Dissertation chapter 3

Chapter 3: Agency in the Time of (Neo)liberal Intervention?

Introduction

The story of sovereignty-as-responsibility and R2P told by many liberals (e.g. Weiss 2007, Bellamy 2011) as well as postcolonial political theorists (e.g. Getachew 2018, Whyte 2017) begins in the early 1990s. Thus far, I have narrated a longer theoretical history of these doctrines by closely examining the legal anthropology of Francis Deng. In this chapter, I connect those earlier ideas of Deng's to the diplomatic work he undertook in the 1990s. Doing so bolsters the theoretical critiques I draw out in the final chapter: understanding the history and politics of these doctrines pushes against the claims made under the parallel banners of “critique of the ethical turn” and “critique of humanitarianism” – as I reconstruct them, these are intensely political debates, not the anti-political elevation of ethics over all else. I argue that the sense of “responsible sovereignty” promoted by Deng was not a neoliberal attempt to deny responsibility for past harms, but rather a recognition of what was required to govern in light of past harms. He uses the internally displaced person (IDP) as a liminal figure to demonstrate the shortcomings of contemporary humanitarian and human rights approaches, and as a starting point from which to introduce the idea of sovereignty as entailing positive responsibilities. In proposing sovereignty-as-responsibility, Deng rethinks the problem of state building, and the boundaries of “the international,” after the nation state. Focusing on sovereignty allows him to rethink both that which is “below” (the state) and “above” (the state system).

Francis Deng produced very few academic publications in the 1990s. However, he was sole, lead, or co-author of several important UN reports as well as NGO reports. Many of these were exercises in consensus building, compromise, or guides for implementation. In some of the co-authored reports, Deng's personal contribution is clearly identified (e.g. The Challenge of Famine Relief, 1992), whereas in others no direct indication is given (e.g. Sovereignty-as-Responsibility, 1996). However, when we put these reports into conversation with Deng's earlier academic work, as well as later interviews and writings, a clearer picture of Deng's own contributions and positions emerges which is at odds with postcolonial critics who argue he simply proposed a template for neoliberal interventionism. In this way, Deng emerges as engaged in a project of dramatically shifting accepted notions of sovereignty – in a way that promotes mutual responsibility and interaction against a colonial fantasy of hermetically sealed units.

Importantly, tracing Deng's work and the emergence of sovereignty-as-responsibility also draws a distinction between this project and other forms of interventionism, humanitarianism, and human rights-based politics that emerged in the 1990s. It is true that at the end of the Cold War, some powerful Western actors saw the world as theirs to remake in a liberal image. Left theorists –postcolonial and critical theorists – and IR realists argued that Neoliberal/neoimperial impulse guided (implicitly or explicitly) all institutional attempts to grapple with the waves of violence in this period. But to make this claim is to foreclose the very possibility of Southern agency in these responses to violence and immiseration.

Further, bringing Deng's broad body of work to the fore provides a grounding for a global political theoretical critique of several important problems in mainstream political theory. Deng is not simply reviving old doctrines (neither minority treaties nor pre-Westphalian sovereignty) and “applying” them in a period of liberal hegemony. Rather, Deng's approach derives from his observations and analyses in Africa. Thus, he begins neither from Europe as the universalizable model nor from an abstract ideal theory that may reinscribe colonial reason.

I begin this chapter with a defense of sovereignty-as-responsibility as a theoretical innovation. Here I take up recent work by Luke Glanville (2014) and James Turner Johnson (2015), both of whom excavate histories of the responsibilities sovereignty carries to the domestic and the global. Glanville's book is an influential account of sovereignty in the English school of IR theory, and is treated across IR approaches as a theoretical grounding for R2P. Johnson's argument is an important historical, theoretical, and theological corrective to recent work on the role of justice and responsibility in the history of sovereignty (e.g. Philpott 2001, Elshtain 2012). Both Glanville and Johnson's accounts are instructive because in looking for a more expansive historical account of sovereignty, they look to the history of sovereignty in Europe. Thus, when they arrive at R2P in their historical narrations, the UN doctrine can be understood as simply heir to a different tradition of sovereignty in Europe. In such accounts, the Global South may be a site of implementation of doctrines of sovereignty, but not a site of innovation – the South as devoid of agency in the history of political concepts. To understand evolutions in sovereignty and their relationship to R2P embodied in events like the 2005 UN World Summit, one must allow for the possibility of innovation outside of Europe. Otherwise, one will conclude (as Johnson does with reference to the UN World Summit) that Global South actors only play a role as spoilers in the promotion and institutionalization of norms. In an ironic way, Johnson's argument is thus the flipside of postcolonialism's structural determinism – neither postcolonial scholars nor Johnson recognize Global South innovation in such a moment, only resistance.

In the second section of the chapter, I reconstruct the political and institutional context of displacement into which Deng's innovation fits. Drawing primarily on the historical work of Emma Haddad (2008) and Mark Mazower (2009), I examine how four different categories – the minority, the displaced, the refugee, and the internally displaced person – emerge in different historical-political contexts and become “problems” to be addressed by the international community. It is important to understand that there is nothing “obvious” about the ways in which we conceive of persons displaced by war, famine, or persecution – or even that those are distinct phenomena. These are conceptual shifts that emerge in and address particular contexts, not simply the bureaucratic headings needed to “rescue” or protect people who are obviously in need. Each new category created possibilities of international responsibility and assistance – while foreclosing others. Thus, when we come to the emergence of the IDP qua problem, we can recognize that the emergence of the “problem” is a conceptual innovation to address a political problem, rather than a new phenomenon that obviously requires new terminologies and regimes.

In the third section, I connect Deng's work on IDPs for the UN in the 1980s and 1990s to his anthropological work I explored in the previous chapter, to argue that Deng's analysis is informed by his understanding of the colonial legacy, rather than simply claiming that internal displacement is a problem “native to” the decolonized world or the Global South. By presenting the legacy of the colonial state as the starting point for understanding Global South conflict in the aftermath of the Cold War, he enacts an ontological challenge – Deng makes the colonial legacy integral to the UN's own understanding of what postcolonial violence is. Importantly, however, the colonial legacy is a starting point, not an end point. Thus, to think about the IDP requires thinking about the colonial state's governance strategies and seeing how the ideologies that legacy promoted – most centrally, sovereignty as non-interference – manifest in the postcolonial state. Key to my claim is that Deng constructed the IDP “problem” to be resistant to reformist solution; had he simply sought to be an effective bureaucrat addressing a humanitarian or human rights crisis, Deng would have worked with aid groups and UN committees to craft an implementation strategy under existing conventions and treaties. Rather, he uses the IDP qua problem to demonstrate the limits of those approaches.

In the final section, I demonstrate how Deng's work on the question of sovereignty in the mid-90s emerges from his approach to IDPs, and how he conceives of it as a solution. In this way, the question Deng constructs to which sovereignty-as-responsibility is the answer is very different than the question Western liberals sought to answer with humanitarian rationales for abrogating sovereignty in the postcolonial world. This takes him in a very different direction than either major Western powers who wanted to legitimate humanitarian intervention, and anticolonialist Global South actors who sought to reify sovereign equality to stymie neoimperial aggression. Importantly, Deng's work makes him a strong case for thinking about the simultaneity of structures (re)making agents while agents (re)make structures. Against the structural determinism of postcolonial theory elaborated in chapter 1, Deng emerges as a model for thinking about Global South agency.

I tie Deng's work to the work of other contemporary African diplomats to argue that Deng was not sui generis, but part of a particular African current in re-envisioning sovereignty and the postcolonial state. It is this approach to sovereignty and the bounds of the postcolonial state that is driven by African political actors, not the humanitarian vision promoted by major Western powers after the Cold War, that is embodied in Global South support for R2P. While R2P is officially UN doctrine, different actors have differing visions of what R2P is. Recovering Deng and other Africans' intellectual and diplomatic groundwork for R2P pushes against the singular vision of R2P as armed coercive intervention for humanitarian purposes, which is the account of both many Liberal supporters and postcolonial critics. In contrast, the African legacy of R2P grounds an alternative vision of Global South agency.

Does Sovereignty-as-Responsibility Represent Something New?

Central to my claim about agency is the argument that Francis Deng's work on sovereignty was a highly influential innovation which became an important building block for an attempt to restructure the sovereign state system by reassessing the status of conflict within states. Thus, the story is not simply one of parliamentary negotiation in an international institution in which, as a necessary part of coalition building, some states of the Global South had to be “bought off” or “assuaged.” A possible critique, however, is simply that the idea of sovereignty entailing positive responsibilities is nothing new. If sovereignty has always required various responsibilities to the people, then perhaps a discussion of Deng ought to be limited to the question of institutional implementation, rather than innovation.

Two theories that identify responsibility as constitutive of the norm and the institution of sovereignty are the Augustinian sovereign and the popular sovereign.¹ Recently, the just war theorist James Turner Johnson and the English school IR scholar Luke Glanville have drawn on these theories in their attempts at a deeper theoretical engagement with R2P. Johnson (2015) focuses on the pre-Modern sovereign, tracing the Augustinian sovereign who is responsible for his people until Westphalia redefines sovereignty as the defense of borders. Glanville (2014) takes a different approach, holding both that sovereignty as theorized and as practiced had always contained responsibility to a people as the authorizing component. Glanville argues (following Martin Wight) that innovations in legitimacy within states can only be understood by studying innovations in legitimacy between states. Thus, he aims to recast the emergence of popular sovereignty as also a moment in which sovereigns could be held accountable by each other – and that it was only the end of WWII and the drafting of the UN charter in which what we erroneously call the “traditional” notion of sovereignty was legitimated. It is worth delving into these two arguments both because they challenge the idea that a responsible sovereignty is novel or an innovation, and because their oversights reveal ways in which thinking about sovereignty purely from the perspective of European thinkers and political communities blinds us to innovation from non-European agents.

