The events in Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012 have severely tested the balance between emerging global norms and the pushback they have generated, a contest between global and local, with outcomes as yet unclear.

Some established great powers, particularly Russia and China, suffered “buyer’s remorse” for the global principle of “responsibility to protect” peoples from massacres, when that responsibility was seen as authorizing regime change in countries such as Libya. This remorse occurred just a few short years after they and the entire rest of the United Nations member states unanimously endorsed the principle at the World Summit in 2005 and reaffirmed it in 2009.

The international community has answered the most fundamental sovereign questions of who rules and what rules in evolving ways. In the nineteenth century, European states, the United States, and just a few other powerful states such as Japan constructed high walls about their sovereign domestic jurisdiction. No foreign interference was allowed. Governments treated their subjects poorly or well according solely to local whims, laws, or constitutions. Other political societies, in Africa, East and South Asia, or Latin America, had very low sovereign walls. The great powers ruled them as colonies or intervened at will to impose foreign rules and foreign interests, whether it was protecting foreigners, or collecting debts, or enforcing Christian morality.