ABSTRACT
Insecurity is so much a part of daily life for many people on this planet that it has renewed interest in trusteeship as an arrangement of security in international society. Although the anti-colonial movement destroyed the legitimacy of trusteeship along with the great European empires in Africa and Asia, it did not simultaneously abolish the conditions to which trusteeship was a response. Indeed, daily life in some societies is so burdened by gross human rights abuses, mass murder, civil war, starvation, mutilation, slavery, and cannibalism that it is scarcely unlike the barbarism that selfproclaimed trustees of civilization set out to remedy in colonial Africa and Asia. The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate the character of trusteeship in the hope of assessing its suitability as an arrangement of security in contemporary international society. We shall proceed by examining the justification of trusteeship and its claim that one man may rule another, in lands that are not his own, so long as the power of dominion is directed toward the improvement of the weak and disadvantaged. This will lead into a discussion of one of the principal critiques of trusteeship, namely that its justification is confused by a conflict of obligation and interest. In the final section we shall explore the extent to which contemporary international society is hospitable to the resurrection of trusteeship. It will become evident as a result of this investigation that trusteeship is an unpromising arrangement of security in a pluralist international society that continues to value political independence, self-determination, and equality among its members.
