Alden Young is an associate professor of history and global affairs at Yale University. He was a 2021-22 Berggruen Institute Fellow. Muez Ali is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and honorary research fellow at University College London.
This work is supported by the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research program, funded by UK International Development. The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the UK government. Sudan has often served as a mirror for judging the health of the liberal world order because it has repeatedly been a laboratory for multilateral interventions to prevent atrocities and stabilize the humanitarian situation.
During the second Sudanese civil war, which stretched from 1983 to 2005, an estimated more than two million people died. In Darfur during the first decade of the 2000s, international observers estimated that 300,000 people died and another 2-3 million people were displaced. At the time, finding a solution to Sudan’s conflicts was a priority for the United States and the coalitions it galvanized.
For instance, Sudan’s second civil war came to an end only after intense mediation by the troika of the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway, as well as Sudan’s African neighbors, in 2005. The level of Western concern and diplomatic resources mobilized to intervene in Sudan’s conflicts in the early 2000s feels almost unimaginable today. In the 2000s, Sudan hosted two massive UN peacekeeping missions: the more than 13-year-long African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur, which ended in 2020 and the more than six-year-long United Nations Mission in the Sudan, which ended in 2011.
The goals of these missions were to prevent genocide in Darfur and to guarantee the implementation of the peace agreement ending the civil war between the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army and the government in Khartoum. This mission, which included approximately 10,000 soldiers and numerous civilian authorities, ended with a referendum on the independence of South Sudan in 2011. A few months later South Sudan was welcomed by the international community as the newest country in the world.
It was in this context — of the international efforts to end Sudan’s civil wars and the resulting mass displacements — that South Sudanese diplomat Francis Mading Deng developed the idea of “sovereignty as responsibility.” Deng served as the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on internally displaced persons from 1992 to 2004, and many experts credit Deng’s idea of sovereignty as responsibility as the intellectual genesis of the international principle of the Responsibility to Protect. The UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles in 2005 marked a high-water point for the legitimacy of the liberal world order. R2P, as formulated by Deng and others, tried to balance sovereignty as a state’s right to non-interference with the international community’s duty to ensure that a state protects the welfare of its own citizens.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
