Review: Power and Responsibility
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Author | Luke Glanville |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200906400423 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 1160 | Autumn 2009 | International Journal |
the radical changes in the sources of international instability that have taken
place since the end of the Cold War. Since 1991, in fact, the greatest threats
to international peace and security have come mainly from within states,
rather than from clashes between states. In this sense the world is post-
Wilsonian, given that Wilson organized his views around the principle of
state sovereignty.
Although the responsibility to protect was not cooked in the American
liberal kitchen, it is certainly consistent with liberal internationalism, thanks
to its insistence that only the UN has the legitimacy to declare when a state
has failed to protect its own citizens and that external intervention is
necessary. The military intervention in Iraq was inconsistent with this
principle: Iraq was not a failed state and the UN never authorized an
invasion. In sum, Slaughter brings home two very important points: first,
that Wilsonian internationalism is at odds with the Bush administration’s
neoconservative unilateralism and, second, that Wilsonianism is a necessary,
but insufficient, tradition for dealing with contemporary challenges to
international peace. Whatever one’s views on the issues developed in this
short book, the authors have done a wonderful job in demarcating their
disagreements. Indeed, this book should be compulsory reading for students
and practitio ners of American foreign policy. Listening to Obama’s UN
speech, one might think that he also found it useful reading.
Sergio Fabbrini/University of Trento
POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY
Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats
Bruce Jones, Carlos Pascual, and Stephen John Stedman
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009. 360pp, $32.95 cloth
ISBN 978-0815747062
In the 1990s, Francis Deng introduced the concept of “sovereignty as
responsibility” when working as special representative of the UN secretary
general on internally displaced persons. For Deng, sovereignty as
responsibility meant that national governments were accountable to their
own people and also to the international community for the provision of
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