‘States without government,’ for being too narrow (see Thürer 1999: 731-32). Wilde’s is the most interesting critique of the discourse and, in focusing upon the question of responsibility, pre-empts some of the later debates about responsibility to protect. For him, the responsibilities discourse in relation to ‘failed States’ is misplaced. He argues that the label ‘suggests that when governmental infrastructure collapses, the state, its people, and its leaders are solely responsible’ (Wilde 2003: 426). While he accepts that indigenous factors such as ‘civil conflict or corrupt leadership’ often contribute, to a significant degree, to State collapse, other factors, such as ‘the involvement of foreign states, international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, multinational corporations, and the like often plays a major role in mediating the state of local conditions, thereby affecting the viability of the economy and governmental infrastructure’ (Wilde 2003: 426). As will be shown below, the responsibilities discourse is much narrower than its equivalent in relation to ‘failed States,’ focusing as it does exclusively upon the protection of civilians from massive human rights abuses. Wilde’s primary assertion that responsibility cannot be seen as a simple question of singular fault is important to bear in mind, however, when considering the prospects of responsibility to protect. Responsibility turns out to be a considerably more complex notion than the ‘failed States’ discourse would suggest. The ‘failed States’ discourse achieved some purchase in the academic literature and policy prescriptions during the immediate post-Cold War era. The Fund for Peace, a United States-based non-governmental organisation, continues to publish an annual ‘Failed States Index,’ which it uses to analyse and support weak and ‘failing’ States. It provides policy advice to governments in relation to conflict, early warning and assessment, which is an
revolution’ (Orford 2011: 109). Referencing Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Orford notes that, ‘[a]ccording to Hobbes, the lawful authority is recognisable as the one who achieved protection in the broad sense of bringing into being a condition in which the safety of the people can be achieved’ (Orford 2011: 36). This argument was revived, according to Orford, by Carl Schmitt in the twentieth century, though Schmitt used the idea of protection to justify authoritarian government. Thus, ‘Schmitt was concerned with conjuring up the figure of an all-powerful sovereign who could restore order and issue commands that would be obeyed’ (Orford 2011: 132). Such a figure would function on the basis of its ‘capacity to represent the will of an “indivisibly similar, entire, unified people”’ (Orford 2011: 37) against ‘enemies both within and beyond the state’ (Orford 2011: 130). In the words of Schmitt, ‘[d]emocracy requires [. . .] first homogeneity and second – if the need arises – elimination or eradication of heterogeneity [. . .] A democracy demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign and an equal that threatens its homogeneity’ (Schmitt 1988: 9). This defence of totalitarianism ‘was realised in the fascist states of 20th-century Europe’ (Orford 2011: 37). Therefore, Orford is clearly well-aware of the paradox of the ‘turn to protection’ within the context of the responsibility to protect, which challenges the tyranny of States and insurgents by providing an authority to protect to someone or something. In the case of the responsibility to protect, that something is the rather ephemeral and unidentified ‘international community.’ The power of the international community is, therefore, to secure protection, ultimately through the potentially tyrannical power to distinguish between friend and enemy. It is at this point that Orford makes clear her primary concern with the concept of responsibility to protect: ‘[t]he history of attempts to ground authority