The responsibility to protect concept offers a coherent framework for understanding the practices of international executive rule that have shaped the decolonised world since the 1950s. As outlined in Chapter 1, those practices were initiated during the early years of decolonisation by then UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld argued forcefully that it was necessary to stop thinking of the UN merely as a forum for ‘static conference diplomacy’ and instead reimagine it as a ‘dynamic instrument’ for ‘executive action, undertaken on behalf of all members’. The techniques of international governance developed during that period – such as preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping and territorial administration – were premised upon the idea that the UN could act as a neutral force and fill the political vacuum caused by a temporary crisis of authority within a territory, thus pre-empting intervention by powerful states with vested interests. In order to understand the implications of the responsibility to protect concept, this chapter explores the development of those practices of executive rule, and the shifting ways in which they have been rationalised and reflected upon over the past fifty years.

Although Hammarskjöld recognised that the UN Charter gave little attention to the development of the executive aspects of the organisation, he did not interpret this as a limitation on executive action. Instead, he argued that the UN's ‘executive functions and their form’ had ‘been left largely to practice’.