Johnson begins from the argument that the just war tradition is really a political and theological tradition of thinking about sovereignty and all it entails, rather than merely a way of thinking about war.² Responsibility of the sovereign for the common good, then, is both the primary feature of this pre-Modern sovereignty and something that is lost with the move to a Westphalian model of sovereignty. The older conception of sovereignty “differs importantly from the modern one: a conception of sovereignty not in terms of the state and its territorial inviolability but in terms of the moral responsibility of the ruler for the common good of the people governed” (Johnson 2015, 1-2). The rash of humanitarian interventions in the 1990s, and the rise of R2P doctrine in the 2000s, become an opportunity to think past (both directionally and temporally) the model of sovereignty as the sacralization of borders. “But thinking of the matter of humanitarian intervention in terms of just war tradition, I thought of sovereignty in a different way: as responsibility for the common good. The result was to encounter a dilemma similar to that encountered from the perspective of human rights: Humanitarian intervention, from the just war perspective, might be a moral obligation; yet at the same time, it would be a violation of international law. The two conceptions of sovereignty were thus in direct conflict with each other” (Johnson 2015, 2). In carefully detailing this pre-Modern history of sovereignty, Johnson lays out what could be the groundwork for an historically informed legitimation of Deng's efforts to think of sovereignty as constituted by positive responsibilities.

Yet when Johnson arrives at R2P and the conception of sovereignty upon which it rests, he commits the same error of which he accuses just war revivalists: taking war (in this case, armed coercive intervention), rather than sovereignty, as the defining feature. Thus, in first laying out the content of the ICISS report, Johnson skips much of the discussion of sovereignty to claim that “the meat of the report had to do with what should be done in cases in which states fail in this responsibility, and a major focus of the answer provided by the report was to lay out conditions for military intervention” (Johnson 2005, 143). In doing so he primes his reader to treat the change of the idea of R2P from the 2001 ICISS report to the 2005 World Summit document as a failure because humanitarian intervention is de-emphasized in the latter. He is not alone: Alex Bellamy (2006), Thomas G. Weiss (2007), and Simon Chesterman (2011) all treat the 2005 World Summit document as a weakening or watering down of R2P because humanitarian intervention is not emphasized or formally recognized.

In treating the 2005 World Summit document as a retreat from the ideals of R2P, merely the messy and disappointing result of negotiation and implementation, these scholars treat R2P as reducible to armed coercive intervention. It is my aim in this chapter to demonstrate that sovereignty-as-responsibility, the conception of sovereignty upon which R2P rests, is itself an important development directly informed by Francis Deng's analysis of the postcolonial African state. Focusing on armed coercive intervention misses the significant shift in the discourse of sovereignty spearheaded by Deng.

Further, Johnson does note that in the Augustinian tradition the sovereign is responsible for the people, but not actually accountable to the people: “the thinkers who defined this conception of sovereignty as responsibility did not seek to provide any particular mechanism by which those people could influence the understanding or exercise of that responsibility” (Johnson 2015, 107). A significant difference between the possibility of intervention through R2P and Augustinian protection of the neighbor is that in the latter, another sovereign holds the corrupt and tyrannical ruler responsible – essentially, sovereignty is revoked or superseded by an outsider – whereas Deng's argument about sovereign responsibility rests on the idea that sovereignty may dissolve from within. This means that in Deng's vision of sovereignty, the people are not simply wards to be cared for but agentic themselves, and thus sovereignty-as-responsibility and R2P cannot be reduced to a claim of right by others to supersede sovereignty. Because sovereignty-as-responsibility offers an alternative vision of state-making in which legitimacy is grounded in a responsibility that is simultaneously to and for the people, sovereignty in the Augustine tradition provides little guidance for evaluating this approach to state sovereignty.

By contrast, Glanville is both more optimistic about R2P and concerned with responsible sovereignty as a Modern idea. Thus, he begins by examining sovereignty in early Modern Europe, rather than Augustine and Roman law. He insists that “it is not a categorical or timeless definition of sovereignty that we [should] seek” (Glanville 2014, 10), because attempting to distill some essence would blind us to how sovereignty actually operates, and how it changes across historical eras. Helpfully, he insists that we read the history of sovereign responsibility without averting our gaze from Europe's declaration of “responsibility” over “backwards peoples”: “advocates ought to acknowledge, as historians increasingly do, that some of the central ideas that today underpin the 'responsibility to protect' concept – ideas of self-rule and accountability, individual rights and forcible intervention – were historically both framed by the experience of empire and also put to work to justify empire” (Glanville 2014, 222). However, while he treats the objection as valid, he does not find a way to do more than acknowledge it in the analysis he presents.

A problem for Glanville's project is that he wants to find consistent evidence of states refusing to treat sovereignty as an absolute distinction between domestic and international concerns, to the extent that numerous examples he cites, in particular during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, are exercises in reading history backwards to ground a modern idea. At times his examples cut against his thesis, and other times they simply embody an exceptional moment which does nothing to build an argument about norms of sovereignty.

Glanville credulously repeats imperial justifications, presenting them as evidence of a mixed record rather than as cynical or self-righteous justifications. Thus, the Berlin Conference – perhaps the height of colonial aggression against Africa – is cast as a story of European powers stripping Belgium of its African holdings because of the brutality of Leopold's rule over the Congo. He claims, “the Berlin Act led to actions by the imperial powers...that harmed native interests and welfare more than protected them. Nevertheless, the act established in international law...that the treatment of natives by those in authority over them was a legitimate matter of international concern...if we follow the [history of the Congolese Free State] to its conclusion, we find that it is also an example of a sovereign eventually being held to its newly internationalized responsibilities” (Glanville 2014, 123) (emphasis added). Similarly, he treats the regulation and eventual end of the slave trade as a case of sovereigns being forced to account to the society of states for their internal cruelties, and it serves as a transitional case for his attempt to connect colonial sovereignty to the tradition of popular sovereignty. Lacking from these discussions, it is worth emphasizing, are the voices of Africans who fought slavery and Africans who fought colonial domination.

It is important that Glanville recognizes the anti-imperial critique as valid – by contrast, English School IR theorist and special adviser to the UN on R2P Alex Bellamy (2017) dismisses the anti-imperial critique of sovereignty out of hand – but Glanville does little to think through what it might mean. Thus, while he consistently notes that advocates of sovereign responsibility must take such critiques seriously, he neither considers what taking such critiques seriously might look like, nor does he consider the possibility that (certain theories of) sovereign responsibility might also be a critique of colonial sovereignty. At root, the problem is that Glanville excavates a Eurocentric history of sovereignty and does not think about what it would mean to think theoretically about sovereignty from a non-European perspective – the critiques he gestures towards are simply critiques of the implementation of ideals of sovereignty.

If Glanville and Johnson are right that sovereignty-as-responsibility is not new and is just a rejection of one recent(ish) conception of sovereignty, then Deng is not necessarily innovating anything. More importantly, such a claim returns us to thinking about sovereignty in terms of the European state. But part of what is so dramatic about Deng's arguments about sovereignty is that he is looking at the postcolonial state in Africa not as a parochial interest or a matter for area studies, but as a way of rethinking the broader concept of sovereignty. This aspect is lost in Johnson and Glanville's studies.

Further, thinking with Acharya's model of “norm circulation”³ here is helpful – even if Glanville and Johnson were correct that responsible sovereignty is an old idea, this would not then mean that Deng simply promoted the ideas of others. In a process of norm circulation, there are multiple agents acting upon the norm in turn, rather than a single agent “diffusing” an idea. Sovereign responsibility may be both an old idea and simultaneously an important innovation from the Global South. Innovation is rarely absolute originality, and it is not the claim that either Deng makes or that I make about Deng’s work. It is in the debate about sovereignty in which Deng is engaged that we may gain another perspective on the agency of Global South actors in global politics.

(Re)Defining the Displaced, and What it Means to Help

There is nothing new about populations fleeing to avoid threats of war, persecution, and famine. However, this does not mean the problems faced by or posed by such populations, and solutions to those problems, are obvious or timeless. Rather, historical and global political contexts are key to “knowing” the displaced. Emma Haddad holds that studies of displacement, particularly “refugee studies,” have “a tendency to reify the concepts of sovereignty, the state and citizenship as natural pre-given features, and actors' identities and interests as fixed. However, the concept of sovereignty and the structure of an international system based on sovereign entities are not static, and 'sovereignty' and the 'state' are ambiguous and dynamic concepts” (Haddad 2008, 14). How the displaced are recognized, whether they are understood to be a “problem,” and how to address them as a problem are not arrived at independent of contemporary discourses of sovereignty and citizenship. In the changing context of the sovereign nation-state of the 20^th century, several figures – the minority, the displaced, the refugee, and the internally displaced person – emerged as “problems” within the sovereign states system.

After the First World War, the League of Nations established a protectorate system as well as a series of minority treaties to address both the problems of “peoples without states” and those who were displaced by war. But after the Second World War, the global institutional response to displacement, and the meaning of sovereignty, shifted dramatically towards “sovereign equality” (Haddad 2008, Mazower 2009, Cohen 2012) and did not consider a state's “minorities” as a legitimate question for international institutions. Francis Deng's anthropological work, based on both his lived experiences and field research beginning in the 1950s, with publications beginning the early 1970s, coincided with another dramatic shift in thinking about displacement – namely, displacement in the aftermath of decolonization. Then, as a UN diplomat, Deng's work on internal displacement spanned the emergence of Detente and the end of the Cold War. His work on internal displacement was important precisely because he challenged dominant conceptions of sovereignty, ultimately using the figure of the internally displaced person as a starting point from which to work for acceptance of sovereignty as entailing positive responsibilities.

The minority treaties promoted by the League of Nations recognized that the nation-state was not universalized in Europe and sought to deny a casus belli for states seeking to “protect” their co-nationals who lived across sovereign borders (Haddad 2008, for historical background on this kind of intervention see Finnemore 1999). However, the minority treaties only applied to the losing powers – the United Kingdom, The United States, and France were not bound by these treaties. Minority treaties were ostensibly guarantees of tolerance within borders; however, as Mamdani (2021) helpfully notes, they also defined a permanent “outgroup” in whose image the state could never legitimately be remade. Thus, we can think of the minority treaties as consonant with the “apolitical” approach to humanitarian protection derided by Getachew and Mamdani⁴ – protection coming at the cost of political empowerment. But the minority treaties neither reliably protected those subject to them, nor did they survive the normative realignment of the post-WWII era.

