The paper argues that Anglo-American approaches to civilian protection since 2011 have increasingly taken the form of ‘Low Intensity Humanitarianism’. In both Libya and Syria, objectives of civilian protection have been reduced to support for local proxies, marking a distinctive movement away from longer-term and more immersive counterinsurgency, stabilization and multi-dimensional peace operations. A post-Iraq/Afghanistan anxiety about long-term, highly immersive interventions is likely to have contributed to this apparent turn toward more limited and remote forms of response. However, the paper suggests that this more remote cosmopolitanism might also indicate the limits of trans-border moral solidarity within domestic publics against the backdrop of an increasingly permanent economic emergency. At a time when increasingly sophisticated, cosmopolitan-informed foreign policy concepts are emerging, ultimately the depth of moral solidarity and cosmopolitan identities within domestic polities will dictate the contours of future practice. Are cosmopolitan-minded policies simply the preserve of economically successful societies?
