ABSTRACT
This chapter examines an alternative analogy to Kuhn’s portrayal of scientific revolutions typified by the Copernican inversion of the Ptolemaic image of earth as the centre of the heavens. The Responsibility to Protect, commonly shortened to ‘Responsibility to Protect', is widely seen as a quintessential post-Westphalian, liberal internationalist norm. Rulers have long claimed that the protection of their subjects is the first duty of the sovereign’s primary responsibility of the relevant sovereign state – an idea that is grounded in the long-standing attempts by rulers to legitimise their regimes based on the claim that they protected their people. International law, however, has continued to recognise states and governments on the basis of who exercises effective political control over discrete territories. The input of historical trauma of the colonised societies makes them deeply suspicious of various concepts of suspended sovereignty, interrupted sovereignty and, most significantly, conditional sovereignty.