After World War II, displaced persons were conceived of as a problem stemming from war, thus the resolution of their problem was conceived of as related to the cessation of hostilities. In particular, they represented a “temporary problem, a concept brought about by specific transformations in international society which could be resolved as soon as international conditions were stabilised” (Haddad 2008, 31) [emphasis added]. This is in marked contrast to the interwar minority, who was seen to be a stubborn fact to be accommodated.

One proposed solution to stabilize the states system, despite its previous association with the recently defeated Nazi regime, was population transfer. Mark Mazower argues this approach – not simply of European Jews to Israel (a favored option of Joseph Schechtman, the author of several leading technical texts on population transfer), but also of ethnic Germans out of Eastern Europe, and numerous proposed “homelands” outside of Europe for other minority populations – became an intellectually sophisticated solution. “One indication” of the shift in opinion, “was the erosion of belief in any revival of minority rights even among those who had supported the idea before the war” (Mazower 2009, 121). On this account, uniting nations and states (in order to reduce ethnically-aligned conflict) would mean territoriality concentrating nations rather than expanding or creating new states.

Creating new states to house stateless nations, several representatives at the UN Charter meetings in San Francisco worried, might embolden France and the UK's colonies to demand their own states as well. “This is evidenced,” notes Haddad, “in the incorporation of the reference to 'self-determination of peoples' in the UN Charter, as distinct from the discredited League of Nations idea of 'national self-determination'...now the stability of states and borders was to be paramount” (Haddad 2008, 137). Peoples was a more ambiguous term than nations – could not all the Queen's subjects be one people? Or as de Gaulle would state unequivocally a decade later: there is no Algeria, only France.

With the disappearance of the national “minority” as an internationally recognized problem in the sovereign states system, and the emergence of a stricter sovereignty less amenable to intervention of any kind,⁵ a new “problem” emerged: the refugee. The refugee, Emma Haddad reasons, is created by the states system that excludes him. As defined in the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the refugee was defined as someone displaced in Europe by World War II (Haddad 2008). Half a decade after the end of WWII, many “displaced persons” had not been “repatriated” – the victors’ initial plan to deal with them. “The refugee regime that became immortalised in the 1951 Convention was formulated as a specific response to the post-war situation in Europe, and, accordingly, the refugee continued to develop as a concept invented in and for Europe. Indeed, it first applied only to European refugees and it was not until 1967 that the refugee concept was 'universalized' with the removal of the geographical limits of the 1951 Convention via the [UN Protocol Relating the Status of Refugees]” (Haddad 2008, 148). Non-Western peoples (particularly Arabs) displaced either by WWII or the postwar resettlement projects, “were regarded as malleable,” thus their displacement did not call for protections through international conventions nor dedicated territorial homelands, but rather endless integration (Mazower 2009, 144).

Decolonization and the emergence of postcolonial state conflict demonstrated the short-sightedness of the refugee convention. It is important to register that the challenge was not simply to institutional arrangements, but to an entire mode of thought. “Estimates put the total refugee population of Africa at 400,000 in 1964, a figure that had reached one million by the end of the decade and several million by the end of the 1970s. But these large-scale movements of refugees were constructed by western states as 'national problems,' outside the scope of the 'international', yet in practice heavily European, refugee protection regime” (Haddad 2008, 149-150). We might thus take the refugee as another example of Chakrabarty's critique of the inherent Eurocentrism of the “international”⁶ – a phenomenon in Europe could be understood as international, but outside of Europe an identical phenomenon would be simply provincial and not of “international” concern.

Here we should return to Moyn's argument against the “truncation and fulfillment” approach to intellectual history⁷: concepts are not themselves agentic, so if an initial promise of universality is not immediately fulfilled, but later expanded in a more universal sense, this was not an inherent potential in the concept itself fulfilling its immanent promise. Rather, these are moments when subaltern agency is being expressed – and to focus exclusively on the concept is to deny that agency. Thus, the elimination of territorial limitations on the definition of “refugee” did not come about because a new phenomenon demonstrated the need to fulfill a promise of universality, but because postcolonial actors – most prominently the Organisation on African Unity (OAU) – fought to expand the definition.⁸

However, in a technical sense there was one aspect of the idea of Africa's displaced as a “domestic” issue rather than an “international” one which was correct: in the early 1970s, many (though not clearly a majority) of Africa's displaced people had not crossed a sovereign border. While the 1951 Convention definition of the refugee recognized that people might become refugees if they were fleeing individual persecution (as Eastern European political dissidents were), fleeing civil war did not clearly count. Thus, the Southern Sudanese displaced to Sudan's North, about whom Francis Deng wrote in the early 1970s, were unrecognized by international convention and hidden beneath a discourse of strict state sovereignty. Arguably, these internally displaced persons might have been covered by a revival of the interwar minority treaties. However, this is not the approach Deng took. Minority status is much closer to colonial tribal sovereignty, a protection at the cost of political empowerment and which would promote ethnicity as the primary line upon which state power would be delegated. Instead, drawing on his anthropological studies, he sought to gain international recognition for a new category of displaced persons.

From Domestic Phenomenon to International Concern: Inventing the IDP

At the end of the Cold War, two approaches originating in the Global North emerged quickly to explain conflict in the decolonized world. First, triumphant liberals declared that “the past was over” and – with the end of superpower rivalry – responsibility for violence lay solely at the feet of the states in which it occurred.⁹ The other approach, usually associated with IR realists, was that the end of the Cold War also meant the end of outside moderating influences, and that “ancient hatreds” were re-emerging and would lead to more bloodshed.¹⁰ Both of these approaches deflected attention from histories of colonialism and decolonization: the first denied the relevance of history, while the second imagined a permanent enmity that was only kept in check by outside forces. Refusing to accept such simple narratives, Francis Deng argued that the roots of the conflicts that he was tracking had their origins in the colonial state.

Deng was not the first nor the only figure to identify postcolonial conflict as having roots in the colonial world. However, there were important differences to his approach: while among anticolonial thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s it was common to argue that the roots of conflict lay in colonial legacies, these formulations generally sought to blame an ongoing (neo)colonial structure for crises in the decolonized world.¹¹ More specifically, they held that international institutions drew upon colonial constructs to perpetuate domination beyond the end of de jure colonialism. By contrast, Deng argued that the colonial legacy reshaped the agency and identity of decolonized peoples – but he regarded them as the ultimate agents in their political fates. In his early UN work he highlighted the colonial construction of these postcolonial identities as a way of confronting – and escaping – the colonial legacy rather than naturalizing it. Further, Deng focused on the colonial state, rather than the colonial international structure – which meant he was attuned to the ways in which imperial governance strategies (re)produced difference and hierarchy through identity, rather than positing them as simply structural problems. Importantly, Deng made the argument for the colonial state's role in postcolonial violence as part of an analysis for the UN bureaucracy; he was not a triumphant rebel taking the podium to excoriate the assembled body for its complicity with colonial domination. This meant that Deng's analysis was an attempt to make this analytical claim central to how the UN understood – and dealt with – problems, rather than a critique or protest of the institution itself. In essence, he presented an ontological challenge, rather than immanent critique.

Internal displacement also became a way for Deng to foreground the reverberations of the colonial legacy, and African experience in particular, rather than viewing everything through the prism of the end of bipolar rivalry. “The period of the cold war overlapped worldwide processes of decolonization. International institutions emerged that are dedicated to providing developmental assistance across sovereign jurisdictions and cultural differences” (Deng and Minear 1992, 1-2). Thus, the Cold War and decolonization become simultaneous events, rather than the Cold War as the defining conflict of the post-WWII world. Furthermore, Deng argues, that as “the Cold War raged...conflicts [in the decolonized world] were not seen as domestic struggles for power and resources but as extensions of the superpower ideological confrontation. Rather than help resolve them peacefully, the superpowers often made them worse by providing military and economic aid to their allies” (Deng 1993, 155). Destabilization in the decolonized world has specific historic roots, it is not simply the result of “ancient hatreds” and one cannot pretend the end of the Cold War marks a “clean slate.” While these statements seem rather pedestrian for a political theorist in the 21^st century, it is important to acknowledge that in the early 1990s, and in official UN reports, to make such a claim carried a very different significance.

In a special report on internal displacement he authored in 1993 for the UN secretary general, Deng writes unequivocally:

“The starting-point in many of the affected countries has to be the colonial State and its unification of the diverse groups which it kept, paradoxically, separate and unintegrated. Ethnic groups were broken up and affiliated with others within the artificial borders of the new State system. While the colonial powers were the third-party moderators of ethnic coexistence and interaction, they imposed a superstructure of law and order that often was stratified on the bases of racial, ethnic, cultural and religious differences and inequities. Although the basic needs of survival were provided by the State, social, economic and political development were low on the priority list of the colonial State.” (Deng 1993a, 34)

Here, he is drawing directly upon his research in Sudan on both the colonial state and its legacy for governance through ethnic and racial identity. Against the sorts of reductionist approaches that guided Western audiences, Deng is at pains to lay out what these identities mean and, importantly, what they do not mean. Writing against the “Arab Muslim versus Black African” framing which would later cause so many Westerners to misperceive conflicts in Darfur and South Sudan, Deng argues that while the “most significant [difference in Sudan] is the dichotomy between the Arab-Muslim North and the indigenously African South...Diversity is by no means limited to that dualism...regional and ethnic diversities reflect vast distances from Khartoum in physical, political, and socioeconomic terms that explain the separation, if not alienation, of the national leadership from the rural populace” (Deng and Minear 1992, 3). It is not simply racial, ethnic, or religious difference that defines conflict in the postcolonial state, which also means that dividing postcolonial states into smaller, more homogeneous units would not necessarily resolve these conflicts.¹²

Importantly, “colonial structures and processes of control had divested the local communities and ethnic groups of much of their indigenous autonomy and sustainable livelihood and replaced them with a degree of centralized authority and dependency on the State system” (Deng 1993a, 35). Thus, these communities are caught in a double-bind: on the one hand, their “identity” was hardened as a strategy of colonial rule, and on the other hand colonial rule enervated these communities and destroyed their ability to rule themselves. This formulation is developed in Deng's legal anthropology throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and we see here how that work frames Deng's diplomatic work.

