Scholarly Ships in the Night: Sovereignty as Responsibility and the Good Governance Agenda

On September 16, 2005, the UN General Assembly adopted the World Summit Outcome document. Across paragraphs 138–40, summit participants endorsed the “responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity” (UNGA 2005, 30). This endorsement followed years of intensive advocacy from supporters of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s (ICISS 2001, viii) report, The Responsibility to Protect, which outlined “the idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe … but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states.” From this point forward, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle has been the subject of persistent academic debate, which only intensified following the 2011 UN Security Council-backed, NATO-led R2P intervention in Libya (Thakur Reference Thakur2013; Welsh Reference Welsh2016).

Although Deng has written on a range of topics, including African governance, human rights, internal displacement, legal anthropology, and Sudanese culture, history, and politics (see An-Na’im and Deng Reference An-Na’im and Deng1990; Deng Reference Deng1971; Reference Deng1980; Reference Deng1986; Reference Deng1993c; Reference Deng1995a; Reference Deng1995d; Deng et al. Reference Deng1996; Deng and Lyons Reference Deng and Lyons1998; Deng and Zartman Reference Deng and Zartman2002), he is most known for developing the concept of sovereignty as responsibility. Deng’s influence in shaping the origins of R2P—both diplomatically and intellectually—has been substantiated across several practitioners’ retrospectives (Axworthy Reference Axworthy2004, 414; Cohen and Deng Reference Cohen, Deng, Bellamy and Dunne2016; Deng Reference Deng2010; Evans Reference Evans2006, 708). For Acharya (Reference Acharya2013, 476), Deng’s contribution to R2P reveals its plural origins and manifestations (see also Quinton-Brown Reference Quinton-Brown2024, 195–97), particularly the importance of the African regional context.

Yet Deng’s conception of sovereignty as responsibility is hardly uncontested. R2P critics have argued that it reflects or is even responsible for what they see as R2P’s neo-imperial and neoliberal orientation.Footnote ³ Getachew (Reference Getachew2019, 226) contends that “the very redefinition of sovereignty as responsibility … displaces more expansive accounts of sovereignty that emphasize ideals of self-government and independence to render the concept of sovereignty instrumental and paternalist.” Getachew specifically attributes this paternalism to Deng’s “equation of government with conflict management” and “casting [of] the state in the role of manager” (230; emphasis added). Whyte (Reference Whyte, Singh and Kim2016, 310–11) claims that R2P has enabled the “‘responsibilization’ of the postcolonial state,”Footnote ⁴ as its proponents “sought to banish the specter of colonialism by moving away from the language of a ‘right to intervene’ towards the neoliberal language of ‘sovereignty as responsibility.’” Thus, “the responsible state is conceived as one that is responsive to the needs of the private sector and pursues economic policies dictated by the global financial institutions and major donor nations” (318). Both Getachew and Whyte deem sovereignty as responsibility to be ahistorical and depoliticizing.

In response to these and other critiques (see Cunliffe Reference Cunliffe2010; Mamdani Reference Mamdani and Cunliffe2011), Mares (Reference Mares2024) reframes Deng’s conception of sovereignty as a fundamentally political effort to remake the postcolonial state, with a particular focus on the problem of internal displacement as a colonial legacy. Addressing Whyte’s argument directly, Mares (368) contends that Deng used the term “responsibility” to affirm postcolonial state agency, rather than to deny colonialism’s consequences or to echo the neoliberal emphasis on individual self-help. By reconstructing Deng’s early thought, Mares (364) re-periodizes the idea of sovereignty as responsibility in a postcolonial context, long before the publication of Sovereignty as Responsibility. Mares further distinguishes Deng’s promotion of state capacity building from “neoliberal structural adjustment,” portraying the former as a distinctive “emancipatory strategy” in support of postcolonial sovereignty (376).

Nonetheless, this literature largely overlooks what Deng argued should be the subject of responsible sovereignty: good governance.Footnote ⁵ Such an elision is particularly striking given that, as noted by Deng’s collaborator Roberta Cohen (Reference Cohen2006, 90), “Deng and other scholars developed the concept of sovereignty as responsibility in writing about good governance in Africa” (see also Cohen Reference Cohen2010; Cohen and Deng Reference Cohen, Deng, Bellamy and Dunne2016, 75, 77–78). One exception among R2P scholars is Chandler (Reference Chandler2010, 163–66), who contends that the 2009 UN Secretary-General’s report Implementing the Responsibility to Protect reframed mass atrocities as being the responsibility of individual states, prompting a turn toward institutional development interventions concerning good governance.Footnote ⁶ However, as this article will show, good governance was central to Deng’s original conception of sovereignty as responsibility.

