International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect

Anne Orford is the Michael D. Kirby Professor of International Law, an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne. She researches in the areas of international law and legal theory, with a current focus on histories of international law, political theology and empire.

• 1. Protection in the shadow of empire; 2. Practices of protection: from the parliament of man to international executive rule; 3. How to recognise lawful authority: Hobbes, Schmitt and the responsibility to protect; 4. Who decides? Who interprets?: jurisdiction, recognition and the institutionalisation of protection; 5. The question of status and the subject of protection.

'The turn to the language of 'protection' reveals an authoritarian undercurrent in present debates about international intervention. Drawing on doctrines of international executive power (Hammarskjöld) and the history of Western political theory (Hobbes), Anne Orford is able to throw a sharp light on the ideological significance of the debates on international administration and the responsibility to protect. Inspired by humanitarian and legalistic purposes, she argues, the exercise of international executive rule tends to impose demands of unconditional obedience over distant populations. The result is a welcome corrective to the view that international administration is above all a 'technical' problem. Never have the political implications of the theory and practice of international governance been explored with more sophistication than here. 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