For postcolonial political and social theorists in the 21^st century, this problem of the colonial legacy is well understood. However, this recognition is relatively recent in our field: as Jennifer Pitts (2010) points out, political science and political theory were very late to recognizing empire and imperialism as problems for theory, let alone how their forms of governance crafted identities. Deng's work grounding UN reports in this history is also a few years before Mamdani's Citizen and Subject (1996), perhaps the most important work for introducing political science to anthropology's work on imperialism's rule through identity creation. At the time of Deng's work for the UN on IDPs, political theory's approach to identity was dominated by Taylor's Multiculturalism (1991), which was an analytic argument focused on rights and recognition, rather than being in dialogue with anthropological sources and histories of imperialism. Thus, Deng's work was far ahead of political science and political theory's understandings of the colonial legacy.

It is important to emphasize how radical a break from the “common knowledge” of many international bureaucrats and public intellectuals this was in the early 1990s – and that Deng is drawing on this knowledge to structure how the UN recognizes internal displacement. This is in marked contrast to how more recent Liberal humanitarians narrate the rise of IDPs as a concern that ultimately lead to R2P. For example, Alex Bellamy and Edward Luck (2019) argue that the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the “human security” paradigm made internal displacement something that could be dealt with – as though it were an existing problem that everyone recognized, and with the end of superpower competition human rights concerns in the Global South could finally be addressed. But Deng's work reveals that internal displacement was something that first had to be thought, rather than an existing problem in search of an answer. In this way, we can return to Collingwood's logic of question and answer: the history of answers tell us much less about political thought than the recovery of (non-obvious) questions. With a focus on Deng, we can trace how an important set of questions emerged and how they were different than the ones Liberal humanitarians sought to address.

As representative of the UN-Secretary General on issues related to internally displaced persons, Deng prepared several reports in the early 1990s for the UN Commission on Human Rights. At this point, “internally displaced persons” was not a recognized category; indeed, Deng reports that many hedged against marking the IDP as a category. “The essential thrust of the proposals contained in this study is not to create new categories of persons having special rights, but rather to extend the protections already recognized as the rights of persons in certain situations to others in analogous situations, and thus promote a more harmonious and coherent approach to human rights” (Deng 1993a, 16). In other words, the human rights community was interested in addressing the problem of internal displacement by subsuming it under existing approaches to human rights. Human rights conventions and treaties (such as the Convention Against Torture) rely on signatory states to uphold responsibilities defined by convention. The attempt to subsume IDPs under existing conventions can be understood as a reformist approach: using existing mechanisms, conventions, and institutions, to expand mandates to address a “new problem” “as it arises.”

But internal displacement generated greater tension surrounding sovereignty because of the similarity between the refugee and the internally displaced person. What separated them, of course, was the sovereign border. In these early reports, Deng consistently bumps up against sovereignty as a problem for addressing the needs of IDPs. This echoes language used by former Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar as well as then-Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. While Deng also gestures towards a way of thinking through sovereignty, rather than trying to surmount it, that approach was far beyond the human rights community's capacity in the early 1990s. Thus, in these reports, we see Deng exploring – and ultimately demonstrating – the limits of thinking about internally displaced persons primarily through the lens of human rights.

Furthermore, because the IDP lacked access to food, shelter, and medicine, many were eager to address it as a simple humanitarian crisis. But in his co-authored UN report on famine emergencies, Deng lays the groundwork for thinking of internal displacement as driven by acute political conflicts rather than simply being the expected result of natural disasters. “Where the causes [of internal displacement] are natural disasters, a national consensus to provide protection and assistance is likely and the government often assumes responsibility with the assistance of the international community” (Deng 1993, 3-4) This insight is important for several reasons: first, Deng is recognizing internal displacement by violent conflicts as a political problem, distinct from displacement by natural causes of immiseration. Thus, internal displacement is not simply a condition to be subsumed under traditional humanitarian approaches because when internal displacement is sparked by political conflict, the state will resist treating displaced persons as a global concern. Second, international assistance in the wake of natural disasters can be a model for thinking about internal displacement – states should accept or solicit aid, rather than regarding these as “domestic issues.” But this involves convincing states to act in this way; organizing an international humanitarian response in the absence of this willingness from a state will lead to little help for IDPs. And finally, contrary to Marxist and postcolonial claims that R2P excludes “natural disasters” because these are exacerbated by global capitalism (Meiches 2019, 7), the willingness of governments to accept aid in the aftermath of natural disasters is part of the model of sovereignty embraced by R2P. Armed coercive intervention is not necessary in cases where humanitarian assistance is consensually agreed upon or specifically requested. Drawing specifically on his work in Sudan, Deng notes: “The salient feature of both [Sudanese famine] emergencies was the reticence and denial that characterized the response of the government of Khartoum and aggravated the emergencies” (Deng and Minear 1992, 2). The problem, as Deng identifies it, lies squarely with the denial of access to internally displaced persons by central governments.

The denial of access to the international community, Deng notes, is due to a particular vision of sovereignty. “It is particularly in these circumstances that the protection and assistance of the international community are needed...although they are frequently difficult to provide because of the jealous defense of sovereignty by governments that are unwilling or unable to provide equal protection to all nationals” (Deng 1993, 4). Sovereignty as identified with non-interference of all kinds, including giving aid to internally displaced persons, insists on an absolute barrier between “domestic” and “international.” Deng identifies this “traditional” conception of sovereignty as the primary stumbling block in addressing the issue of IDPs.

Treating internal displacement as a political problem would mean that, rather than straightforward humanitarian food aid, political solutions would be necessary. “Resolving the problems of the internally displaced must ultimately mean addressing the causes of displacement, which, in many instances, means making efforts toward resolving conflicts, ensuring peace and security for all, and guaranteeing the rights of citizenship without discrimination, a task that may call for international intervention with all its attendant problems” (Deng 1992, 4). This was a dramatic departure from the dominant view of humanitarianism in the 20^th century, which was that humanitarian aid must be apolitical.¹³ Furthermore, the inclusion of “citizenship without discrimination” is another significant departure; rather than stating that all populations must be safeguarded, Deng is tying internal displacement to the question of citizenship.

Political empowerment through citizenship, rather than a revival of minority rights treaties or an appeal to an apolitical humanity, is Deng's favored approach. And Deng recognizes the ways in which stripping people of their citizenship can be used as an excuse by governments to deny responsibility for them: as I quoted Deng above, he notes that “governments that are unwilling or unable to provide equal protection to all nationals” (Deng 1993, 4) will resort to invoking their sovereign right to refuse outsiders access. In this quote, Deng uses “all nationals,” not “all citizens,” such that the denial or revocation of citizenship cannot absolve a state of its responsibilities to the displaced. So universal state citizenship is part of the solution to the crisis of internal displacement, and the denial of citizenship cannot be treated as a sovereign right.

Revocation of citizenship is a question that goes to the heart of statelessness: as Mira Siegelberg (2020) recounts, in the aftermath of WWI the question of whether a state could revoke citizenship, and whether other states could refuse to recognize another state's revocation of citizenship, was central to whether “stateless” could become a recognized category. A powerful faction within the League of Nations bureaucracy opposed the attempt to deny a right of revocation, arguing that citizenship was central to the institution of sovereignty, and to place internationally mandated limits on that would be to deny a distinction between national and international realms. The League could argue in favor of protecting “national minorities” by treaty, by contrast, because minority status was a protection not an individual right. Thus, we can say that when Deng argues that revocation of citizenship cannot be recognized as a sovereign right, we should interpret that as much as an affirmation of political right, rather than apolitical protection.

In repeatedly tying the failures to deal with internal displacement to sovereignty as a “problem,” Deng demonstrates the shortcomings of the mandate he was given to study internal displacement from the perspective of human rights. “Although human rights law provides a basis for protecting and assisting internally displaced persons, it does not directly address some situations affecting them, such as forcible displacement and lack of access to humanitarian assistance” (Deng 1993, 6). What the UN Human Rights Commission was looking for was an implementation strategy or set of reforms that would enable the UN to address a particular form of immiseration that it had not previously recognized as part of its purview. Deng, however, used the assignment to bring bigger questions to the fore, arguing that implementation and reform would be unable to address the problem in the way he was constructing it. “In effect, the challenge becomes more than one of implementation and enforcement. Just as certain categories of vulnerable groups such as refugees, the disabled, women, and children, require special regimes for protection, so do the internally displaced” (Deng 1993, 9) The internally displaced person, for Deng, had to become a category – and thus a subject – in a way that existing approaches were not able to represent.

Deng was not the first person to identify sovereignty as a “problem” in this way; as noted above, two UN Secretaries General, Perez de Cuellar and Boutros-Ghali had both identified sovereignty as a “problem” for dealing with human rights. Deng would also talk about the possibility of enforcement actions necessitating “the international community to override traditional prerogatives of sovereignty” (Deng 1993, 13). He justified this approach by arguing that “where the government is not in control or the controlling authority is unable or unwilling to create the conditions necessary to ensure rights, and gross violations of the rights of masses of people result, sovereignty in the sense of responsible government is forfeited and the international community must provide the needed protection and assistance” (Deng 1993, 13). “Override” and “forfeit,” in relation to sovereignty, are stark claims of an authority above sovereignty. While Liberal humanitarians embraced such language, sometimes tying it to human rights as the spectre above sovereignty, Deng certainly understood that creating an expectation that the international community would override sovereignty in certain cases would make states in the decolonized world hesitant to embrace any initiative to which that was attached. And it is in this space that Deng begins to break from that approach to sovereignty as a “problem” and instead begin to think through sovereignty.

