Abstract:After almost four decades of abandonment, the institution of trusteeship had a revival on the international agenda as the United Nations assumed responsibility of the war-torn territories of Kosovo and East Timor in 1999. This revival was met with severe criticism for jeopardising the values of order and equality in contemporary international society. The present article argues that this criticism is misleading. The essence of a modern trusteeship is not order or equality but the expansion of freedom. Rather t… Show more
“…Many of the international institutions and their accompanying body of formalized norms, or international law, are concerned with the implementation of these last two ideas, and with negotiating the tension between sovereignty and protection of international norms that this entails (Young ; Zacher ). Søbjerg (:478) argues that, with the rise in attention paid to competing norms of individual rights in ways that often supercede state “rights”, there has been a rise in intervention by international actors in the internal affairs of particular states:Despite this appraisal of sovereignty as the most important principle of contemporary society, an increasing number of violations of sovereignty such as humanitarian interventions have taken place within the last decade and a half. This disregard of sovereignty has occurred with reference to justice and solidarity.…”
International trusteeship of post‐conflict territories by multilateral institutions or foreign states received renewed attention in the wake of its application in Kosovo and East Timor during the 1990s. Subsequently, interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have contributed to the intensity of critical discussion over post‐Westphalian sovereignty approaches and competing norms regarding human rights, nationalism, and security. This article seeks to establish normative and practical criteria for the application of the trusteeship model to weak, fragile, or post‐conflict societies. In particular, I propose that consent of the local population, multilateral international approval and participation, and absence of local institutional capacity for effective governance form the key dimensions of the legitimacy and feasibility of a potential international trusteeship. Building on the literatures on quasi‐states, state building, liberal institutionalism, and critiques of international intervention, the article tests the utility of these criteria through illustrations of international trusteeships in East Timor, Kosovo, and through a more extensive analysis of the Palestinian territories. It concludes that, despite frustrations over the Israel‐Palestinian peace process in the absence of intensive external intervention, the Palestinian territories do not meet the proposed criteria for the effective and legitimate application of an international trusteeship.
“…Many of the international institutions and their accompanying body of formalized norms, or international law, are concerned with the implementation of these last two ideas, and with negotiating the tension between sovereignty and protection of international norms that this entails (Young ; Zacher ). Søbjerg (:478) argues that, with the rise in attention paid to competing norms of individual rights in ways that often supercede state “rights”, there has been a rise in intervention by international actors in the internal affairs of particular states:Despite this appraisal of sovereignty as the most important principle of contemporary society, an increasing number of violations of sovereignty such as humanitarian interventions have taken place within the last decade and a half. This disregard of sovereignty has occurred with reference to justice and solidarity.…”
International trusteeship of post‐conflict territories by multilateral institutions or foreign states received renewed attention in the wake of its application in Kosovo and East Timor during the 1990s. Subsequently, interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have contributed to the intensity of critical discussion over post‐Westphalian sovereignty approaches and competing norms regarding human rights, nationalism, and security. This article seeks to establish normative and practical criteria for the application of the trusteeship model to weak, fragile, or post‐conflict societies. In particular, I propose that consent of the local population, multilateral international approval and participation, and absence of local institutional capacity for effective governance form the key dimensions of the legitimacy and feasibility of a potential international trusteeship. Building on the literatures on quasi‐states, state building, liberal institutionalism, and critiques of international intervention, the article tests the utility of these criteria through illustrations of international trusteeships in East Timor, Kosovo, and through a more extensive analysis of the Palestinian territories. It concludes that, despite frustrations over the Israel‐Palestinian peace process in the absence of intensive external intervention, the Palestinian territories do not meet the proposed criteria for the effective and legitimate application of an international trusteeship.
“…For example, Lene Søbjerg argues that the essence of a modern trusteeship is the expansion of freedom: according to her, modern trusteeships can contribute to the reestablishment of liberty, stability, and peace in territories emerging from conflict. 9 A second body of normative literature on postconflict reconstruction revolves around the policy debate over the ''responsibility to rebuild.'' In late 2001 the independent International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) issued its report, The Responsibility to Protect, which sets out the view that if the international community seeks to claim a responsibility to protect civilians through the use of force, it is obliged also to consider the aftermath of such military measures.…”
Abstract:Contemporary global governance is organized around an odd pairing: care and control. On the one hand, much of global governance is designed to reduce human suffering and improve human flourishing, with the important caveat that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves how they want to live their lives. On the other hand, these global practices of care are also entangled with acts of control. Peacebuilding, public health, emergency aid, human rights, and development are expressions of this tension between care and control. There is a concept that captures this tension: paternalism. Drawing on our moral intuitions, I argue that paternalism is the attempt by one actor to substitute his judgment for another actor's on the grounds that such an imposition will improve the welfare of the target actor. After discussing and defending this definition, I note how our unease with paternalism seems to grow as we scale up from the interpersonal to the international, which I argue owes to the evaporation of community and equality. After exploring the implications of this definition and distinguishing it from other forms of intervention, I consider how different elements of paternalism combine to generate different configurations. Specifically, I point to five dimensions that are most relevant for examining the paternalism found in contemporary global and humanitarian governance: the tools used to restrict another actor’s liberty (force versus information); the scope of the interference (wide versus narrow); the purpose of the intervention (prevention of harm versus emancipation); the source of the paternalizer’s confidence (faith versus evidence); and the mechanisms of accountability (internal versus external). These different elements often correlate historically, suggestive of two ideal types of global paternalism: strong and weak. Contemporary global and humanitarian governance is largely the weak variety: force is severely proscribed, interference is relatively restricted, the paternalizer’s confidence has epistemic roots, and accountability to local populations remains a noble but rarely practiced goal. I further speculate that a major reason for this difference is the effects of liberalism and rationalization. I use this taxonomy to suggest how two different global efforts to improve the lives of those peoples living in what were perceived to be unstable and illiberal territories — the civilizing missions of the nineteenth century and the peacebuilding operations of the post-Cold War period — exhibited different kinds of paternalism. I conclude by reflecting on the ethics of international paternalism.
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