Mr Connor O'brien1
1University Of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Biography:
Connor O’Brien is a second-year Politics PhD student at the University of Cambridge. He obtained a BA (honours) from the University of Melbourne and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. Connor’s PhD dissertation is titled The Development Leviathan: Good Governance and the Remaking of Global Political Authority, 1989-2005. It examines the evolution of the good governance concept across the long 1990s, working at the intersection of international relations, intellectual history, and historical sociology.
Abstract:
Humanitarian interventionism and global development policymaking are typically understood to be distinct and indeed distant spheres of global governance. However, I contend that these fields were in fact closely connected throughout the 1990s, with the emergent concept of good governance playing a critical mediating role. This paper analyses the position of the good governance concept in Francis Deng’s theorisation of ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility’. Widely regarded as the intellectual forerunner of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, Deng framed good governance, in the form of effective conflict management, as the primary responsibility of state sovereigns. Thus, Deng proffered a managerial conception of political authority which drew heavily upon New Institutional Economics, the increasingly influential institutionalist tradition propelling the World Bank’s Good Governance Agenda. This institutionalist view of the developmental state was critical for reconceptualising sovereignty as contingent, and hence humanitarian interventionism as legitimate. Ultimately, I conclude that the gradual divergence of the good governance concept from early R2P thinking contributed to R2P becoming a responsive and interventionist, rather than preventive and programmatic, instrument of global governance.