Internally displaced persons are the vehicle by which Deng challenges the “traditional” notion of sovereignty that has taken hold in the postcolonial world. The IDP is a liminal figure who demonstrates the limits of traditional notions of sovereignty and humanitarianism. Deng's purview as representative of the UN Secretary General to the UNHCR did not include a rethinking of sovereignty as the basis for the international system. Thus, in order to introduce sovereignty into the discussion, Deng presented the question of sovereignty as already contested. After noting the possible need for “overriding” or “forfeiting” sovereignty, he noted that “world developments suggest that transcending sovereignty is no longer a forbidden territory for discussion” (Deng 1993, 13). While Deng first echoed the idea of sovereignty as a problem, the turn to “transcending” signals how Deng will chart an alternate course. Without noting his participation in the cited report, he writes that “The concept of sovereignty [the 1992 report argues], is becoming understood more in terms of conferring responsibilities on governments to assist and protect persons residing in their territories, so much so that if governments fail to meet their obligations, they risk undermining their legitimacy” (Deng 1993, 15). While not using the phrase “sovereignty-as-responsibility” yet, he is framing sovereign power around this notion of responsibility rather than non-interference.

How is this ultimately different from liberal threats to use force to crack down on human rights abuses? A central difference is in how the international community is framed. For human rights liberals like Emilie Hafner-Burton, the enforcement of human rights must be taken up by liberal democracies. Human rights norms are settled, and those who respect them (a list which is almost exclusively Western democracies) must protect the abused of the world. New institutions (for Hafner-Burton (2013), a “concert of democracies”) may be necessary to get past the gridlock of global participatory institutions like the UN. Alex Bellamy treats African norms and institutions instrumentally, claiming that “by the time of the 2005 World Summit, Africa had already developed a peace and security architecture that mirrored – indeed went well beyond – the norms espoused by R2P” (Bellamy 2015, 118). What Bellamy wishes to do, however, is to appropriate that political and moral authority to legitimate a doctrine of armed coercive intervention emanating not from regional institutions themselves but from the UN.

This is not Deng's approach. As noted above, Deng clearly considers how decolonized states will understand any proposals, and understands these states are determined not to be swept along into giving up their hard won authority. Furthermore, Deng's studies of indirect rule imperialism highlight the ways in which colonial powers used pacification and exaggerated threats from others to make populations pliant to alien rule. After stoking these fears of neighbors, “colonial masters imposed a superstructure of law and order to maintain relative peace and tranquility” (Deng 1993, 114). Entrusting the enforcement of human rights to powerful states who can override the sovereign authority of others would risk re-establishing this fear based hierarchy. Thus, the first difference between Deng's approach and the Liberal humanitarian approach is Deng's emphasis on regional human rights instruments (Deng 1993, 5). To be respected as responsibilities entailed by sovereignty, human rights cannot be treated as norms to be “diffused” to or “enforced” on the Global South. A second important difference will be Deng's emphasis on human dignity over human rights¹⁴ – the former of which he sees as having greater claims to universality than the latter (Deng 1990).

Throughout his analysis of IDPs for the UN, Deng uses Africa – and Sudan in particular – as a source for thinking about broader global problems, rather than representing Africa as a unique situation or a parochial interest. He frames his study of the dual famine crises in Sudan by treating it as a generalizable model. “Looking to the future, [we suggest] ways in which the international community, learning from the problems of relief operations in the Sudan, may strengthen such interventions in the future” (Deng and Minear 1992, 7). Throughout this period, Deng highlights African innovation as a model for global change – and that includes the question of sovereignty.

In the context of the end of the Cold War, many African leaders and intellectuals believed that the international community, led by the US, was likely to disengage from Africa entirely – if African conflicts were not proxies for the Cold War, but rather manifestations of “the coming anarchy” in Robert Kaplan's (1994) words, then all forms of assistance to the continent might erode. “African problems now exist in regional and national but not international contexts” Deng observed ruefully. However, this made self-help (understood as Africans helping Africans) of greater importance: “Having lost [Cold War] ties, self-reliance in resolving conflicts and encouraging economic development is increasingly imperative.” For Deng, this perception of the post-Cold War context leads to “two seemingly contradictory but in fact complementary lines of action. They are recognizing that if the world does not care much about them, they must take their destinies into their own hands. At the same time, the imperatives of global interdependence propel them to resist marginalization” (Deng 1993, 112). Thus, innovation in conflict resolution among Africans was both a form of self-help and offered the potential to put Africa at the center of global conversations about conflict resolution.

Deng locates OAU secretary-general Salim A. Salim at the center of this conversation, noting that Salim “has implored Africa to take the lead in building on its traditional values of communal solidarity to transcend conventional notions of sovereignty and propose peaceful resolution of conflicts and cooperation in addressing humanitarian challenges” (Deng 1993, 114). Deng places Salim in contrast with earlier nationalist invocations of “African values” which sought to strengthen the principles of non-intervention, but often also strengthened a leader's grip on power. “Cultural self-assertions are part of this process. From the dawn of African independence, such slogans as Senghor's 'negritude,' Nkrumah's 'consciencism,' Kenyatta's 'Uhuru,' Nyerere's 'Ujamaa,' Mobutu's 'authenticity,' and Kaunda's 'humanism' have symbolized African leaders' search for cultural legitimation of their political and economic strategies. Often the slogans were rationalizations for ideas and practices adopted from foreign prototypes and dressed up in local garb,” so the simple assertion of an “African value” cannot be taken at face value.

Salim, as the head of a regional organization which aimed to foster mutual support and assistance, rather than as a nationalist leader who sought to define his own rule as the “true” cultural value, gave his claim much more credibility for Deng. Further, because the state is a foreign imposition, Salim's innovation was a way of using “cultural values” to mitigate the power of the state through a syncretic reformulation, rather than making state power unassailable through the invocation of tradition or culture. In a 1992 report, Salim wrote that the OAU needed to establish a clear provision for intervention by the organization into African state conflicts. “In that way, the apparent shift in the thinking of Member States on the non-interference principle will move from the realm of mere theory to actual practice” (cited in Deng 1993, 113).

Non-interference as the cornerstone of sovereignty, Deng sought to demonstrate through his work on IDPs, relieved states of responsibilities to their own populations. In focusing on Salim's attempt to weaken the doctrine of non-interference in the OAU, Deng and other African leaders presented this view of sovereignty as an African innovation and made clear that weakening non-interference was not simply an invitation for great powers to impose their political visions on African states while covering themselves in the name of humanity.

Throughout his anthropological work, Deng emphasized the importance of “practicality” in Dinka traditions, and acting with an acknowledgment of existing constraints when incorporating innovation. We should regard Deng's exploration of the limits of human rights and humanitarian approaches to IDPs in a similar manner: given a mandate to propose a program of reforms and implementation strategies, Deng skillfully constructed the problem of IDPs in such a way as to resist a reformist approach. He made the colonial legacy part of the UN's understanding of post-Cold War conflict, and used his mandate to introduce a larger question: that of sovereignty. In a 1995 report prepared by Deng on behalf of the UN Secretary General, he wrote that in his role as representative “the mandate [to study IDPs] has evolved into a more focused catalytic role” (Deng 1995, 31). Addressing root causes of displacement, rather than attempting to meet needs through traditional humanitarian and human rights mechanisms, must be the UN's role. “Humanitarian assistance and the promotion of human rights cannot become substitutes for broader political efforts to advance the cause of peace, security and stability in a country” (Deng 1995, 28). Furthermore, “Neither the political will nor the resources, however, exist at the present time to support the creation of a new agency responsible for the internally displaced. It is pointed out, moreover, that internally displaced persons have needs spanning the entire range of United Nations agencies” (Deng 1995, 24). It is from this problem space from which the question of sovereignty necessarily emerges.

Sovereignty-as-Responsibility: To Remake the State and States System

Internal displacement, as constructed by Deng, was a problem that demonstrated the limits of discourses of humanitarianism and human rights under conditions of sovereign equality. Importantly, however, Deng's answer to this was not that postcolonial states did not “deserve” “full sovereignty” – which was a common claim throughout the 1990s and 2000s.¹⁵ Rather, Deng pressed the system as a whole towards a different understanding of sovereignty.

Deng sought to remake the states system. As I laid out in Chapter One, agents remaking structures are not themselves free of structural influence. Agents are (re)made by structures, and structures are (re)made by agents: “the simultaneity of this interaction creates difficulties for capturing both the self-reinforcing nature of structures and the ways in which people sometimes overturn social order. People consciously and unintentionally replicate and challenge institutionalized routines and prevailing assumptions” (Klotz and Lynch 2007, 7). Deng's recognition of the legacy of the colonial state structuring problems faced by the postcolonial state is precisely an awareness of this simultaneity; rather than concluding that the colonial legacy was a determinant structure, postcolonial actors remain agents in his account.

Deng recognizes the colonial legacy as a structural and epistemological conditioning of postcolonial actors. But these actors, in recognizing their situatedness, can work to remake the structures in which they live. This is very different than postcolonial and anticolonial ideas of overthrowing or resisting neoimperial structures, in which an outside position is sought. Thus, while anticolonial statesmen sought to create South-South relations as a means to escape the domination of the Global North (Getachew 2019), Deng does not see participatory institutions such as the UN as simple handmaidens of imperialism, nor does he posit South-South collaboration as a buffer against domination by the Global North, but rather as the empowerment of a more globalized international community. Deng's work is also different from liberal reformist approaches; for a liberal such as Keohane (2003), sovereignty should retain its post-WWII meaning, but some states may simply not qualify as sovereign. Deng rejects this two-tiered approach (which was designed to facilitate humanitarian intervention by powerful Western states) in order to recast the broad norm of sovereignty, not simply its application.

The task Deng sets forth is the remaking of the postcolonial state: “is Africa bound to follow the Eurocentric models which the colonial powers bequeathed to them at independence?” (Deng 2010, 2). In remaking the postcolonial state, Deng posits a vision of sovereignty around which the state system can be remade. Central to remaking the postcolonial state is recognizing and rejecting the colonial logics guiding the state form. Sovereignty as the hermetically sealed unit, hierarchical with a single locus of authority, is a European export. But this does not mean rejecting the state in toto: “even as the traditional concept of sovereignty erodes, there is no presumptive, let alone adequate, replacement for the state...Until a replacement is found, the notion of sovereignty must be put to work and reaffirmed to meet the challenges of the times in accordance with accepted standards of human dignity (Deng et al 1996, xi). The state remains the (flawed) essential partner, never fully reducible to the community.

