Professor Mark Gilbert and the Bologna Institute for Policy Research hosted Professor Jennifer M. Welsh to discuss her recent research into the liberal aspirations of human rights advances in the 1990s, particularly as they pertain to notions of sovereignty and individual accountability.

Professor Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University, as well as director of the university's Centre for International Peace and Security Studies. Previously, she served as Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute and as Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford. At Oxford, she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict. Professor Welsh also has experience as the Special Advisor on the Responsibility to Protect for former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Part of a broader book project (co-edited by John Ikenberry and Peter Trubowitz), the question at the core of Professor Welsh's research is whether the key human rights developments of the 1990s – built on the idea that individuals are subjects of global concern, with rights that transcend boundaries and affect state responsibility – are truly as revolutionary as they are often perceived. To examine this question in detail, Professor Welsh focused specifically on the concepts of "Sovereignty as Responsibility" and "Individual Accountability."

The idea of Sovereignty as Responsibility, she noted, represented a shift from the traditional Hobbesian conception of sovereignty. Under the new, liberal claim, sovereignty had been transformed from the right of absolute state authority into one that identifies a source of authority outside of the state which can condition key state rights, such as non-intervention. Along this line of thought, international law and international organizations should abandon their traditional neutrality toward domestic principles of legitimacy, and instead pursue stability and security for individuals. In practice, this could be identified both in a "positive" sense having to do with how political entities gain sovereign status and in a "negative" one pertaining to how states can temporarily lose rights of sovereignty.

Individual Accountability, meanwhile, brought forward the idea that individuals, not only states, can be subjects of international law and held accountable for their acts. With this new conception of individual criminal accountability under international law, any individual who commits widespread and grave violations of human rights can be held accountable, regardless of their official status or function. This idea most concretely took shape in the form of criminal tribunals created in the 1990s, though these were temporally and territorially limited to what the great powers of the time prioritized, and later the International Criminal Court.

When it comes to examining each of these ideas in practice, Professor Welsh argued they should best be understood as forms of "soft revolutionism." While they attempted to recast practices of conflict resolution, intervention, and international justice, they have not proven to be quite as novel either in theory or in practice as some liberal proponents have suggested. This was in part because they did not represent the only way sovereignty and justice could have been understood following the end of the Cold War, and because the most powerful liberal state in the international system during that time – the United States – was reluctant and selective in its commitment to some of the key liberal ideas around human rights that emerged in the 1990s, sowing the seeds for later contestation of those ideas.

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hosted by Professor Mark Gilbert


Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University and Director of the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies.

She was previously Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect.

She has published several books and articles on the ethics and politics of armed conflict, the ‘responsibility to protect', humanitarian action, the UN Security Council, and Canadian foreign policy. Her most recent book, The Return of History: Conflict, Geopolitics and Migration in the 21st Century (2016), was based on her CBC Massey Lectures.

Welsh sits on the Advisory Boards of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt. In 2021, she was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.