On international legal method

Abstract

International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect seeks to show that the emergence of the responsibility to protect concept and its embrace by a very diverse range of actors is one sign of a significant shift in the representation of authority in the modern world. More specifically, the book argues that the responsibility to protect concept offers a framework for rationalising and con- solidating practices of international executive rule, many of which were de- veloped by Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), in the early years of decolonisation. Since the late 1950s, the UN and other international actors have developed and systematised a body of practices aimed at 'the maintenance of order' and 'the protection of life' in the decolonised world, 1 including fact-finding, peacekeeping, the management of refugee camps, civilian administration, strategic forms of technical assistance and early warning mechanisms. My aim was to explore the ways in which those practices of governing and that form of authority had been represented. The book is also a wager that there is something to be gained—theoretic- ally, politically and empirically—by developing a primarily juridical (rather than historical, philosophical, economic or sociological) method as a basis for exploring such contemporary international developments. Juridical think- ing frames the problems that the book raises, shapes the archival choices made throughout its research and the construction of its narrative, structures its argument and provides its conceptual underpinnings. Of course, this begs the question of just what 'juridical thinking' is, where we might look for it, and to which historical figures and authors we might properly make reference in order to develop a legal analysis that is also critical, idiomatically recognisable and politically useful. I return to these questions below.