In Deng's writings about sovereignty-as-responsibility in the mid-90s, he begins from two premises: the failure of many postcolonial (African) states, and the origins of these problems as located in the colonial state. For Deng, any conversation about state failure begins from the premise that the colonial legacy is not irrelevant – the past is not “over,” as (postcolonial critics claim) Neoliberals argue, but a different sense of responsibility emerges. In this way, Deng distinguishes himself from both Liberal interventionists and anticolonial rebels: the colonial past created problems that bequeath a burden of responsibility on the postcolonial state to address. Understanding this colonial past is key for recognizing the problems the postcolonial state faces; and because postcolonial actors are agentic, they have the responsibility to remedy these challenges. Thus, it is neither enough to say that postcolonial violent conflict, displacement, and state failure are the fault of the colonial legacy, nor to say that postcolonial states bear all responsibility for violent conflict, displacement, and state failure.

The critique of the colonial state

Deng includes references and analysis of pre-colonial and colonial rule in his multiple writings on sovereignty-as-responsibility in the mid-1990s. This is the clearest indication that his diplomatic work is shaped by his legal anthropology, and that his whole career can be read as wrestling with the colonial legacy. As I argue in chapter two, Deng's understanding of the colonial state is heavily informed by his legal anthropology in Sudan. Thus, he is particularly sensitive to the dynamics of British indirect rule colonialism, and the ways in which it reified certain identities and attempted to make communities into isolated hierarchical units dependent on the colonial power. Importantly, however, Deng also refuses a reflexive romanticizing of the pre-colonial past: “Conflicts as they now pertain in the new states of Africa have their roots in the formation of the colonial state. This is not to say that there were no conflicts in Africa before colonial intervention; quite the contrary, conflicts were rampant and in some cases catastrophic” (Deng 1996, 221). For Deng, a recognition of the problems created by colonialism is not a call to return to a mythic peacefulness and authenticity. Rather, colonialism created a particular set of problems; to overcome the colonial legacy requires addressing how those problems underlie contemporary conflicts.

Central to Deng's legal anthropology of Dinka tribes was the recognition of their syncretic character: there was no transhistorical, authentic “Dinka-ness” which survived contact with other communities. Rather, there was a process of assimilating ideas and practices into a larger culture, such that any discussion of culture was a discussion of dynamism rather than stasis or authenticity. While the state was a colonial imposition, Deng argues, the postcolonial state must remake itself as a syncretic entity. Thus, a pre-colonial past is useful for thinking about the world after colonialism, not a template for political organization.

Deng writes:

a different political and social order existed in pre-colonial Africa which involved largely horizontal relations among groups of varying levels of organization. African political systems ranged from highly centralized kingdoms to stateless societies with a segmentary lineage system. Ethnic groups interacted, cooperated, conflicted, and reconciled in accordance with the established rules of kinship and the normative code of the wider community. Over time, communities developed rules of coexistence and interrelationships embodied in local agreements or customary norms, predicated on autonomy and reciprocity. While groups jealously guarded their lands, borders remained porous and neighbours interacted as economic activities dictated and in accordance with established rules of conduct (Deng 1996, 222).

Political and ethnic communities have always interacted: according to Deng, the “strict” sovereign boundary was not part of any African political tradition. It was only with the theoretical basis of indirect rule, pioneered by Henry Maine,¹⁶ that the idea of the isolated “authentic” community came to dominate thinking about non-European peoples. Indirect rule colonialism created the need to identify an authentic culture, and remake these societies hierarchically with a strong ruler at the top to enforce this authenticity and to enforce an isolation to protect that authenticity. Francis Deng's father, Deng Majok, (unevenly) played this role for the British among the Ngok Dinka.

This reformation of traditional life was the basis of “the colonial state, with its rigid borders and centralized structures and procedures.” This imposition of the state “tore apart regional ethnic groups and affiliated them with other groups. But while these groups were supposedly united by incorporation into the modern state, they were kept apart. Indeed, their relations were manipulated as part of the divide and rule strategy of colonial domination” (Deng 1996, 222). Colonialism's obsession with classification also had consequences for economic distribution. “During the precolonial period, when in many areas the concept of the state in the European sense had not yet been instituted, communities coexisted and interacted horizontally on the basis of relative parity and mutual accommodation in the common interest.” However, “The formation of the centralized state system that became responsible for the distribution of power and resources shifted the focus away from local arrangements...This introduced into the equations of power at all levels elements of stratification that had not existed in precolonial times” (Deng et al 1996, 67). Thus, in addition to introducing hierarchies into communities, indirect rule colonialism also created hierarchies between communities. The advantages that various communities received under colonialism would be new sources of conflict after decolonization.

It was this colonial reification and isolation of tribalized and racialized identity that fueled the identity-based conflicts in the 1990s, not “ancient hatreds” – indeed, the idea of these identities as hardened and ancient was itself a product of the colonial legacy. This also pits Deng against leading Liberal interventionists at the time: in arguing in favor of humanitarian intervention to stem the tide of nationalist-based internal conflicts, Stanley Hoffmann (1997) treated nationalist identity simultaneously as toxic and anachronistic. For Hoffmann and other liberals, nationalism was gasping a dying (and dangerous) breath, and Liberal values needed an (armed) nudge to overcome it. The post-nationalist Liberal future would be cosmopolitan, with identity related to civic ideals rather than nationality, ethnicity, race, or creed. Deng certainly recognizes that identity can be weaponized for power and in conflict, but he resists stigmatizing these forms of identity as constitutive of political organization, and instead wants to dig into how they are constituted and deployed.

This isolation of identities from each other was a strategy of rule by British colonizers, and now the postcolonial state is living with its aftermath. “It is widely recognized that the problems in Africa have their roots in state formation and the challenge of nation building. The system was first intended to serve the interests of the colonial powers. Independence granted political autonomy to the colonies while maintaining their linkage to the economies of former colonial powers through trade, investment, and largely tied aid” (Deng 1998, 138-139). For Deng, the problem of the postcolonial state begins with its inheritance of the colonial state that was meant to serve others. Here he is in agreement with many anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers, and the contrast is strongest with liberals who claimed “the past was over” as well as with those who saw identity-based conflict as a matter of “ancient hatreds.” It is in his analysis of the postcolonial state where Deng breaks solidly with most anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers.

The critique of the postcolonial state

Deng, however, is not content to assign blame to colonialism for the origins of postcolonial problems. He writes that “however external their sources or continued linkages, the primary responsibility for solutions, especially in the post-cold war era, fall first on the Africans themselves. The time has long since come to stop blaming colonialism for Africa's persistent problems” (Deng 1998a, 139). This is a stark statement, seemingly at odds with the portrait I have drawn of someone continuously wrestling with the colonial legacy. Indeed, taken in isolation, this might seem to confirm Jessica Whyte's thesis (2017) about R2P as Neoliberal responsibilization – making postcolonial states “responsible” for violence within their borders, with no consideration of colonial legacies.

Deng's statement is different in important ways from Whyte's critique of the Neoliberal erasure of the colonial past in service of making postcolonial states responsible. We can think of Deng and Whyte as employing two different meanings of “responsibility.” For Whyte (and Said, upon whom she draws), Neoliberalism makes postcolonial states “responsible” by claiming that the past is over, and that conflicts and catastrophes in the postcolonial world are simply homegrown and not the legacy of centuries of oppressive imperial rule. Deng does identify postcolonial states as responsible, but “responsibility” in this sense is not because there is no past. Rather, postcolonial states are responsible because they are agents and thus must work to escape the legacy of the colonial state. Anticolonial and postcolonial theorists also sought to portray these actors (states, civil society actors, communities, intellectuals, etc) as agents, but theorized that escaping the colonial legacy would take the form of resisting continued domination from the Global North. Internal aspects of the colonial legacy, prior to Mamdani's (1996) pioneering work, were frequently associated with a Western educated colonial elite.¹⁷

For Deng, the internal structure of the postcolonial state – its reliance on “strict” sovereignty, its approach to ethnicity, and its jealous centralization of all functions of society under its own power – is part of that colonial legacy, but which has been adopted by postcolonial state actors to further their own power. “The irony, however, is that the principal modern agent of Africa's political and economic development and the interlocutor in the international arena is the state, itself a creature of foreign intervention” (Deng 1998a, 139). While state borders were the most outwardly recognizable colonial aspect of the postcolonial African state, its internal structure also preserved colonial organization.

In the immediate aftermath of decolonization, several regions – not exclusively ethnically or racially defined – attempted to secede from the newly formed states to pursue their own “self-determination,” most prominently the Anyanya rebellion in southern Sudan and the Biafra war in Nigeria. Anyanya and Biafra represented two different approaches to identity. Anyanya was racially Black, made up of diverse tribes from the South, against a central government drawn heavily from the Arabic north. By contrast, many outside observers questioned whether a “Biafran people” existed outside of the claims by the Biafran rebel leaders (Heerten 2015). However, Deng's anthropology should caution us about the “obviousness” versus “inventedness” of these identities. He uses Ngok Dinka history, occupying a space intersecting the North and the South of Sudan, to demonstrate that both race and ethnicity were colonial projects, and that such identification is tied to particular strategies of governance. As Deng treated the Dinka region as a microcosm of Sudan as a whole, he concluded, “Sudan is an example of a context in which applying racial or ethnic standards is particularly problematic. The Sudanese, who are commonly referred to as Arabs, are primarily Africans who speak Arabic...The Northern Sudanese claim to be Arab race can only be valid for a negligible few. And yet it is one of the factors in the overwhelming identification of the North and the country as a whole with Arabism, and one of the major reasons for conflict with the South” (Deng et al 1996, 64). Thus, we should be wary of any argument that treats an “invented” identity like Biafran as somehow less authentic than one of the identities reified by colonial rule. Indeed, Deng would go on to argue that “one of the ironies of the Sudanese situation is the extent to which identities are both malleable and rigid…The ambiguities of identity are potentially both acutely divisive and bridging” (Deng 2010a, 163).

