Conducting international authority: Hammarskjold, the Great Powers and the Suez Crisis

Abstract

Anne Orford’s International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect traces the lineage of international executive authority from its constitutive articulations, as practice, by reading Dag Hammarskjöld’s archives of office. Through her self-conscious historical accounting, Orford asks us to reconsider the received narrative of the emergence of the responsibility to protect (R2P) concept. The use of case studies—the Suez and Congo crises—is not to facilitate a comparison with contemporary practices of protection, but rather to provide a foundation from which the reader can trace the construction of the R2P concept. In these remarks, I discuss how additional archival sources can add to Orford’s account of the practices of international executive authority. These additional sources help to situate Hammarskjöld’s practices in relation to Great Power. I also seek to expand the basis of the case study account Orford provides—taking the Suez Crisis as the subject of my comments—by examining the practices of...