A cost with no holder is never repaired.

The book in sixteen sentences

One sentence per chapter, in the language of the book and without a word changed; each leads to the passage that carries it.

1. Globalisation has displaced the effects of decisions far faster than it has displaced the mechanisms of responsibility. 1. Introduction
2. The scale of the accountability deficit is not a matter of scarce means. 2. The accountability deficit
3. Over the past three years, the United Nations has produced the most complete diagnosis of this problem ever drawn up — and has stopped, with remarkable consistency, at the threshold of binding implementation. 3. A dense international system that stops along the way
4. A solution holds only if it places the human being and human values at the heart of the decision — and it keeps them there only by inscribing them in the very structure of that decision, rather than by entrusting them to the conscience of the decision-maker. 4. The theory of chain-based accountability: origins and design principles
5. None of these institutions is invented from nothing: each generalises functions already at work somewhere — sectorally, regionally, or voluntarily — and links them together. 5. Seven functions, not necessarily seven new institutions
6. Three principal instruments, distinct in their addressees and in their effects — not a single text with superimposed functions. 6. The legal, normative and civic system
7. Certifying a model attests to its technical compliance, not to the legitimacy of the decision it informs: the latter remains human, reasoned and contestable. 7. Institutions equipped with AI, governed by humans
8. It asks whether, once the seven functions and the three instruments have been specified, a single case file can pass through the whole architecture — without the measurement being redone, without the uncertainty disappearing, without the price preceding the law, without the funder commissioning its own evidence and without redress arriving too late. 8. The integrated demonstrator: an AI data centre
9. Among the five transmission modes of Table 4, policy spillovers are the least theorised at the institutional level — and the one this research programme has dissected most completely. 9. Monetary spillovers: from incidence to bounded attribution
10. The chain does not deal only with harm: applied to development financing, and in particular to the Sevilla Platform, it could make aid more effective by linking announced money to verifiable results. 10. From announced financing to actionable development
11. Instrumented accountability is, upstream, an infrastructure of peace. 11. Preventive peace and resilience in the face of crises
12. The question every reader should ask is not “is this desirable?” but “through what sequence of individually rational steps could any one of these elements come into being?”. 12. The political economy of adoption
13. An architecture is credible not when it claims to have no internal tension, but when it can show where those tensions lie and how they are resolved. 13. Stress tests, objections and the cost of the architecture
14. Sixteen limits bound the claims of this document, and each defines a research front on which collaboration is invited. 14. Limits, refutability and research programme
15. An accountability chain that begins only after the harm has materialised remains incomplete where the mechanisms of propagation are reasonably foreseeable. 15. From corrective accountability to anticipatory accountability: the prevention loop
16. Institutional responsibility begins when explanation by intention no longer suffices. Conclusion — From moral aspiration to structural responsibility