Even if an intervention is purely humanitarian, the practice of the Security Council reveals general acceptance that the Security Council may declare any situation a threat to the peace, even if its transnational effects appear minimal. As for purely humanitarian intervention without Security Council authorization, a minority of states and scholars have maintained either that the meaning of Article 2 4 must be interpreted to allow humanitarian intervention in extreme situations since it cannot be that peoples in accepted the charter to the extent that it would protect a government engaged in murdering its people or that such intervention should be regarded as legitimate even if not technically legal.
During the period of the cold war — the prospect of nuclear confrontation between East and West helped promote strong unity on the prohibition of the transnational use of force, thus tempering any enthusiasm for the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. At the same time, the East—West divide resulted in repeated deadlocks at the UN Security Council, with any one of the five permanent member nations having the power to veto a proposed action.
As such, although many states might have supported efforts by the Security Council to authorize humanitarian intervention, the Security Council itself proved incapable of serving that function, thus fueling calls by a minority of scholars for greater latitude in allowing regional organizations or states acting alone to use force to protect human rights.
Despite those sentiments no authoritative state practice developed in support of a doctrine of humanitarian intervention. In several instances a state intervened in a manner that appeared to protect human rights, but the state typically would justify its intervention on the basis of self-defense, thus evincing doubt even on the intervener's part that humanitarian concerns alone were permissible legal base for acting e.
Moreover, the international community, through the voice of the UN General Assembly, usually would condemn such interventions as unlawful e. The end of the cold war in allowed for a transformation of the Security Council as a collective security mechanism. In several instances during the s the Security Council authorized a transnational use of force to address a threat to the peace that, at its heart, involved a widespread deprivation of human rights. Thus, in December the Security Council authorized a U.
In June the Security Council authorized France's intervention in Rwanda to end a brutal civil conflict and genocide between the Tutsis and Hutus. The slowness with which the Security Council acted—some , Tutsis were killed prior to the intervention—led to sharp criticism that powerful states were not living up to their moral responsibilities in addressing such crises.
In July the Security Council authorized a U. Nonetheless, the Security Council remained incapable, in certain circumstances, of reaching agreement on such intervention. Milosevic was widely regarded as the architect of genocide and crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early s; the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, indicted him for such crimes in Russia and China, however, were unwilling to support a Security Council resolution expressly authorizing the use of force against the FRY to protect the Kosovar Albanians.
Consequently, in March states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO collectively decided that the intervention was justified as a matter of international law and policy, leading to a ten-week bombing campaign against the FRY. Ultimately, Milosevic backed down and agreed to withdraw all FRY military and paramilitary personnel from Kosovo.
The Kosovo incident may support an emerging acceptance by states in the post-Cold War era of a doctrine of humanitarian intervention even without Security Council approval, since the Kosovo intervention was supported by the nineteen NATO states and many non-NATO states as well, was not condemned by the General Assembly, and was legally justified by several governments with reference to the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. At the same time many states including Russia and China opposed and condemned as unlawful the use of force against the FRY, whereas other states that supported the intervention such as the United States asserted that its legality turned on a variety of factors, including prior Security Council resolutions identifying the FRY's actions as a threat to the peace.
Various scholars have sought to delineate criteria that should govern the resort to humanitarian intervention. In the wake of the Kosovo incident one highly-respected group of experts—convened as the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty ICISS —advanced in a report several criteria falling into four general categories. First, the commission stated that there must be a just cause for the intervention, which can arise when there is serious and irreparable harm occurring or likely to occur to human beings.
Specifically, the commission identified such harm as the "large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation. Second, the commission advocated four precautionary principles as a means of ensuring that the intervention is undertaken properly. The primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt human suffering.
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All nonmilitary options for resolution of the crisis must first be explored. The scale, duration, and intensity of the intervention should be dictated by what is necessary to achieve the humanitarian objective. Finally, there must be a reasonable chance of success in halting the suffering, such that the consequences of action are not likely worse than those of inaction ICISS, , pp. Third, the commission urged that before embarking on such intervention, states must formally seek Security Council authorization.
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If Security Council authorization is not forthcoming, states should seek authorization from the General Assembly, regional, or subregional organizations. In the absence of such authority the commission did not declare humanitarian intervention to be unlawful, but noted that "in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action,. Finally, the commission proposed certain criteria to guide the military operation itself. The intervening military must have a clear and unambiguous mandate and the resources to support that mandate. When the intervention is conducted by several states, there must be a unified command, with clear channels of communication and chain of command.
The intervening military must accept that there are limitations on the force to be used, since the objective is to protect the population of the state, not to completely defeat the state at the same time the use of force cannot be limited to the protection of the intervening forces themselves.
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The intervening military must abide by precise rules of engagement that match its humanitarian objective, adhere to international humanitarian law, and coordinate their actions as much as possible with humanitarian organizations. Criteria of this type provide useful guidance in the event that a state is considering a humanitarian intervention, but until such criteria are incorporated in a binding document and accepted by a wide variety of states, the legality of humanitarian intervention at least in the absence of Security Council authorization and the manner in which it is to be conducted will remain controversial.
Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law. Doing Good and Doing Well: An Examination of Humanitarian Intervention. The challenges here are both epistemic and conceptual. Satisfying threshold conditions of suffering may depend on the specific domestic contexts in which people and government find themselves. Though most discussions of humanitarian interventions specify threshold conditions in terms of human rights violations, other kinds of characterizations of the relevant human suffering are used by others.