Good governance scholars have reciprocated this neglect. In using the term “good governance” in the report Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Landell-Mills, Agarwala, and Please Reference Landell-Mills, Agarwala and Please1989), the World Bank departed from its historical avoidance of political issues such as corruption. Existing good governance scholarship emphasizes three “environmental catalysts”Footnote ⁷ that spurred the concept’s rise: the end of the Cold War, which “relaxed donor states’ concerns about sovereignty” amid a general mood of triumphalism regarding the Western liberal democratic model (Weaver Reference Weaver2008, 100; see also Bøås and McNeill Reference Bøås and McNeill2004; Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama1989; Kapur Reference Kapur2001, 210; Kapur and Webb Reference Kapur and Webb2000, 2; Leftwich Reference Leftwich1993); the World Bank’s internal crisis following the failures of structural adjustment programs (Weaver Reference Weaver2008, 96; see also Best Reference Best2005; Reference Best2014; Santiso Reference Santiso2001, 5; Williams Reference Williams2008); and the rise of NIE, which—in combination with ascendant neoliberal economic thought—persuaded development policy makers to remake domestic institutions in Global South states, echoing earlier modernization and colonial development agendas (Weaver Reference Weaver2008, 98–99; see also Anghie Reference Anghie2000; Babb and Kentikelenis Reference Babb and Kentikelenis2021; Duffield and Hewitt Reference Duffield and Hewitt2009; Gathii Reference Gathii1999a; Reference Gathii, Quashigah and Okafor1999b; Hewitt Reference Hewitt2006; Keene Reference Keene2002, 147–48; Thomas Reference Thomas1999).

Although the good governance concept has been deployed in a variety of ways (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2016; Weiss Reference Weiss2000), a large body of critical scholarship has traced the narrow, market-oriented focus of the good governance agenda and associated anticorruption reforms (for example, see Bukovansky Reference Bukovansky2006; Weaver Reference Weaver2008, 93). To explain the good governance agenda’s limited remit, some scholars have invoked the World Bank’s interpretation of its legal mandate to avoid encroaching on political issues while nonetheless implementing a liberal reformist agenda (Sinclair Reference Sinclair2017; Williams Reference Williams2008; Reference Williams2010). Others have offered anthropological and sociological explanations centered on the World Bank’s culture and organizational incentives (Best Reference Best2014; Sarfaty Reference Sarfaty2012; Weaver Reference Weaver2008). The Bank itself highlights former president Jim Wolfensohn’s 1996 “Cancer of Corruption” speech as motivating the agenda’s rise (Lateef Reference Lateef2016; World Bank 2020). Finally, numerous scholars have studied how the World Bank’s conception of good governance foreclosed the anticolonial possibilities of democracy and human rights agendas, reproducing global hierarchies of domination and inequality (Abrahamsen Reference Abrahamsen2000; Anghie Reference Anghie2000; Gathii Reference Gathii1999a; Reference Gathii, Quashigah and Okafor1999b; Harrison Reference Harrison2004; Williams Reference Williams, Olivié and Pérez2019).

Yet across this extensive literature, the good governance concept’s association with Deng’s work on sovereignty as responsibility has been persistently overlooked. This omission is partially redressed by state-building scholars, who have explored how the merging of humanitarian, development, and security governance under “emergency” conditions has come at the expense of Global South sovereignty (for example, Chandler Reference Chandler2004; Reference Chandler2006; Reference Chandler, Hehir and Robinson2007; Duffield Reference Duffield2001; Reference Duffield2007). Nonetheless, state-building scholars have predominantly examined the effects of this synthesis in practice, rather than its diplomatic and intellectual foundations. Analyses of the good governance concept’s role in state-building and transitional justice have emphasized their “conceptual affinities” and shared historical antecedents (Bhuta Reference Bhuta2008, 532) or alternatively traced their commonalities to a unified “end of history narrative” (Nesiah Reference Nesiah, Buchanan, Eslava and Pahuja2023, 656). In so doing, these accounts underplay the ideational and political conflicts activated through the encounter between global development, humanitarian, and human rights governance, instead presenting the good governance concept’s rise as an inevitable output of liberal triumphalism.

Whyte provides an important exception to this mutual neglect. In substantiating R2P’s imperial and neoliberal character, Whyte (Reference Whyte, Singh and Kim2016, 318) specifically invokes Deng and coauthors’ use of the term “good governance.” Regarding its imperial character, Whyte (318) contends, along with Anghie (Reference Anghie2005), “That this responsibility is framed in the language of ‘development’ and ‘good governance,’ rather than ‘civilization,’ does not mean that it is free of the paternalism and the racial hierarchies that typified the earlier standard of civilization” (see also Anghie Reference Anghie2000; Reference Anghie and Jones2006). Regarding its neoliberal character, Whyte (Reference Whyte, Singh and Kim2016, 318) highlights Deng and coauthors’ support for governance-linked conditionality, arguing that it is provided without concern for “the failures of neoliberal restructuring in Africa” and “the role of the International Financial Institutions in dismantling previous investments in public and social services.” Sovereignty as responsibility therefore represents yet another instance of neoliberal thinkers and institutions remaking humanitarian and human rights agendas for their own purposes (see Whyte Reference Whyte2019; Reference Whyte, Moses, Duranti and Burke2020).

