Diplomacy & Public Service
Peerless
Francis Deng
born 1938
Wrote the idea that became the world's Responsibility to Protect
Peerless is level 1 of 4 in the South Sudan Hall of Fame: changed the field itself. Tell the country's story without them and the story breaks. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He argued in 1996 that sovereignty is not a shield but a duty — that a government owes its own people security and welfare, and is answerable to the world if it fails. The UN built the Responsibility to Protect on it.
Francis Mading Deng took a law degree at the University of Khartoum and a master's and doctorate in the science of law at Yale, and has written or edited more than thirty books across law, conflict resolution, displacement, human rights, anthropology, folklore, history and politics.
He was the UN Secretary-General's Representative on Internally Displaced Persons from 1992 to 2004, and in 2007 Ban Ki-moon appointed him Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide at Under-Secretary-General rank. He became South Sudan's first Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and later its roving ambassador.
His 1996 book Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa set out the argument that national governments are duty bound to guarantee minimum standards of security and welfare to their citizens and are accountable both at home and internationally — the intellectual foundation on which the United Nations later built the Responsibility to Protect.
He was the UN Secretary-General's Representative on Internally Displaced Persons from 1992 to 2004, and in 2007 Ban Ki-moon appointed him Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide at Under-Secretary-General rank. He became South Sudan's first Permanent Representative to the United Nations, and later its roving ambassador.
His 1996 book Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa set out the argument that national governments are duty bound to guarantee minimum standards of security and welfare to their citizens and are accountable both at home and internationally — the intellectual foundation on which the United Nations later built the Responsibility to Protect.
- United Nations — Secretary-General appoints Francis Deng of Sudan as Special Adviser for Prevention of Genocide
- Brookings — Sovereignty as Responsibility
- Cambridge, International Theory — Recovering African contestation and innovation in global politics: Francis Deng and sovereignty-as-responsibility
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