The Usage and Usefulness of History

Abstract

Luke Glanville, Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 240 pages. isbn: 9780691205021 (hbk). This is an extraordinarily lucid account of the past, present and future of the responsibility to protect (R2P). It is the ‘fruitful framing’ (p.18) in the history of ideas and practice of international law and protection of vulnerable populations that makes this book such a perspicacious contribution to knowledge and theorising, even if perhaps less to the practice of international politics. Luke Glanville embarks on a journey and takes his readers with him, that starts in medieval philosophy and ends in The Gambia’s case against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice. In between, readers are taken on a breathtaking tour de force through legal philosophy and political practice that has the potential of changing minds and perspectives. The book is a contemplation on history, rather than the future, and the author wants us to learn from history in order to secure a possible and sustainable future for the project of the responsibility to protect.