However, as the third section will show, good governance was hardly a synonym for neoliberal structural adjustment when Sovereignty as Responsibility was first published. As for human rights (Whyte Reference Whyte2019, 3), good governance exhibited a Foucauldian “tactical polyvalence.”Footnote ⁸ Its conceptual meaning was only delimited through its programmatic implementation across the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s. The significance of good governance’s initial conceptual latitude is perhaps best demonstrated by Whyte’s quotation of Achille Mbembe in critiquing good governance and structural adjustment (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001, 93, cited in Whyte Reference Whyte, Singh and Kim2016, 319). Mbembe was, in fact, an active participant in early good governance debates. He attended the inaugural conference of the Carter Center’s Governance in Africa Program, arguing for the need to “attack simultaneously the intellectual foundations as well as the material and political bases of post-colonial authoritarianism” (Carter Center 1989, 10; see also Mbembe Reference Mbembe1990, 4).Footnote ⁹ Although Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2001, 7) later critiqued the “narrow horizon of ‘good governance’ and the neo-liberal catechism about the market economy” (see also Mbembe Reference Mbembe2006, 147), he continues to argue that donor states and the IFIs do not take governance-related democracy and rule of law considerations seriously enough (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2022, 3).

Mbembe was not alone in viewing good governance as a possible language through which to resist and transform structural adjustment in Africa. Throughout the 1990s, the Nigerian political economist and development critic Claude Ake and former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere continued to support the good governance concept while denouncing IMF and World Bank lending practices (Ake Reference Ake1996, 39; Nyerere Reference Nyerere1999). In a similar vein, the fourth section will demonstrate how both Deng and coauthors’ conception of good governance and their corresponding policy proposals meaningfully differed from, and at times actively challenged, neoliberal objectives.

As Mares (Reference Mares2024) establishes, Deng’s conception of sovereignty as responsibility also cannot be reduced to neo-imperialism, given his concerted efforts to reckon with colonial legacies. For Mares (356), “R2P and sovereignty-as-responsibility are themselves sites of contestation and offer possible futures for reordering the sovereign states system,” just as for the (early) good governance agenda. However, the boundaries between Deng’s “emancipatory” project of capacity building and “neoliberal structural adjustment” are more porous than Mares (376) implies. Alongside good governance, the World Bank popularized capacity building, jointly creating the African Capacity Building Initiative with the African Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP; World Bank 1991, iii). Moreover, Dunstan Wai—the southern Sudanese World Bank official and political scientist who first internally proposed the term “good governance” (Landell-Mills Reference Landell-Mills2021, 9)Footnote ¹⁰—–theorized good governance and capacity building as dialectically connected imperatives that developing countries should pursue to bolster their sovereignty (Wai [1995] Reference Wai2005). Hence, the fourth section will show that Deng actively intervened in IFI-led debates about African development, strategically oscillating between contesting and affirming neoliberal practices in seeking to reorient the IFIs toward conflict management, prevention, and resolution objectives.

Studying Deng’s Thought as International Theory

Deng’s intent in using the term “good governance” as the subject of responsible sovereignty is not a mere semantic issue. It bears on how he understood his thought and advocacy to be shaping the post–Cold War international order. By reconstructing Deng’s conception of good governance as responsible sovereignty, this article raises broader questions about whether a generalized political economy category such as neoliberalism can fully capture the motivations behind global governance developments across the 1990s and early 2000s. It also casts doubt on monolithic explanations of global politics in the 1990s, centered on the so-called end of history and the unipolar moment, that ignore the subjective perceptions of the actors (re)shaping the post–Cold War international order. Deng, like many of his counterparts, experienced the 1990s as a contingent and potentially elusive period for transforming the extant international order that was nonetheless fraught, given the instability provoked by the Cold War’s end (see Deng Reference Deng1993a).

In studying Deng’s thought, this article seeks to shed light on the manifold intellectual influences over the post–Cold War international order. It resurfaces Deng’s contribution to African and non-Western scholarship and advocacy on good governance issues (more generally, see Adedeji Reference Adedeji1999; Anghie Reference Anghie and Jones2006; Mkandawire Reference Mkandawire2007; Roelofs Reference Roelofs2023). In so doing, I build on recent historical and theoretical studies of the plural origins of international order writ large (Acharya Reference Acharya2018; Helleiner Reference Helleiner2014; Reference Helleiner2023; Lorca Reference Lorca2015; Tourinho Reference Tourinho2021; Towns Reference Towns2012). In this regard, Deng is an illuminating figure, given that he moved between Global North and South academic and policy spaces throughout his career.

Deng’s liminal positionality is also embodied in his diplomatic and policy-making approach. Reflecting a keen awareness of Global South sovereignty concerns, Deng adopted a consensus-driven approach to promoting sovereignty as responsibility among counterparts (Cohen and Deng Reference Cohen, Deng, Bellamy and Dunne2016, 82, 87–88), thereby eschewing the more coercive methods favored by many Northern diplomats and officials (see also Mares Reference Mares2024, 376). Critical scholars of the UN and IFIs have interpreted Deng somewhat favorably for this reason (for example, see Mutua Reference Mutua2001, 207; Reference Mutua2007, 582).Footnote ¹¹ Both the style and substance of Deng’s diplomacy provide a window into alternative post–Cold War internationalisms that abjure liberal interventionist excesses (see Quinton-Brown Reference Quinton-Brown2024).

