At the outset of his response to Ayelet Shachar, Jakob Huber observes that political theorists usually ask two kinds of questions when it comes to issues of refugees and asylum: who should be granted refugee status and how the burdens of refugee protection should be distributed among states. Shachar’s essay, by contrast, presents a third puzzle: does it matter from where refugees seek protection. Noting that Shachar herself is drawn to a negative conclusion, Huber makes the contrary case, building on Kant’s conception of cosmopolitan right (Weltbürgerrecht) in order to defend a right of safe passage. He begins by arguing that our answer to the shifting-border phenomenon is contingent on a deeper question concerning the relation between humanitarian claim-making and territorial presence. He then turns to a related interpretive puzzle. Against the widespread “natural law” reading, he puts forward an interpretation that characterizes cosmopolitan mobility as a form of political agency. This allows him to defend a right of safe passage as part and expressive of a broader shift aimed at acknowledging the choice and the voice of refugees. Huber concludes by suggesting that conceiving of mobility as a form of agency invites us to reframe migration as a whole and see it less as a problem than as a regular part of the human condition.

Leti Volpp begins her response to Ayelet Shachar’s lead essay by observing that the “shifting border,” while unsettling, is not entirely new. To support this assertion, she points to the examples of embassies, churches, and colonial territories as historical exceptions to the Westphalian model of coterminous territory and jurisdiction. Nonetheless, she commends Shachar for pushing thinking forward along multiple dimensions, providing a synthetic approach that will help direct future conversation. The rest of Volpp’s response is divided into two sections. In the first of these, she focuses on Shachar’s discussion of the “shifting border in action” and her analysis of state techniques that both “bleed” the border inward and stretch it out, in order to parse what might be distinctive about these politico-legal phenomena. Volpp then turns to Shachar’s two normative proposals. The first of these is to constrain the shifting border by ensuring that the human rights and constitutional provisions that govern executive power apply regardless of where border control activities are exercised. The second is to delink access to territory and asylum claims. Volpp is sympathetic to these suggestions, but remains skeptical at Shachar’s hope of eliciting greater state responsibility through affording extraterritorial protection. Nonetheless, she praises Shachar’s rich description and provocative normative framework, which provide a conceptual road map for navigating the unsettling legal topography of the shifting border.

This chapter investigates whether France played a role in the emergence of the responsibility to protect and whether the international concept impacted it in any way. It explains that even though Chirac’s various executives continued to promote the importance of human protection, and in particular the idea that because of its history, values and rank, France had a special role to play, France did not take part in the emergence of R2P. The chapter argues that France was excluded from the discussions on R2P after the international community deemed its conception and practice of human protection to be controversial and outdated. It then analyses France’s ongoing commitment to human protection despite its exclusion from the negotiating table. During the lead-up to the Iraq war, France showed that it was willing to to defend its conception of human protection and that its voice still mattered. Additionally, Chirac’s various executives remained committed to intervene militarily for humanitarian purposes and thus continued to contribute to shaping the way the international community practised human protection.

This chapter examines how the Downing Street Declaration was created and how the Irish sought to develop the peace process. In particular, it looks at the complication of text and principles as well as conceptual areas and strategy.

The chapter provides an overview of the innovative framework promoted by the book to analyse the historical interplay between France’s domestic norm of human and the international norm of human protection at the time. The framework builds on the respective work of Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) and Acharya (2004, 2011, 2013, 2015) and is defined by four key stages: entrepreneurship, localisation, subsidiarity and internalisation. Because norms are not static, these stages are likely to recur as the international context evolves and/or new forms of contestation emerge, but the framework put forward can be used to analyse these developments. Before exploring it in more depth, the chapter first investigates some of the key factors that have influenced France’s conception of, and contribution to, human protection over the years. It concludes by emphasising the theoretical contributions made by the book.

This chapter investigates France’s relationship to R2P after it was endorsed by the international community in 2005. It discusses France’s progressive role of norm consolidator, while also analysing how and why France at times endangered the international principle. It also argues that even though there is evidence that R2P began to restrain when and how France could intervene to protect, the influence of the international principle remained limited. In contrast, the domestic norm remained influential and led France to intervene to protect beyond cases defined by the United Nations Security Council as R2P situations, in a way that aimed to fulfil France’s perceived duty while promoting its rank.

In her response to Ayelet Shachar, Chimène I. Keitner argues that Shachar’s lead essay is as important for what it does not address as for what it does. Shachar identifies a number of strategies increasingly used by states to control immigration, but offering a critique of these strategies does not get us very far toward understanding, or attempting to alleviate, the structural and other factors that contribute to their adoption. As Keitner observes, “the shifting border is a symptom, not the disease.” Citing the proliferation of academic work on the subject, she asserts that the core problem is not a lack of conceptual tools, as Shachar thinks, but a lack of political will. In the rest of her response, Keitner traces the regulatory shift from location to identity that lies at the heart of Shachar’s account. She then canvasses some of the persistent obstacles to states’ acceptance of constraints on their ability to regulate entry by non-nationals. Finally, she suggests that governance models of migration regulation might ultimately be better suited than advocacy models to addressing contemporary challenges of global human protection. Keitner concludes by arguing that we do not lack visions of what solutions could look like; what we lack are effective strategies to combat the political mobilization of xenophobia, and programs to alleviate the deep and growing inequality within and between societies that drives destination states to implement restrictive measures to begin with.

The chapter investigates whether, how and why France continued to play a central role in human protection in the second half of the 1990s and whether its conception and practice of human protection impacted – and was impacted by – humanitarian intervention and the increasing international contestation it face. In order to do this, it investigates the norm contestation faced by humanitarian intervention – and more specifically, the role played by France in deepening this contestation – along with the challenges faced by France during its participation to United Nations interventions undertaken for humanitarian purposes. It argues that despite this challenging context, the various executives did not promote a normative rollback, and emphasises the role played by France’s domestic norm of human protection. It then explains that in order to fulfil France’s perceived duty to protect without endangering its rank, and to address some domestic and international constraints, however, France’s practice of human protection evolved considerably and contributed greatly to the reinforcement of the global trend of delegating humanitarian intervention to multilateral organisations and adopting more robust strategies in the field. The last section illustrates these changes by continuing the case study of France’s involvement in former Yugoslavia and, more specifically, by focusing on its interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

This chapter outlines how dialogue was conducted leading up to the Good Friday Agreement. It highlights the intensity of dialogue, the role of American influence and how pressures were managed as to create expectations about power-sharing and agreement.

This chapter explores the period of the Sunningdale Agreement and how the Irish Government sought to influence Sunningdale and deal with its aftermath in the wake of unionist intransigence.

The Introduction explains why the book is needed, defines the core concepts of the book and provides an overview of its theoretical framework, methodology, structure, argument and contributions.