International authority, the responsibility to protect and the culture of the international executive

Abstract

In her book, 'International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect,' Anne Orford compellingly demonstrates how the doctrine of responsibility to protect can be seen as providing a normative foundation for international authority already exercised through 'pre-existing practices of protection' on the part of the international executive. She does so through a close historical analysis of practice on the part of the UN, and particularly the work of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. In doing so, she positions Hammarskjold as the 'founding father' of international executive action, and treats the expansion of international authority justified by reference to protection largely as a result of the implementation of Hammarskjold’s vision for the development of international executive rule. Focusing on Hammarskjold in this way provides the basis for an illuminating and coherent narrative of the development of the responsibility to protect concept. However, it also obscures questions of the social and institutional context within which Hammarskjold’s ideas took effect. Quite evidently, it was not Hammarskjold alone, but a whole bureaucratic machinery which performed the ‘protracted process’ of consolidating international executive power by reference to the concept of protection. But this social history of the responsibility to protect is largely missing from Orford’s narrative. As a result, Orford’s account of the ‘pre-existing…practices of protection,’ which responsibility to protect emerged to justify, is only partial, and leaves critical questions – such as the nature of those exercising international authority – unanswered. In this piece I therefore argue that Orford’s consideration of the political philosophy and intellectual history of the responsibility to protect needs to be supplemented by greater attention to its sociology, through an analysis of how practices of international executive action to 'protect life' developed through the institutional life – or 'culture' – of international bodies. Such an analysis not only offers a more complete picture of the consolidation of international executive authority based on protection, but also provides a basis for understanding how the responsibility to protect concept might affect the future practices of international institutions exercising executive power.