Deng’s thought is doubly unique, given that he moved between development, humanitarian, and human rights policy spaces in pursuing his overarching concern for conflict management, prevention, and resolution. Studying Deng’s thought thereby foregrounds broader struggles between development, humanitarian, and human rights practitioners over the post–Cold War international order. It is this “World of Struggle,” as described by Kennedy (Reference Kennedy2016), that best captures Deng’s approach to reconfiguring global governance, as he sought to establish common ground between diplomats and practitioners with vastly differing experiences, professional training, and worldviews.

Across the following sections, I seek to demonstrate that Deng is best understood as a theorist and practitioner of the conflict–development nexus. Deng was no neoliberal nor even a consistent supporter of the IFIs. Yet he sought to steer IFI policy making toward conflict management, prevention, and resolution objectives. Deng adopted a pragmatic posture toward the IFIs, strategically embracing aspects of “neoliberal globalization” to achieve his aims (Kentikelenis and Babb Reference Kentikelenis and Babb2019). Accordingly, his conception of sovereignty as responsibility had multiple audiences and influenced the trajectory of both IFI good governance policy making and IFI–humanitarian policy coordination at the turn of the century. From this perspective, the concerted neoliberalization of humanitarianism and human rights is less relevant for understanding Deng’s thought and advocacy than the ends for which he sought to enlist the IFIs. This phenomenon constitutes an equal or perhaps even more influential mirror image of neoliberal humanitarian and human rights agendas. I suggest that studying extra-neoliberal justifications for the expansion of IFI authority is necessary for explaining the making of contemporary development, human rights, and humanitarian agendas (for existing histories, see Barnett Reference Barnett2011; Fassin Reference Fassin2011; Guilhot Reference Guilhot2005; Hoffmann Reference Hoffmann2016; Lorenzini Reference Lorenzini2019; Moyn Reference Moyn2010; Reference Moyn2018; Rist Reference Rist and Camiller2014).

I join a growing cohort of historians, political theorists, and international relations scholars who have offered critical genealogies and intellectual histories of the recent past to make sense of contemporary ideological and political ruptures. In so doing, I undertake a situated intellectual history of Deng as an academic practitioner, foregrounding the interdependence of his ideas and practice.Footnote ¹² This approach responds directly to recent critiques of intellectual historical scholarship for narrating international legal and political developments via thinkers who are far removed from the grounded struggle over global political authority (see, in particular, Orford Reference Orford2021). Instead, I deploy contextualist methods to study a uniquely situated academic practitioner and to recover how his thought recursively shaped his diplomacy. This article draws on academic and policy publications, as well as institutional reports, speeches, and primary source documents held in the African Union Archives, the Brookings Institution Archives, the Brookings Internally Displaced Persons Archive, the Carnegie Commission for Preventing Deadly Conflict Archives, the James Gustave Speth Papers collection, and the Robert S. McNamara Papers collection.Footnote ¹³

I will now contextualize Deng’s thought, surveying the contemporaneous debates regarding good governance, human rights, and sovereignty in which his conception of sovereignty as responsibility intervened.

Contextualizing Sovereignty as Responsibility

Before coauthoring Sovereignty as Responsibility, Deng had been a nonresident senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution since 1988 (Stewart Reference Stewart1988). He took up this position after stints in US academia and think tanks and diplomatic and political service for the Government of Sudan. Since 1992, Deng had also served as Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Internal Displacement.Footnote ¹⁴ His appointment followed concerted advocacy by the human rights community, culminating in the 1991 conference on “Human Rights Protection of Internally Displaced Persons,” in which Deng participated. The conference was co-organized by Refugee Policy Group (RPG) executive director Dennis Gallagher and senior adviser Roberta Cohen (RPG 1991), who later coordinated the Brookings Institution–Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (Brookings-SAIS) Project on Internal Displacement alongside Deng. Cohen and Deng (Reference Cohen, Deng, Bellamy and Dunne2016, 80) trace the conceptual origins of sovereignty as responsibility to this conference, at which participants—including the newly appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata—debated, inter alia, who should bear responsibility for the protection of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). This dilemma emerged from the absence of international refugee protections for those displaced within, rather than outside, their countries of origin; it only worsened as the number of IDPs soared following the end of the Cold War (Cohen Reference Cohen2010, 16–19). The question of how to manage the relationship between sovereignty, responsibility, and protection therefore underpinned Deng’s mandate from its inception.

On being appointed Representative, Deng was initially tasked by Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali with providing practical advice to the UN on how it could protect IDPs (Cohen Reference Cohen1992b). For his first report, Deng collaborated primarily with Roberta Cohen at RPG, Michael Reisman at Yale, and Henry Steiner at Harvard (Cohen Reference Cohen1992a; Reference Cohen1992b; Steiner Reference Steiner1992). Reisman and Steiner and their respective teams drafted the report for Deng’s consideration, actively raising issues relating to humanitarian intervention, human rights, and IDP protection (Steiner Reference Steiner1992). In response, drawing on the 1991 RPG conference debates, Deng’s report made consistent reference to governmental responsibilities to protect IDPs (Bode Reference Bode2014, 290; Deng Reference Deng1993b).

