An Imperfect Response to My Critics Luke Glanville Associate Professor, Department of International Relations, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Luke.glanville@anu.edu.au Luke Glanville, Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 240 pages. isbn: 9780691205021 (hbk). I am incredibly grateful to Susanne Karstedt, Uğur Ümit Üngör, and James Pattison for taking the time to read and respond to Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities. What a privilege it is to receive such thoughtful and astute feedback from colleagues. Their essays provide compelling overviews of the book’s key claims, valuable reflections that have caused me to reflect anew on what I sought to do in the book, and provocative gestures toward what I might have done differently. Let me begin by address- ing some points that Karstedt and Üngör raise about my treatment of the past and present politics of international protection before turning to Pattison’s comments about the concept of ‘imperfect duties’ that underpins the book’s ethical framework. 1 On Optimism It is intriguing to me that both Karstedt and Üngör read my book as one that is optimistic. Karstedt senses that, while I spend a good amount of space acknowledging and wrestling with the long and frequently disturbing his- tory of international efforts to construct and perform extraterritorial protec- tion responsibilities – a history marked by selectivity, hypocrisy, paternalism, and racism, especially with respect to European relations with non-European peoples – I nevertheless remain ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the future of international human protection. Üngör perceives that, whereas others would argue that the atrocities of the present century demonstrate the failure of the Responsibility to Protect (r2p), I retain a ‘grim optimism’ about the norm. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/1875-984X-14010008 Global Responsibility to Protect 14 (2022) 115–121 Downloaded from Brill.com09/07/2022 11:58:32PM via Australian National University