ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the merit of the template account of the responsibility to protect and insight into the moral and empirical assumptions informing the larger project of democracy promotion which influential formulations of the responsibility to protect could be made to serve. The newly emerging positivist international legal order was grounded on familiar assumptions: that states are the sole subjects of international law, and that in the absence of any higher authority, they are bound only by their own consent—assumptions that are no longer tenable. In performing its reinterpretation of the concept of sovereignty as responsibility, international commission on intervention and state sovereignty relies upon the argument that the legal and political concept of sovereignty has undergone a significant transformation, and that the exclusivity and sanctity traditionally associated with it are legal fictions. The human security concept introduced in the 1994 UN Human Development Report, and adopted as the basis for the responsibility to protect, provides a rare credible candidate.
