The Political Economy of Security Development in the Neoliberal Age : R2P and the UN This book builds upon Foucauldian scholarship’s compelling interrogations that have contributed to the changing conceptualization of the premises of the discipline of International Relations. This epistemological ‘glasnost’ facilitates the analysis of the United Nations General Assembly endorsed ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) as not merely a security but a security development measure. This book unpacks the conditions that on one hand necessitate such measures and on the other hand allow the subsequent dilution of their radical promise. This framing and analysis of R2P has implications beyond R2P. Increasingly citizens converted into populations are shepherded by the state to chambers of partial if not total surrender of civil liberties standard of living and well being. The COVID 19 pandemic accelerated such measures for people in the Global South who since the inception of the post Second World War order continue to await their turn to be the beneficiary of development. The development initially prescribed by the modernization theorists echoed subsequently in the 1980s by the good governance promoter—World Bank—continues to elude most in the Global South. Indeed the region’s political and economic instability is often the site that renders as a truism Foucault’s upending of Clausewitz’s dictum—‘War is the pursuit of politics by other means’—with ‘Politics is the pursuit of war by other means.’ The thanatopolitics (politics of death) of these ‘failed ’ ‘failing ’ or ‘flailing ’ states is the reason why their populations are seen to be in frequent need for the operationalization of the international community’s ‘responsibility to protect.’ Rina Kashyap is Associate Professor of Politics at the Lady Shri Ram College of Women University of Delhi New Delhi India. 1. Introduction 2. Understanding R2P as a Security Development Measure: Security and Development in the Discipline of International Relations and in the UN Security Development Dispositif 3. Historical Context of R2P 4. The Material and the Ideational Dimensions of R2P in the UN’s Security Development Dispositif 5. Understanding the Map: Locating R2P in the UN’s Security Development Dispositif 6. Understanding the Map: R2P as Discursive Rearticulation within the Liberal Neoliberal Security Development Dispositif 7. R2P: The Journey So Far.