Aware of the potential instability from identity-based claims for self-determination, early postcolonial African states simply agreed to abide by the colonial borders. “The demand by regions and ethnic groups, not only to control their own affairs through decentralization but also to participate at the national level on equal footing, was perceived by the power elite as a threat to the unity of the country...The threat that these demands posed for the unity of the newly independent African countries prompted the Organization of African Unity to adopt the principle of preserving the colonial borders against any demands for secession or self-determination” (Deng 1996, 223). This was done ostensibly to create stability and order, from which these states could organize as new, self-reliant units. However, “In most African countries, the determination to preserve national unity following independence provided the motivation behind one-party rule, excessive centralization of power, oppressive authoritarian regimes, and systematic violations of human rights and fundamental liberties. The participatory decisionmaking in African society was later alluded to by nationalist leaders to justify the one-party system, the rationale being that since Africans traditionally sat and debated until they all agreed, the multiparty system was antithetical to African culture” (Deng 1998, 145). Using “culture” as a veil, many states entrenched themselves in power, jealously guarding all functions of civil society and regional authority as solely the purview of the central government.

Identity became the primary source of unmanageable conflict for the postcolonial African state. This cannot be surprising: among states previously ruled by many forms of 19^th century colonialism (certainly British, Belgian, and French), the emphasis and management of difference was a colonial governance strategy. To then press together into a supposed nation-state these disparate identities that had been fostered and rewarded – though simultaneously kept separate – under a previous system created tensions and conflicts the world over. Africa, in particular, had many overlapping identities which colonial powers had used to command loyalty to “local” rulers. “Given its centrality and pervasiveness, ethnicity is a reality no country can completely afford to ignore. As a result, African governments have ambivalently tried to dismiss it, marginalize it, manipulate it, corrupt it, or combat it. But no strategic formula for its constructive use has been developed” (Deng 1998, 145). In numerous postcolonial states, such as Nkrumah's Ghana and Nyerere's Tanzania, the state attempted to marginalize and stamp out ethnicity as a source of political affiliation or loyalty. Other states, such as Bashir's Sudan, attempted to unify the state under a single identity, be it ethnic, racial, or religious (or some combination of the three).

In addition to being a simple way of identifying enemies of the regime, salient identities became shorthand for graft and a substitute for state capacity building. Rewarding supporters was a substitute for building state institutions. This tied power even more closely to identity, further raising the stakes in conflicts over identity. And it made the state less responsible to its broad population. “In many parts of Africa, the threat to human dignity is often rooted in the politics of identity and competition for power and scarce resources, which often clash with the demands of nation building....The crisis of national identity emanates not only from the conflict between the exclusive and the inclusive notions of identity, but also from the tendency of the dominant, hegemonic groups to try to impose their identity as the framework for the national identity and a basis for power-sharing and resource allocation” (Deng et al 1996, 20). Importantly, even where corruption was not a motivator, patronage government could still be a rational response of the state in the face of scarcity. “There is always strong pressure on elected politicians to become benefactors to their kin-group or ethnic constituencies, whether financially or in terms of social services and development projects...the abuse of power for the acquisition and private disbursement of wealth under those conditions, rather than being the result of indigenous propensity toward corruption, may well be the outcome of felt need caused by the demands of new standards of living in the midst of a scarcity” (Deng 1998, 153). When the state does not have the capacity to ensure an equitable distribution of resources for all its citizens, the “responsibility” felt by some leaders will be not to the state as a whole, but to those with whom they most closely identify.

Consignment to minority status could thus mean immiseration or persecution. “In most African countries the population is a conglomerate of many ethnic groups, which makes it difficult to speak of majority and minority...groups that find themselves threatened with a minority status would rather resist incorporation into such a stratifying national framework” (Deng 1998, 141). When the postcolonial state enshrined an identity as the “authentic” identity of the state – even where it was not a numerical majority – the lack of institutions which might facilitate political contestation exacerbated conflict. By mythologizing the notion of national unity, these states did not develop political mechanisms for resolving conflict that was the result of competing demands from different identity or civil society groups, and could only recognize such conflict as a threat to national unity. The postcolonial state, in this account, had no means for successfully managing “internal” conflict in a political context. Thus, there was simultaneous pressure on the state to engage in repression to “unify” the population, and on “minority” (or simply alternative) identity groups to pursue their interests through violent means.

Internal displacement due to violent conflict thus became a crisis in postcolonial Africa. Sovereignty was the mask behind which both repressive governments and the international community hid: both could claim that this was merely a “domestic” issue, and of little concern to the international community. Humanitarian aid was sometimes accepted (though, as Deng points out, in some cases it was rejected) by central governments, which created a new paradox of dependence. “Perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of the crisis [of internal displacement] is that by uprooting such large numbers of people, they, and ultimately the nation, are deprived of their resource-base and capacity for self-reliance. They must therefore depend on international humanitarian assistance for basic survival. Such assistance, while pivotal in saving lives, may also have the effect of encouraging dependency and undermining development as a self-generating and self-sustaining process from within” (Deng 1996, 219). Persecution and dislocation further undermined the stated goal of self-sufficiency, both for the displaced persons who had no choice but to rely on international assistance, but also for the state, which could not draw upon the productive power of large portions of its population.

It is important to return to the distinction between responsibility for and caused by. The underlying causes of the problems of the postcolonial state outlined here lie with the colonial state. But in Deng's account, responsibility for addressing these problems lie with the postcolonial state. This is a statement of agency – the structure left by colonialism is not determinative. It falls upon the postcolonial political community to remake the state such that it can address the problems the colonial state created. Ultimately, this argument is anti-fatalist: Africans can remake their states, and in doing so remake the structure of the states system. The system itself is not a structure which, absent resistance from an outside point, will crush attempts at substantive change. If the outcome of the postcolonial state is state failure, internal displacement, corruption, and immiseration, the responsibility for that lies with the postcolonial state – just as the responsibility for overcoming these weaknesses also lies with the postcolonial state.

A new path for sovereignty?

Sovereignty-as-responsibility begins as an argument for the need to re-define “the state” in Africa, not simply its borders. The crisis of internal displacement is an entryway for thinking about the ways in which “traditional” sovereignty masks many postcolonial African states' failure to be a functioning state responsible to all its people. Because there are so many forms of identity, as well as overlapping and dynamic identities, simply cleaving off new states from colonial constructs in order to give every possible communal “self” the right to self-determination would not end identity-based conflict – indeed, it would likely exacerbate such conflict because there would be a strong incentive to make a preferred identity “incompatible” with the state in which it resided. In essence, sovereignty-as-responsibility is about the problem of state building in a world after the nation-state.

Rethinking the meaning of sovereignty in Africa, it is important to note, is not simply a regional or parochial interest. The other aspect of sovereignty-as-responsibility is to rethink how the international community more broadly understands sovereignty. Importantly, the sovereign state system is a system – and systems are conventional. Thus, rules for entry and recognition can be created and modified. Deng is using the problem of postcolonial state conflict in Africa to rethink the rules of the system as a whole. The grounding of sovereignty in responsibility carries with it a corollary responsibility: if the states system is founded on sovereignty, then the states system carries a reciprocal responsibility to its members. When sovereignty is defined primarily as non-interference, that responsibility is to respect a state's sovereignty as a boundary. But when sovereignty is conceived of as positive responsibilities to a people (or peoples), the system as a whole becomes secondarily responsible to populations (since the state carries the primary responsibility). This does not mean that the international community can simply use its secondary responsibility to engage in armed coercive intervention: rather, it means that in times of crisis (such as massive internal displacement), the international community cannot simply categorize the crisis as a “domestic problem.” What the international community's responsibility entails will differ based on the crisis; it is not a one-size-fits-all proposition (contra Getachew 2018) nor a pretext toward armed coercive intervention or invalidation of state agreements (contra Mamdani 2009).

Central to this rethinking is the idea of making the postcolonial state into a syncretic entity. The sovereign nation-state was a poor model for the postcolonial state to adopt, but the world is still made up of states so some form of state needs to be embraced – not an imagined pre-colonial communal structure, nor an internationally mandated “quasi state” (Jackson 1990). To construct “a nation on indigenous identities, structures, values, institutions, and heritage does not mean a return to the past. Instead the concept envisages a dynamic reinterpretation and transformation of tradition as a foundation and a resource for promoting a transitional integration that is self-reliant and self-sustaining. This would make development a process of self-enhancement from within” (Deng 1998, 152). Africans as agents can work to create the new reality of states, and this process of creation is in itself an emancipatory project. “There can be no question that Africa stands to benefit from cross-cultural fertilization, but that should mean what the word says: synergizing the positive aspects of the interactive culture and related value-systems” (Deng 2010, 3). Importantly, syncretism is not simply derivative.

In Deng's argument, restructuring the state may mean accepting certain universal ideals for states but being open to different institutional and procedural norms informed by local histories and customs: “all African countries strive in varying ways and degrees to transcend the simplistic Eurocentric model constitutions and principles of constitutionalism which assumed a degree of homogeneity with hardly any regard to the specificities of the African context, its cultural values, institutions, and patterns of behavior” (Deng 2010, 1-2). For both human rights and democracy, Deng wants to avoid fetishizing or valuing a particular process, and instead think about the ways in which the underlying values might be approached from a variety of cultural backgrounds. For human rights, this means focusing on values of dignity – evidence of which can be found across cultures – rather than necessarily an enumerated set of institutionally ratified rights. “To argue for the principle of universality is not to deny the significance of the cultural context for the definition, the scope, and the degree of protection of human rights...its is by seeing human rights concretely manifested in a particular context that we can fully appreciate their form and content in a comparative framework” (Deng 1990, 261). Thus, while Dinka societies had no pre-colonial conceptions of rights, Deng identifies Dinka values such as cieng as consistent with a universalist sense of dignity.¹⁸ Urging postcolonial states to promote and enshrine such local values when they are consistent with universal or transnational principles is thus different from “cultural arguments” that were deployed in some postcolonial states to resist broader values and entrench certain groups in power. This approach also resists the norm distribution model of human rights, in which norms originate in a particular place (usually in the West) and are then “taken up” when actors in other areas accept the legitimacy of the norm and adopt it (in the process, confirming their own legitimacy).

