Sovereignty

About: Sovereignty is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25909 publications have been published within this topic receiving 410148 citations.

Treaties, Human Rights, and Conditional Consent

Abstract: The U.S. treaty-makers have consistently attached conditions to their consent to modern human rights treaties, in the form of reservations, understandings, and declarations ("RUDs"). Through these RUDs, the treatymakers have sought to limit their consent to international obligations that the United States is constitutionally and politically able to comply with, and to ensure that these obligations are implemented in a manner consistent with principles of separation of powers and federalism. The conventional wisdom among scholars is that the RUDs are invalid under international law and U.S. domestic law, and are harmful to the international human rights movement. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom about RUDs. It argues that the RUDs serve as a useful bridge between isolationists who want to preserve the United States' sovereign prerogatives, and internationalists who want the United States to increase its involvement in international institutions -- a political divide that has had a debilitating effect on U.S. participation in international human rights regimes since World War II. In addition, RUDs help reconcile fundamental changes in international law with the requirements of the U.S. constitutional system. The RUDs achieve these ends in ways that are valid under both international and domestic law.

Crimes against Humanity: A Normative Account

Abstract: This book was the first booklength treatment of the philosophical foundations of international criminal law. The focus is on the moral, legal, and political questions that arise when individuals who commit collective crimes, such as crimes against humanity, are held accountable by international criminal tribunals. These tribunals challenge one of the most sacred prerogatives of states - sovereignty - and breaches to this sovereignty can be justified in limited circumstances, following what the author calls a minimalist account of the justification of international prosecution. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book should appeal to anyone with an interest in international law, political philosophy, international relations, and human rights theory.

Individual Rights and the Making of the International System

Abstract: We live today in the first global system of sovereign states in history, encompassing all of the world's polities, peoples, religions and civilizations. Christian Reus-Smit presents a new account of how this system came to be, one in which struggles for individual rights play a central role. The international system expanded from its original European core in five great waves, each involving the fragmentation of one or more empires into a host of successor sovereign states. In the most important, associated with the Westphalian settlement, the independence of Latin America, and post-1945 decolonization, the mobilization of new ideas about individual rights challenged imperial legitimacy, and when empires failed to recognize these new rights, subject peoples sought sovereign independence. Combining theoretical innovation with detailed historical case studies, this book advances a new understanding of human rights and world politics, with individual rights deeply implicated in the making of the global sovereign order.

Trapped by their ideas: French élites' discourses of European integration and globalization1

Abstract: Until relatively recently, French elites seemed to have found a winning combination for the communicative discourses through which they legitimated European integration and responded to globalization. First, the Gaullist discourse underplayed the loss of sovereignty by emphasizing the gains to interests and identity through French leadership in Europe. Next, the Mitterrandist discourse updated the ideas in the Gaullist paradigm to legitimate further institutional integration while it added a new rationale for greater economic integration: Europeanization as a shield against globalization. The discourse in the Chirac years did little to change or update this discourse. The problem today is that neither the institutional nor the economic ideas in the discourse are persuasive: the public is convinced that France no longer leads Europe and that Europe no longer protects against globalization. And yet, French elites seem trapped in the old discourse, unable to develop new ideas capable of legitimating...