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Review of: I Hear Your Voice, Young-Ha Kim (2017) (trans. Krys Lee)
New York: Mariner Books, 272 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-544-32447-3, p/bk, $13.99

Review of: The White Book, Han Kang (2017) (trans. Deborah Smith)
Cornwall: Portobello Books, 128 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-525-573, p/bk, $11.56

Abstract
Like other types of humanitarian intervention before it, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has suffered in practice from a pervasive lack of political will. This represents a failure of moral motivation, but also a failure to accept the often steep political, material and human costs associated with intervening to try and halt mass atrocity crimes. In order to ease this second barrier to intervention, we need a reform agenda that will limit the prevalence, intensity and duration of mass atrocities as well as the crisis situations that make them possible, thereby reducing the various costs associated with any specific intervention. This can be achieved through certain aspects of the work of cosmopolitan philosopher Thomas Pogge.

The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was created in the hope of overcoming the barrier that state sovereignty, as a principle, had become to actions of humanitarian intervention. It was imagined that as mass atrocity crimes were coming to the attention of the international community, that, on the whole, they were willing, able and eager to intervene in order to stop the violence in question. Holding them back was sovereignty as both a legal and normative barrier. This was always a bad explanation for the pervasive lack of humanitarian intervention; accordingly R2P, as a bad solution, has failed almost entirely. The problem is, and always has been, that when faced with mass atrocity crimes, the international community is plagued by a near-permanent lack of political will to action.