Deng’s early engagement with the concept of sovereignty as responsibility occurred at arguably the high point of human rights–based critiques of state sovereignty, and he worked directly with the leading proponents of these critiques in responding to the issue of internal displacement. Reisman (Reference Reisman1984; Reference Reisman1987) had already questioned the status quo boundaries of international coercion, non-intervention, and state sovereignty and would soon become a prominent defender of humanitarian intervention to promote democracy and human rights (Reisman Reference Reisman1995a, 794, 805; Reference Reisman1995b). Deng’s collaboration with Reisman is perhaps unsurprising, given that Reisman publicly referred to Deng as a friend and was the leading practitioner of the New Haven School approach to international law cofounded by Harold Lasswell, who supervised Deng’s doctoral dissertation (Deng Reference Deng1971; Derrig Reference Derrig2025; Reisman Reference Reisman1992; Reference Reisman1993, 406). Deng’s work regularly drew on universalistic New Haven School concepts such as human dignity, while simultaneously considering how tradition “supplement[s] and inform[s] abstract values and principles” (An-Na’im and Deng Reference An-Na’im and Deng1990; Deng Reference Deng1995b, 256–59; Twining Reference Twining2009, 8). This attempt to bridge the universal and the particular in a postcolonial African context underpinned much of Deng’s early anthropological and international legal scholarship (Mares Reference Mares2024).

Contemporaneous debates within the Brookings Institution regarding African governance and civil violence were similarly influential. Deng highlighted the importance of Foreign Policy Studies program director John Steinbruner’s memorandum on “Civil Violence as an International Security Problem” in his first Brookings publication on internal displacement, Protecting the Dispossessed (Deng Reference Deng1993c, 124–29; Steinbruner [1992] Reference Steinbruner and Deng1993).Footnote ¹⁵ Steinbruner’s memorandum also shaped I. William Zartman’s (Reference Zartman1995) early edited volume Collapsed States, to which Deng contributed. Throughout their collaboration, Deng and Zartman engaged with Africanist scholars who were repurposing the World Bank’s good governance concept for the broader study of “the management of regime relations,” by which they meant “the rules that set the framework for the conduct of politics” (Hyden and Bratton Reference Hyden and Bratton1992, x).Footnote ¹⁶ Hyden (Reference Hyden, Hyden and Bratton1992) thereby sought to develop a conceptual alternative for studying comparative politics that overcame the perceived analytical limitations of terms such as government and democracy. As Mkandawire (Reference Mkandawire2015, 573) notes, the good governance agenda became “closely associated” with the study of “neopatrimonialism,” although Bratton and Rothschild (Reference Bratton, Rothchild, Hyden and Bratton1992, 268–69, 278–79) noted the normative orientation of governance arguments made by African scholars such as Achille Mbembe, Claude Ake, and Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, a conceptual variegation that Mkandawire (Reference Mkandawire2007) has elsewhere highlighted.

Deng’s thought thus evolved from ongoing debates about African governance and state sovereignty. Rather than repudiating the concept of sovereignty in its entirety, Deng viewed his professional and scholarly work as responding to the erosion of sovereignty with the growing recognition of human rights imperatives, as analyzed most prominently by Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali and Organization of African Unity secretary-general Salim Ahmed Salim (Deng Reference Deng1995b; Deng Reference Deng2010, 361, 363–66; Deng et al. Reference Deng1996, xiv). Exemplifying this view, in an influential report titled An Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali (Reference Boutros-Ghali1992, 9; emphasis added) declared, “The time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty, however, has passed; its theory was never matched by reality. It is the task of leaders of States today to understand this and to find a balance between the needs of good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world.”

Boutros-Ghali’s report notably drew on the language of good governance. However, this cosmopolitan invocation of the good governance concept contrasted with the World Bank’s technocratic definition of governance as referring to “the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs” (Landell-Mills, Agarwala, and Please Reference Landell-Mills, Agarwala and Please1989, 60). This is not to say that World Bank officials ignored post–Cold War debates about sovereignty and globalization. At the 1991 World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics, Pierre Landell-Mills—a coauthor of the 1989 World Bank report that first publicized the concept—and Ismail Serageldin presented on “Governance and the External Factor,” explicitly engaging with the relationship between state sovereignty and good governance (Landell-Mills and Serageldin Reference Landell-Mills, Serageldin, Summers and Shah1992). They deployed the UN’s cosmopolitan rhetoric, acknowledging that “we live in an increasingly interdependent world, in which each state must take into account the effect of its actions on others” (308). However, they argued that the constraints of the World Bank’s mandate, coupled with the need to engender support from debtor states, necessitated that good governance measures avoid impinging on sovereignty and instead involve relatively uncontroversial interventions such as capacity building (306, 310, 316).Footnote ¹⁷ Rather than explicitly challenging state sovereignty, the World Bank conceptualized good governance as providing the basis for a “renewed attempt … to link the roles played by political science, institutional economics, and neoclassical economics to create a coherent theory of development management” (303).Footnote ¹⁸ In fact, the World Bank’s (1992, 1) Governance and Development report further narrowed the concept’s meaning to “the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country’s economic and social resources for development,” reflecting World Bank senior vice president and general counsel Ibrahim Shihata’s ([1991] Reference Shihata2000) assessment that the Bank’s mandate restricted it to policy interventions concerning the economic rather than political aspects of governance.

