"Always on top"? : the "Responsibility to protect" and the persistence of colonialism

While the R2P literature consistently affirms the centrality of the state, the post-colonial state no longer appears as the guardian of the self-determination of its people, if it ever did, but as a “regulatory barrier between Western domination of the international order and the instability caused by the inequalities perpetuated through its reproduction.” Thus, redefining sovereignty as responsibilities provided a way to re-imagine the postcolonial state as an agent of stabilization that manages its population in the interests of a global, neoliberal order. “States are still the front –line responders to today’s threats…” reads a key UN report. “It follows that greater effort must be made to enhance the capacity of States to exercise their sovereignty responsibility.” This language of “front-line responders,” which tends to portray the state as a police force, is not coincidental. States, according to ICISS and to Deng et al., must be sufficiently strong to police internal conflicts and pacify their populations. As Deng et al. frame it, Sovereignty as Responsibility is concerned with “government hired to serve as allocator, judge, and policeman over a jostling crowd of petitioning groups.” Central to the role of the state, in this framing, is overcoming what they see as one of the major defects of independence movements: their tendency to raise expectations, especially amongst the urban population. Thus, the people must be disciplined to accept a neoliberal economic agenda, and states must be disciplined to exercise their sovereignty within a field of clearly demarcated political and economic options. The dream of responsible sovereignty is one in which post-independence states will be held responsible for their failures, while those who established the rules of the game these states are forced to play will evade responsibility, and thus remain, in Said’s words, “always on top.