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.

This chapter investigates France’s relationship to R2P in the post-Libya era, and more specifically during Hollande’s presidency (May 2012 – May 2017). It argues that Hollande and his various executives were strong promoters of the international norm normatively, diplomatically and militarily. However, it also explains that France’s strong involvement was not always beneficial. It then investigates the reasons behind this strong support. It argues that it can partly be explained by the fact that R2P was beginning to be internalised by France to a certain extent, but explains that this internalisation did not mean that the domestic norm became obsolete, as it remained very influential during Hollande’s presidency. Finally, the chapter reflects on the shift in France’s strategy to intervene for humanitarian purposes. It argues that despite a strong unilateral presence in Africa, it would be mistaken to argue that a return to Françafrique or a shift away from multilateralism was taking place.

This chapter provides a comprehensive picture of how dialogue and negotiations between the Irish and the British led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Here Michael Lillis describes his relationship with British official David Goodall and the process of engagement that led to agreement

This chapter explores how the Irish worked to shape the course of Sunningdale, what went wrong, what happened afterwards and how relations developed between Dublin and the British, moving towards the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the increased role of Irish involvement in the affairs of Northern Ireland.

In her closing essay for the volume, Ayelet Shachar begins by briefly restating her concept of the “shifting border.” She then moves on to address the three core issues raised by her interlocutors, which she labels as follows: 1) shapeshifting migration control and illiberal leeway; 2) legal institutions, social change, and constraints on governmental power; 3) the emancipatory power of ideas and political agency. Shachar concludes by observing that we cannot wait for perfection before we turn to counter preventable harm, death, and injustice. At the same time, we should not be afraid to contemplate robust, long-term solutions to the vexing problems of unfettered power, systemic exclusion, and official indifference to migrants’ rights, safety, and dignity.

In her response to Ayelet Shachar's lead essay, Noora Lori commends Shachar for providing the conceptual language to critique the contemporary migration-enforcement practices of liberal states while developing a framework for countering the illiberal effects of these policies. Lori notes, however, that while Shachar explains that the shifting border contracts and expands into time as well as space, most of her empirical examples focus on spatial mobility. Dividing her response into two parts, Lori begins by elaborating on the temporal aspects of Shachar’s argument, notably legal maneuvers that deploy time to police the boundaries of the national body politic. These separate the chronological advancement of the clock from the counting of time under the mantle of the law: what matters is not how much time a person has resided in a territory but rather how that time is counted by the state. By pegging rights to a specific legal status, and counting the time of different statuses differently, states can suspend, slow down, or speed up chronological time in order to exclude, delay, or hasten the inclusion of particular non-citizens. The second part of Lori's response takes a step back to assess the larger implications of Shachar’s findings for our understanding of the political continuum between liberal democracies and authoritarian or autocratic states. Lori observes that, like the enterprises of colonialism and imperialism during previous periods, the practices associated with contemporary migration enforcement highlight the contradictions between democratic ideals and the actual practices of liberal states.

In her lead essay for the volume, Ayelet Shachar introduces the concept of the "shifting border." Whereas borders are traditionally understood to exist at a country's territorial edge, prosperous countries are increasingly utilizing sophisticated legal tools to selectively restrict mobility and access by detaching the border and its migration-control functions from a fixed territorial marker. The shifting border extends the long arm of the state to regulate mobility half the world away, while also stretching deeply into the interior, creating what have been referred to as “constitution free” zones or “waiting zones” where ordinary constitutional rights are partially suspended. To understand this development, Shachar proposes a change in perspective from studying the movement of people across borders to critically investigating the movement of borders to regulate the mobility of people. Looking at cases in the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Australia, she reveals a paradigmatic and paradoxical shift in the political imagination and implementation of the sovereign authority to screen and manage global migration flows in a world filled with multiple sources of law. When it comes to controlling migration, states are abandoning traditional notions of fixed territoriality, but when it comes to granting rights and protections, the same states snap back to a narrow and strict interpretation of spatiality which limits their responsibility and liability. Shachar concludes her essay by exploring whether there are limits on such authority, and if so, how to activate them and who should do so.