Boutros-Ghali and the World Bank’s competing conceptions of governance reflected the collision of two distinct intellectual projects: reimagining state sovereignty to accommodate humanitarian and human rights imperatives, and reforming development policy making to promote economistic, institutional interventions. Yet these conceptions did not exhaust good governance’s variegation. By 1995, when Deng first detailed his account of sovereignty as responsibility, good governance language had already been invoked across numerous contexts, reflecting the concept’s polyvalent character (Fukuyama Reference Fukuyama2016; Weiss Reference Weiss2000). The UN Economic Commission for Africa (UN ECA) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member states sought in distinct, albeit interconnected. ways to attach the concept to the notions of human and participatory development (Bhuta Reference Bhuta2008, 525; OECD-DAC 1995; UN ECA 1990; 1993). Global North states such as France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom invoked the good governance concept to promote democratization, human rights, and aid selectivity objectives (Hoebink Reference Hoebink2006). In his second major UN “agenda” report, An Agenda for Development, Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali (Reference Boutros-Ghali1994, 22–25) advanced the notion of “democracy as good governance,” incorporating democracy, development, and human rights objectives. Although the linkage of peace and conflict issues to the term “governance” can be traced back to at least 1988 through the United Nations University’s research on “peace, culture and governance” (UN 1988, 605), by 1995 it remained relatively marginal to public, formalized conceptions of good governance. One important exception is the UN ECA’s (1994) work on good governance, which explicitly linked the concept to political stability and peace and security.

In an African context, the good governance concept was taken up by scholarly critics of structural adjustment such as Adebayo Adedeji (Reference Adedeji1994) and Claude Ake (Reference Ake1996), alongside a range of current and former politicians, international bureaucrats, and public intellectuals. However, by late 1995, the good governance agenda was experiencing significant pushback from African and international NGOs, amid accusations of IFI paternalism and persistent attempts to push structural adjustment on African states (Harsch Reference Harsch1996; Tandon Reference Tandon1996), just as the World Bank began to prioritize governance and corruption issues under newly elected president James Wolfensohn (Lateef Reference Lateef2016; World Bank 2020). This pushback echoed earlier concerns within the Organization of African Unity (OAU) regarding the imposition of governance conditionality by European states in negotiations over the Lomé IV Convention midterm review (OAU 1994, 23–24; 1995, 18), as well as African Development Bank (ADB) resistance to “the idea of good governance that the international community is trying to press on Africans” (OAU, ECA, and ADB 1992, 20).

The good governance concept also occupied an increasingly crowded field of attempts to reimagine the post–Cold War international order, with alternatives including “humane governance” (Falk Reference Falk1995) and “human security” (UNDP 1994), which was popularized in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report. As Acharya (Reference Acharya2018, 135, 137) notes, human security had “strong Asian roots”—in contrast to good governance’s Africa focus—and evolved from regional “ideas of comprehensive and cooperative security.”

The humanitarian catastrophes of the mid-1990s—most notably the Rwandan (1994) and Srebrenica (1995) genocides—altered the character of debates about sovereignty and international order. The question of how to prevent atrocities committed within the boundaries of the sovereign state became of the upmost importance to UN diplomats, governments, and human rights scholars. The failure of UN reform efforts following the South Commission (1990) and the Commission on Global Governance (1995) led to the reprioritization of programmatic agendas within existing institutional structures. It is in this context that Deng provided a groundbreaking account of sovereignty as responsibility, which positioned conflict management as the primary objective of good governance and, by extension, the central responsibility of state sovereignty.

Good Governance as Conflict Management

Deng expounded his conception of responsible sovereignty as good governance in two publications: a solo-authored article on sovereignty and internal displacement and a coauthored Brookings Institution volume titled Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Deng Reference Deng1995b; Deng et al. Reference Deng1996). Sovereignty as Responsibility represented the centerpiece of the Brookings Institution’s Conflict Resolution in Africa project, which began in 1989 and formed the basis of Deng and Zartman’s (Reference Deng and Zartman1991) initial collaboration. Deng also drew on his prior UN reports, which introduced and promoted the vocabulary of sovereignty as responsibility (Deng Reference Deng1993d, 3–4; Reference Deng1994, 3; Reference Deng1995c, 8). He then further detailed his vision for addressing African governance issues in three coauthored volumes (Cohen and Deng Reference Cohen and Deng1998; Deng and Lyons Reference Deng and Lyons1998; Deng and Zartman Reference Deng and Zartman2002).

