Research Seminar
‘Retaining the Mandate of Heaven: Sovereign
Accountability in Ancient China’.
By: Luke Glanville, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute and
Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University.
Ideas of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ have become
increasingly accepted by the society of states in recent years. The origins of these ideas
are appropriately traced to earlier European concepts of popular resistance and
humanitarian intervention. However, Europe is not unique in possessing a heritage of
sovereign accountability. Almost two thousand years before sovereignty emerged in
early modern Europe, philosophers in Ancient China developed remarkably similar
concepts about the responsibilities of legitimate rule. Confucian scholars, in particular
Mencius, argued that rulers were established by Heaven for the benefit of the people.
The people, in turn, could rightfully hold their rulers to account. They had the right to
banish a bad ruler and even to kill a tyrant. Moreover, a benevolent ruler was justified in
waging ‘punitive war’ against the tyrannical ruler of another state, in order to punish him
and to comfort the people. Recognition of this non-European heritage of sovereign
accountability opens up new possibilities for dialogue between those who would promote
present day concepts of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and those who perceive these
concepts as merely Western and alien principles grounded in Western and alien values.
Luke Glanville is a research fellow in the Griffith Asia Institute and Centre for
Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University. He recently submitted his PhD thesis
at the University of Queensland which examines the historical development of the notion
that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their populations from grave
violations of human rights and explores the implications of this history for present
thinking about the responsibilities of sovereignty.
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Thursday 27 May 2010
N72 Room -1.18
Nathan campus
12:30-1:50pm
To RSVP, please contact Natasha Vary on (07) 3735 5322 or [email protected] no
later than 5.00pm Tuesday 25 May 2010.