Beginning in the late 1990s, a debate emerged whether Edmund Burke might be read as a significant critic of empire because of his impeachment of Warren Hastings. The debate that ensued, I argue in this article, revealed ambiguities and paradoxes in the category of anti-imperialism. Rather than imperialism and anti-imperialism representing a clean binary, anti-imperial projects, events, and figures may embody the very sorts of politics that many disciplinary debates about anti-imperialism wish to critique. Foregrounding “anti-imperialism” in the history of political thought, I conclude, may obfuscate as much as it illuminates—even when examining the twentieth-century experience of decolonization.

Against both liberal narratives and postcolonial critiques, this article argues that sovereignty-as-responsibility – the theory of sovereignty embraced in the responsibility to protect (R2P) – is part of a problem space that emerged with decolonization, rather than the end of the Cold War. The internally displaced person (IDP), the vehicle which Francis Deng used to critique Westphalian sovereignty, had to be theorized against the rise of the postcolonial state. In recovering the questions motivating Deng, we find a stark politics driving his work on IDPs and sovereignty. Against the claim that the heart of R2P is armed coercive intervention for humanitarian purposes, Deng used sovereignty-as-responsibility to promote a profoundly political critique of the colonial legacy and the postcolonial state, which was taken up by states of the Global South in debates on the ratification of R2P. Recovering Deng's work on IDPs and sovereignty-as-responsibility highlights R2P as itself a site of contestation, and offers a case for how ideas emerge ‘from below’ in global politics.

I challenge a recent trend in just war theory – that civilians might be complicit with terrorists and lose non-combatant immunity – by reversing the gun sights and asking whether colonizing populations complicit with empire might compromise their non-combatant status. Employing colonial settlers as a thought experiment, I demonstrate the logic of expanded civilian culpability that has been proposed in the wake of the War on Terror would be unacceptable in other scenarios, and that these revisionist proposals are in service of ends incompatible with just war. In the process, I identify an important ambiguity regarding the performativity of non-combatant status, and show how this is used to aggressively expand civilian culpability for violence.