Deng’s coauthors for Sovereignty as Responsibility included IMF Africa Department Deputy Division Chief Sadikiel Kimaro, Brookings research associate Terrence Lyons, and academics Donald Rothchild and I. William Zartman (Deng et al. Reference Deng1996, viii). This collaboration traversed disciplinary and professional boundaries, which in part explains the eclectic set of ideas that they deployed. The volume was first drafted in 1994, and with respect to the following analysis, Deng wrote the first synthesis chapter on a “Normative Framework of Sovereignty” (pp. 1–33) and the third chapter on “Identity” (pp. 61–92), Zartman wrote the second chapter on “Governance” (pp. 34–60),Footnote ¹⁹ and Kimaro wrote the fourth chapter on “Economics” (pp. 93–130; Chege Reference Chege1994, 1–3). Because the volume was published without individual chapter-by-chapter attribution, I will henceforth refer to Deng et al. when citing the book, except when I draw attention to an individual author’s specific views.

In the first instance, Deng et al.’s conception of sovereignty as responsibility is explicitly tied to good governance. Deng’s first chapter synopsizes the book’s argument as follows:

According to Deng et al. (Reference Deng1996, 24), “the core of such responsibility is good governance, which implies the management of all internal affairs, including ethnic relations, the economy, and foreign policy.” This definition’s managerial inflection reflects what Deng et al. (26) view as good governance’s provision of “an objective yardstick for evaluating one’s own performance and the performance of others in the hierarchy of authority and control in the global system.” Thus, they position good governance as a measure of governmental legitimacy. In a separate solo-authored article, Deng (Reference Deng1995b, 273) describes good governance as the “internal dimension” of sovereign responsibility, with the “international dimension” viewing “the state both as an object of scrutiny and a responsible member of the international system.” He therefore conceptualizes good governance promotion as both a domestic and an international obligation, directly responding to Boutros-Ghali’s aforementioned call for states to understand and balance “the needs of good internal governance and the requirements of an ever more interdependent world” (Boutros-Ghali Reference Boutros-Ghali1992, 9; cited in Deng Reference Deng1995b, 269). This further reflects Deng et al.’s (Reference Deng1996, xvii) contention that “the sovereign state’s responsibility and accountability to both domestic and external constituencies must be affirmed as interconnected principles of the national and international order.”

After Deng’s initial chapter, Zartman provides a more detailed justification for making governance the focus of responsible sovereignty. As a transnational ordering principle, Deng et al. (Reference Deng1996, 34) contend that good governance requires effective conflict management: “if sovereignty is responsibility, governing is managing conflict.” They emphasize that conflicts need not become violent, meaning that “the responsibilities of sovereignty are most evident” before violence breaks out, where “proper and effective handling of political conflicts prevent them from turning violent” (40–41). They are consequently pessimistic about conflict management after the prospect of violence emerges (47–48). In the African context, the fundamental problem is that violence is already widespread (53–54). To resolve this issue, they advocate for the institutionalization of conflict management, which involves many characteristic good governance prescriptions, albeit of the more overtly political variety: supporting the separation of powers, freedom of association, free and fair elections, and the decentralization of political authority (54).

Deng et al.’s (48) initial usage of institutionalization draws on both North’s (Reference North1990) NIE—an essential influence over the World Bank’s thinking on good governance (see World Bank 1992)—and Huntington’s (Reference Huntington1968, 59–71) work on political order, which infamously frames corruption as an outcome of “modernization.” This unusual combination of thinkers stems in part from the fact that, unlike for preexisting good governance scholarship, both corruption and economic growth are of secondary concern for Deng et al. (Reference Deng1996, 44), with the latter becoming relevant only insofar as it “appears to be a necessary requirement for the effective handling of demands and management of conflict.” For this reason, they contend that economic policy should “focus on the neoclassical issues of efficiency and growth as well as on the governance matters concerning distributive justice and basic economic rights and freedoms” (94).Footnote ²⁰ Hence, Deng et al. take a broad view of institutionalization, moving beyond the World Bank’s (1992) increasingly narrow focus on property rights and other market-oriented institutions.

In so doing, they combine a social contractarian approach with John Powelson’s account of institutions as providing a means through which states can manage conflicts produced by economic growth (Deng et al. Reference Deng1996, xx, 34–36, 48; Powelson Reference Powelson1972, 13). A far less canonical proto-New Institutional Economist, Powelson is later praised by North but does not draw on North’s economistic analytical toolkit (Powelson Reference Powelson1997; Saha Reference Saha1995, 581; Sullivan Reference Sullivan1995). Instead, Powelson offers a distinctive, historicist approach to institutional economic theory that foregrounds the challenge of conflict management. Through this intellectual synthesis, Deng et al. connect the idea of good governance directly to peace and security issues.

The final pillar of their analysis concerns the issue of when states do not deliver good governance. On the one hand, Deng et al. (Reference Deng1996, xvi) declare that if African governments “fail to discharge the responsibilities of sovereignty … they cannot legitimately complain against international humanitarian intervention.” On the other hand, they suggest that when states “cannot do so because of incapacity, they can legitimately call upon the international community to assist them” (xvii). This constitutes a more bounded view of humanitarian intervention as a final resort. To some extent, this follows from Deng et al.’s managerial approach. They contend that “governance is self-governance, just as democracy is self-rule” and that “any assumption by others of these functions reduces their integrity” (57).Footnote ²¹ Deng et al. therefore reject the efficacy of externally imposed governance, instead prioritizing efforts to support governments to manage their own conflicts.

