ABSTRACT
Roland Paris is a formidable intellectual, one of Canada’s foremost mid-career scholars with an enviable international reputation already, who thinks deeply and writes cogently on some pressing contemporary challenges of global governance at the intersection of scholarship and policy – as well as a friend and professional colleague. In the period of decolonisation after the Second World War, as European empires crumbled and retreated from around the world, the UN steadily expanded the range of executive actions it undertook to fill power vacuums in many newly-independent countries. A good example of normative inconsistency on the use of force comes from some statements by the US president. A hundred years ago, war was an accepted institution with distinctive rules, etiquette, norms and stable patterns of practices. The charge that inaction on Syria has proven the hollowness and emptiness of Responsibility to Protect.
