument that action must be taken ‘in the face of evil’, but still punishes them for breaking a seemingly inviolable law.

While the Doctor had embraced the need for intervention, the UN – like the Time Lords – was slow to follow. It took three major protection failures to trigger change. The UN had deployed peace operations to several of the conflicts that had broken out post-Cold War. While well intentioned, these missions were hamstrung by limited mandates and the wilful inaction of host states and the UN Security Council. In short order 8000 Muslim men and boys were taken from UN ‘safe havens’ in Srebrenica and executed, and over 800,000 people in Rwanda were killed in just three months while a hopelessly outmatched UN peacekeeping force looked on. Subsequent inquiries into the events in Srebrenica and Rwanda concluded that a lack of political will within the UN Security Council undermined efforts by the broader UN, allowing these atrocities to occur. If one considers the UN Security Council as a proxy for the High Court of the Time Lords, then it is a clear case of life imitating art.

However, the arguments the Doctor presented during their trial foreshadowed the evolving legal and ethical frameworks that would emerge in the wake of the protection failures of the 1990s. The UN’s call of ‘Never again’ was echoed by the 12^th Doctor’s declaration – in the face of a potential intergalactic genocide –of ‘Not on my watch’. By the end of the millennium, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s intervention in Kosovo to halt ethnic cleansing was seen as “illegal but justified”. At the same time, the UN – championed by then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan – was moving to re-define the very meaning of sovereignty. Annan was the Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping during the tragedies in Bosnia and Rwanda and was deeply influenced by them. Ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, Annan lamented that the UNs failure “[m]ust leave us always with a sense of bitter regret and abiding sorrow…None of us must ever forget, or be allowed to forget, that genocide did take place in Rwanda…”.  The Doctor was similarly influenced by their inability to avoid the genocide of two races. As the 11^th Doctor’s Companion stresses, “he regrets it, I see in his eyes every day. He’d do anything to change it”.

It was Kofi Annan who issued a call to action that resulted in  the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in 2001 and the subsequent 2005 World Summit Outcome Document. These two documents placed the responsibility for protecting human rights directly within the purview of the State and made its sovereignty contingent on its ability to do so. For the first time, they also articulated the responsibilities of the international community for assisting states in preventing atrocity crimes. This included using threats of International Criminal Court prosecution to encourage recalcitrant states to curb violence. Most controversial was the third pillar of R2P, which requires the international community to act to provide protection to civilians when the state fails to do so. Embracing the sentiment of R2P, in a 2008 episode of Doctor Who, “the Doctor’s Daughter”, the Doctor declares ‘…look up genocide, You’ll see a little picture of me there, and the caption will read, “over my dead body!”’. A year later, in 2009, the first report of the UN Secretary-General on the Responsibility to protect was issued, laying out how to operationalise the principle. R2P seemed well on its way to becoming an established (if not legally binding) norm.

In 2011, the third pillar of R2P was invoked for the first time. Libya’s long-term dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi had responded to the Arab Spring Uprisings with extreme violence. Fearing crimes against humanity, the UN called for Libya to respect its R2P, human rights and international humanitarian law obligations and passed resolution 1970, referring Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court. When violence continued, France and Britain were able to secure US backing for a military intervention and on 17 March 2011, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973, which authorised “all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas”. As Ramesh Thakur noted, it took NATO almost a decade to decide to intervene to protect civilians in Kosovo in 1999, but just a month for a coalition to form and intervene in Libya. Unfortunately, the intervention in Libya did not go as planned. While the UN mandate limited scope of the intervention, NATO took the unilateral decision to declare that civilians would not be safe until Qaddafi stepped down. Ultimately, Qaddafi was overthrown and summarily executed and Libya descended into civil war.

The Libya intervention damaged the international community’s support for R2P, but this has not meant the death of the norm of humanitarian intervention. Much like the Doctor’s declarations that they no longer interfere while inevitably becoming involved, the UN has continued to engage the ideas of R2P, mentioning it 80 times since the Libyan intervention. R2Ps corollary, the protection of civilians, has become a normative juggernaut, shaping the actions and expectations of the international community. Normatively, a state’s responsibility to protect its civilians is now generally accepted and R2P and protection of civilians advocates are present throughout most international institutions. Just like the Doctor’s many regenerations, support for humanitarian interventions has ebbed and flowed, but always returns in times of crisis.