International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect

The idea that states and the international community have a responsibility to protect populations has shaped debates about conflict prevention, humanitarian action, peacekeeping and territorial administration since 2001. This book offers a history, from Hobbes to the UN, of attempts to ground authority on the capacity to guarantee protection.

The idea that states and the interantional community have a responsibility to protect populations at risk has framed internationalist debates about confict prevention, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and territorial administration since 2001. This book situates the `responsibility to protect'' concept in a broad historical and jurisprudential context, demonstrating that the appeal to protection as the basis for de facto authority has emerged at time of civil war or revolution - the Protestant revolutions of early modern Europe, the bourgeois and communist revolutions of the following centuries, and the revolution that is decolonisation. This analysis, from Hobbes to the UN, of the resulting attempts to ground authority on the capacity to guarantee security and protection, is essential reading for all those seeking to understand, engage with, limit or critique the expansive practices of interantional executive action authorised by the responsibility to protect concept.

`Never have the political implications of the theory and practice of international governance been explored with more sophistication. Written with elegance and verve, this is the most powerful analysis of the dilemmas of the management of globalization by international institutions in the twenty-first century that I have read.'' Martti Koskenniemi, Professor of International Law, University of Helsinki

`Articulating innovative theorietical reflection and well-documented case studies, Anne Orford offers a remarkable critical inquiry into the contemporary international order.''Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

`This book stands out a mongust a growing field of commentaries on R2P for its hard-hitting and valuable insights into the importance of R2P as a framework for rationalising and legitimising external intervention in the post-colonial world. [It] will shape the future discussion of R2P and will be required reading for those working in this area.'' David Chandler, Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster

`In this superb, elegantly written book, Anne Orford presents a genealogy of the relationship between "protection" and "sovereignty" that is clearly crucial to an understanding of contemporary debates about the Responsibility to Protect ...[and] poses fundamental questions about sovereignty, international institutions, and the contemporary international system.'' Anthony Anghie, Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, University of Utah