Both scholars and international actors frequently stress the important role played by anti-civilian ideologies in escalating risks of mass atrocities against civilians. Yet strategies to combat and counter anti-civilian ideologies remain an uncertain and understudied component of atrocity prevention, and scepticism about their efficacy is to be expected. This paper provides a preliminary framework for thinking about strategies and interventions designed to counter the ideological causes of mass atrocities.

Despite its prominence in the discourse of international politics, the concept of ‘great power responsibility’ remains largely unmapped in International Relations. Existing accounts tend to focus their analysis at a structural level and do not pay adequate attention to agency and processes of deliberation, negotiation and contestation. Drawing on constructivist insights to extend existing English School scholarship, this article unpacks great power responsibility as a socially constructed and negotiated concept.

While pre-modern China’s relations with her Sinic neighbours have been described as a distinctive variant of the English School’s international society based on a shared Confucian culture and a China-centred tributary system, her relations with her nomadic neighbours, including the Hsiung-nu, Turks, Uighurs and Mongols, have often been characterized as purely power-political, Hobbesian and lacking any societal foundation.