Good Governance as Responsible Sovereignty: Francis Deng and the Conflict–Development Nexus

The South Sudanese UN official, diplomat, and scholar Francis Deng is widely recognized for his intellectual contributions to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle, most notably through his 1996 coauthored publication, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa. However, existing scholarship has paid limited attention to how Deng conceptualized the subject of responsible sovereignty: good governance. Through a situated intellectual history, this article reconstructs Deng’s conception of good governance, exploring its reception before and beyond R2P. I contend that Deng reformulated good governance as primarily concerning conflict management. Deng’s thought and advocacy in the late 1990s then shaped the expansion of the good governance agenda, the rise of human security, and the synchronization of humanitarian and development activities through efforts to bridge the so-called relief–development gap. Hence, I portray Deng as a novel theorist and practitioner of the conflict–development nexus, who sought to enlist the international financial institutions for conflict management, prevention, and resolution prerogatives. In so doing, this article destabilizes existing grand narratives of the post–Cold War international order that hinge on end of history triumphalism and neoliberal ideological diffusion.