In considering how external actors should support states to manage conflicts, they turn to the IFIs. Specifically, to conclude his “Identity” chapter, Deng argues,

In Kimaro’s chapter on “Economics,” he further endorses “the adoption of growth-oriented policies” and “the liberalization of financial and economic markets” by African countries (Deng et al. Reference Deng1996, 108). Deng et al. nonetheless contend that “there could be room for a more conscious use of conditionality in influencing the management of conflict” and that there is “a need for reorienting structural and macroeconomic policies toward the goals of conflict management” (125–26). Regarding the good governance agenda specifically, Deng et al. (128) posit that even though “recent efforts by donors to influence the economic aspects of good governance constitute a welcome step toward effective management of conflict, there remains, nonetheless, a clear need to extend these efforts to the distributive variables noted above and to specific challenges of each level of conflict.”

This contention underpins a subtle, albeit probing, critique of existing development practices and indeed the economics discipline more generally. For Deng et al. (Reference Deng1996, 98), “the political and social dynamics of these groups … cannot all be captured easily through the Lorenz curve, the Gini coefficient, or other such tools that economists commonly use to gauge income distribution.” On this basis, they advocate for the consideration of issues such as “unfairness in the distribution of wealth and income” and extra-economic identity conflicts, which would typically be ignored or marginalized by neoliberal economists (61, 97). However, regarding IMF and World Bank conditionality, they caution,

Hence, they provide qualified support for linking conditionality to “the economic aspects of governance and conflict management” in a division of labor that delegates “non-economic” governance conditionality to donor states. As foreshadowed in the first section, this complicates Mares’s (Reference Mares2024, 376) argument that, for Deng, “capacity building is not a matter of neoliberal structural adjustment but an emancipatory strategy for postcolonial states.” As Whyte (Reference Whyte, Singh and Kim2016, 318) observes, Deng et al. both support and seek to broaden conditional policy-based lending by the IMF and the World Bank, albeit within the limits described earlier.

Although Deng had previously critiqued structural adjustment (Deng Reference Deng1993a, 33, and later Deng and Zartman Reference Deng and Zartman2002, 2–3), he concludes his identity chapter by recognizing IFI interventions as a “truism” that, like governance issues, have become “widely accepted” (Deng et al. Reference Deng1996, 92). And as mentioned, the World Bank became a key supporter of capacity-building initiatives in close connection to the good governance agenda. Thus, although the term “neoliberal” is perennially contested, Deng et al. endorse, at the very least, deploying the core policy technologies of neoliberal globalization for the purposes of conflict management (Kentikelenis and Babb Reference Kentikelenis and Babb2019). The interpretation of Sovereignty as Responsibility as either emancipatory or neoliberal elides Deng’s pragmatic approach in reorienting IFI interventions, including with respect to “structural and macroeconomic policies” of adjustment toward his preferred ends.

Deng expands on his vision for good governance promotion through IFI interventions in two later publications. On the one hand, Deng (Reference Deng, Deng and Lyons1998, 153) praises the “growing consensus among development experts and donors that indigenous values, institutions, and practices are essential to grassroots participatory development.” On the other hand, he adopts a sharper tone in claiming that “the international community should support those governments committed to economic reform, participatory democracy, respect for human rights, and responsible international partnership with positive incentives” and “should discourage those bent on repression and resistance to reform with punitive sanctions, and offer a combination of carrots and sticks to those wavering in between” (170–71).

In a later collaboration with Zartman, Deng praised prominent UN ECA initiatives that broke from the IFI mainstream—such as the 1988 Khartoum Declaration—for “contribut[ing] general principles to the struggle for development,” even if “they remained unconnected and unimplemented” (Deng and Zartman Reference Deng and Zartman2002, 3–4). Deng instead advocated for a Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA), drawing on the 1991 Kampala Document that outlined a set of corresponding principles, norms, policies, and recommendations modeled on the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (Deng and Zartman Reference Deng and Zartman2002, 6; Mares Reference Mares2024, 371). For Deng, such a conference would address the fact that the goals of security, stability, development, and cooperation are interdependent and thus politically indivisible.

Ultimately, Deng et al.’s account of responsible sovereignty provided a nuanced reworking of the good governance concept that challenged the existing scope of governance interventions. The coauthors did not straightforwardly transplant neoliberal ideas about good governance into a peace and conflict context. Instead, they advocated for the consideration of redistributive needs, economic and social rights, and identity issues, drawing from a more expansive array of thinkers than the usual cast of neoliberal economists.Footnote ²² In conceptualizing good governance as responsible sovereignty, Deng sought to reconcile the goals of security, stability, development, and cooperation with IFI development practices. It is for this reason that I argue Deng is both a theorist and practitioner of the conflict–development nexus. In what follows, I examine how Deng’s arguments shaped UN and IFI policy making, providing a powerful justification for the expansion of their respective authority.

The Governance and Conflict Prevention Agenda