In terms of democracy, Deng urged an approach that would promote broad inclusion in the political process with a goal of consensus, but resist “winner take all” elections. “The quest for consensus becomes the key to conflict prevention, management, and revolution. Western-style democracy of the vote, with the 'winner take all' outcome, runs counter to the African indigenous principles of power-sharing and conciliation, and therefore cannot be a basis for conflict resolution in the African cultural context” (Deng 1996, 226) Indeed, African-led attempts at conciliation in the aftermath of violence stemming from winner-take-all elections provide perhaps the one “success” case for R2P thus far.¹⁹ In the aftermath of Kenya's 2008 post-election violence, in which incumbent president Mwai Kibaki's supporters rampaged through Kikuyu settlements and killed indiscriminately, the UN engaged the conflict as an R2P emergency but did not call for armed coercive intervention. Rather, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, himself from Ghana, led reconciliation talks between Kibaki and his challenger, Raila Odinga.

Deng observes that reconciliation through discussion, rather than punitive action or submission of one side, has a strong basis across African cultures.²⁰ “In the African cultural context, because of the family and kinship orientation of society, where people in conflict are expected to settle their differences and resume cooperative, interpersonal relations, methods of conflict resolution aim at consensus and reconciliation...'Talking it out', even after a bitterly violent dispute, is a prevalent aspect of African settlement of disputes” (Deng 1996, 221). Both punitive and winner-take-all systems discouraged buy-in from minority identities, which hampered the process of postcolonial state building in Africa.

The tendency of the international community to treat humanitarian crises and violent conflicts as isolated moments, rather than as manifestations of deeper rifts, meant that the causes of internal conflict in Africa were allowed to hide under the veil of strict state sovereignty. “What needs to be underscored in the discussion of the normative factors of nation-building is that as long as the root causes of conflicts are not addressed and the framework for consensus within the nation-state is not consolidated, conflict, whether potential or actual, will remain a threat to nationhood...To favour harmony and peaceful interaction is not, or should not, be to support a problematic status quo” (Deng 1996, 221). Restructuring the state, Deng holds, is indispensable for thinking about conflict resolution and responsibility in postcolonial Africa.

This culturally syncretic approach distanced Deng from both emerging discourses around human rights and the democratic peace, both of which sought to make foreign imposed regime change (FIRC) part of an international arsenal to enforce compliance. The responsibility of the international community Deng envisioned did not include armed coercive intervention or FIRC in service of either human rights or democratization. The latter is of particular importance: the democratic peace became a justification for American politicians to advocate FIRC, and was a secondary justification for the 2003 Iraq War.

Francis Deng is an excellent case for examining the ways in which colonially-informed sovereignty and the nation-state were being challenged across Africa in the 1990s and 2000s. Neither Deng, nor Salim, were alone in their convictions, nor did they work as solitary actors. The Conference on Security, Stability, Development, and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA) in conjunction with the African Leadership Forum (ALF) promoted the Kampala Document, in what Olusegun Obasanjo referred to as “a second wave of liberation struggle, this time against internal domination” (Obasanjo 2001, xiv). The Kampala Document recognized the sovereignty of each African state, but in a marked shift away from the OAU's conception of strict sovereignty (which Salim as OAU secretary-general challenged), also recognized the interdependence of security, stability, and development of African states. According to this vision for Africa, “The key to security...is the responsible exercise of state sovereignty, in the absence of which cooperation among neighbors is required to deal with internal problems and conflicts” (Deng and Zartman 2002, 8). While Deng was a member of the ALF, he was one of several on this “council of elders,” and not acting alone.

Further, the disbanding of the OAU and the establishment of the African Union (AU) in 2002 demonstrated that the principle of non-intervention was losing popularity among African states. As noted above, the OAU was founded in part to secure the principle of non-intervention. By contrast, Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union established the legitimacy of an AU-led intervention into African states. Taken together, the CSSDCA and the AU point to ways in which Deng's ideas were both taken up in Africa, as well as demonstrating that he was not a sui generis figure, but part of a larger movement from the Global South challenging the sovereign state.

Conclusion

At negotiations over the implementation of R2P at the UN in 2009, Maged A. Abdelaziz, speaking on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), issued a statement re-affirming the adoption of R2P as UN doctrine through the 2005 World Summit document, while also expressing concern about the doctrine's potential for abuse. This was a significant stance: institutional opponents of the R2P, such as General Assembly president Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, and delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, insisted that the paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit document did not establish R2P as UN doctrine, and moved to send the discussion into committee (where it could be interminably blocked) rather than before the General Assembly.

The statement on behalf of the NAM included two important points for thinking about R2P both beyond intervention and as the result of innovation from the Global South. First, noting the unease that even some supporters harbored, the statement argued: “In order to build consensus on the way forward, there must be clarity on what needs to be done, based on our agreement that each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations. Capacity building is key in this regard in order to allow States to shoulder this responsibility, and allow the international community under the umbrella of Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter to support their efforts, as necessary and appropriate, and to assist those States which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out” (Abdelaziz 2009, 3). State capacity building, as I have argued in this and the previous chapters, is not a matter of neoliberal structural adjustment but an emancipatory strategy for postcolonial states emphasized by Francis Deng. Sovereignty-as-responsibility, in focusing on the question of sovereignty rather than intervention or human rights, addresses problems by simultaneously considering state capacity and responsibility, as well as the responsibility of the international community to every state's people. Though “sovereignty-as-responsibility” is never named in official R2P doctrine, state capacity building is clearly an outgrowth of Deng's conceptualization of sovereignty.

Second, the NAM statement noted that R2P and its constituent features were the result of African innovation: “the African Union is a pioneer in implementing R2P due to its particular historical experience. The conditions for implementation are clearly stipulated under Article 4 (h) and (J) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union, namely in order to restore peace and security upon the request of the State, and only pursuant to a decision by the Assembly of the Union. To date, the African Union has dispatched two operations, both upon the decision of its Assembly” (Abdelaziz 2009, 3). Locating the positive example of the genesis of R2P in the African Union (AU, a successor organization to the OAU) locates both the innovation in sovereignty and institutional implementation in the Global South.

The 2009 statement from the NAM helps us to understand the impact of Deng's work, and also gives voice to an understudied side of R2P. In carefully reconstructing Deng's work – first his legal anthropology, then on IDPs, and finally sovereignty-as-responsibility – we can trace a significant innovation in the state system to its roots in the postcolonial world. While other studies (notably Weiss 2007 and Bellamy 2011) frame R2P as a particular approach to humanitarian intervention emerging from the aftermath of NATO's Kosovo campaign in 1999, such accounts cannot explain why the doctrine eventually drew widespread support in the Global South (beyond a cursory mention of Deng's diplomacy prior to the 2005 World Summit) and downplay the role of state capacity building. The 2009 NAM statement in support of R2P, however, demonstrates that important actors from the Global South promote an understanding of R2P which is rooted in Deng's vision of sovereignty, not the ICISS nor that of the major powers’ approach to intervention.

In a critique of the postcolonial intellectual, the South African writer Fetson Kalua argues that after decolonization too many intellectuals became servants of regimes. Rather, the intellectual must be a transformative thinker: “Such transformations should focus on amelioration in realms such as physical development, education, health, human rights, identity, various freedoms, and several spheres of life. In a word, rather than being sterile or non-creative technocrats, genuine intellectuals are people who are imbued with and have learnt to cultivate the spirit of impartiality and justice as the founding principles or ideals of a stable society” (Kalua 2020, 29). Rather than focusing on being an effective international bureaucrat in a structurally unequal world – and treating internal displacement as a matter for technocracy – Deng’s challenge to sovereignty worked to upend colonial assumptions that fueled modern conflict.

1^ Though popular sovereignty is usually interpreted as not implying responsibility to an international community. On popular sovereignty as explicitly eschewing an international responsibility, see Cunliffe 2007, Cunliffe 2009, and Getachew 2018.

2^ Sovereignty (2015) is the clearest formulation of Johnson's longstanding critique of the “just war revival” inspired by Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars.

3^ I outline Acharya's (2013) account of “norm circulation” in chapter 1.

4^ This is detailed in chapter 4

5^ It is from the disappearance of the international legally recognized minority that Glanville (2014) concludes that the origin of 'traditional' sovereignty is actually a post-WWII phenomenon – an international legal regime that recognized the status (if not necessarily rights, per se) of domestic actors within sovereign states cannot be described as the 'strict' sovereignty that much 20^th and 21^st century IR scholars invoke.

6^ See chapter 1

7^ See chapter 1

8^ A detailed account of these fights and negotiations are beyond the scope of this project, but readers may consult Haddad 2008, chapter 6.

9^ For an overview of this literature, see Edward Said (2002).

10^ See, among others, Robert D Kaplan (1994) and John Mearsheimer (1996).

11^ See, for ex, Rodney 1972, Gunder Frank 1967. For more recent examples of the neocolonial/neoimperialism thesis, see Mamdani 2021.

12^ This was a favored option for many who believed in the “ancient hatreds” hypothesis: Mearhseimer (1996) makes this argument explicitly.

13^ Barnett 2011, though Barnett views the apolitical understanding as more of a legitimation story than an accurate description.

14^ Discussed below in section 4

15^ The first powerful argument for partial sovereignty for postcolonial states at the end of the Cold War was Jackson (1990). Keohane (2003) argued for partial sovereignty on humanitarian intervention grounds.

16^ See Chapter 2.

17^ The classic version of this argument is made by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth.

18^ Here the influence of the New Haven/Yale jurisprudence, in particular Deng's adviser Harold Lasswell, is most clear. Lasswell's approach sought to find empirical evidence of universal values of human dignity, rather than consigning dignity to metaphysics.

19^ See Thakur, 2011 for a detailed argument for why the Annan-led talks in Kenya were a case of R2P, and why it may be regarded as a success.

20^ There is an ironic parallel to Mamdani's (2021) argument for why the South African Truth & Reconciliation process was successful in preventing outbreaks of mass violence, while the partition of South Sudan fueled mass violence. In the former, punitive measures were not held out as a looming sanction for a particular identity group. However, the international community beyond Africa was much more involved in the creation of South Sudan, thus colonially -informed racial categories became the basis for assigning political power in way that did not happen in South Africa.