There are justificatory implications for these kinds of differences. A characterization in terms of human rights readily suggests deontological justifications for armed interventions. For any genuine right, others are bound by correlative duties. Thus, armed interventions are justified partially as discharging default duties correlated with the human rights that are being violated in the target state.
On the other hand, some see armed interventions as aimed at reducing human suffering, regardless of whether there are violations of specific human rights. Some feminists have argued that social oppression of women constitutes threshold conditions for forceful interventions Cudd. Uses of armed force, of course, have costs for human suffering, too. The idea is that sometimes the use of deadly force is justifiable to save lives and reduce total human suffering. Another development relevant to interventions is the concept of human security.
The concept of human security is defined broadly both in terms of causes and kinds of human suffering. The United Nations Development Program has adopted a similarly broad definition. With respect to threshold conditions for humanitarian interventions, using the broad concept of human security has some advantages. Determining whether threshold conditions are satisfied is also simpler without the need to apply specific legal or moral categories such as basic human rights or genocide.
Furthermore, it is argued, the concept calls attention to preventing humanitarian emergencies from emerging, instead of focusing so much on armed interventions as reactions to emergencies. But the breadth and scope of the concept also is challenging for use as a threshold condition for humanitarian interventions. Virtually any kind of widespread, systematic suffering or threat to people becomes a security issue possibly addressed by an armed intervention: For these and other reasons, the concept of human security is not often invoked in articulating threshold conditions for interventions.
The satisfaction of specified threshold conditions and state culpability requirements are only necessary conditions for morally justifying humanitarian interventions. There is a paradoxical quality in using deadly force to prevent or end violence against others. How can it be that war is warranted in the name of saving lives? As matter of morality and legality, individuals have rights of defense that permit using deadly force as proportionate response to unavoidable, imminent threats to our own lives or to the lives of others, whether the endangered people are kin, akin, or strangers.
By analogy, then, states have not only rights of self-defense if attacked, but rights to use deadly force in defense of others. A second analogy also sees states as persons. More direct arguments see a connection between taking universal human rights seriously and acting rightly with deadly force when this force is necessary to defend or protect those rights. Direct consequentialist arguments appeal to the morality of preventing extraordinary suffering when possible, that is, if and when there is opportunity and capability that is not more costly in its effects on human lives than not acting with deadly force.
Thus, there need not be inconsistency or paradox in saving lives by using armed force, at least in some grave circumstances. Regardless of the kind of moral theory employed — direct or indirect utilitarianism, natural law principles, or correlative duties of human rights, for example — justifying an armed intervention involves addressing a host of questions: Who or what has the authority to intervene? Is an intervention likely to succeed, or be worth the costs, on balance? Are there not non-military measures available to address the human suffering? What exactly is the purpose of the military action and how are armed forces to conduct themselves in defending, protecting, or rescuing others from their own government?
Such questions are, in fact, paralleled in the structure of just war theory, or jus bellum , and its traditional duality: Just war theory—especially jus ad bellum— is the framework for making moral decisions about humanitarian interventions. Michael Walzer defends interventions in his classic work, Just and Unjust Wars , and again prominently in the Preface to the Third Edition of that book. Many critics challenge the suitability, adaptations, and implications of just war theory for humanitarian interventions.
So, proponents, opponents, and cautionary discussants employ just war theory in exploring the moral merits of humanitarian interventions. There are additional reasons for relying on the jus bellum framework. The most basic moral question of modern just war theory is delineating what states are permitted to do through the use of military force to those outside their borders and for achieving what aims or purposes.
Second, the classic just war tradition includes attention to what are now called humanitarian interventions, at least as far as the cause and purpose of such military action.
Armed Humanitarian Intervention
Morally justifying humanitarian interventions, then, is often explored by interpreting, applying or adapting the standards for judging whether going to war is justified; receiving the most attention are issues of just cause and right authority for interventions. Other major facets of just war theory and its tradition — jus in bello , and jus post bellum — are also employed, though less prominently, as there has been much less philosophic attention to the conduct of interventions or what follows the use of armed force to rescue, protect, or defend others.
The jus ad bellum framework of just war theory identifies about a half dozen considerations relevant to justifying the recourse to war. All the ad bellum requirements must be satisfied for war to be justified. So, the use of armed force for humanitarian purposes is justified only if all six ad bellum requirements are satisfied. Three of these considerations — last resort, likelihood of success, and proportionality — are consequentialist requirements. Proportionality, for example, requires that the benefits of military action are not overshadowed by the inevitable costs, destruction, and other negative effects.
Last resort captures the idea that war is worth its effects only if non-military means are not available for success: The other three jus ad bellum considerations — just cause, right authority, right intention — appear to be deontological, rooted in natural law, for example, human rights, or other normative, non-consequentialist principles.
In the just war tradition, just cause has long been among the basic considerations in determining whether the recourse to military force is justified. The idea is that certain circumstances rightly prompt and contribute significantly to a justification for a war. Furthermore, the just war tradition, just war theory, and international law today acknowledge that armed attack by another justifies going to war: Supporters of justifiable interventions call attention to features of the just war tradition.
James Turner Johnson, for example, suggests that traditional just war theory is not based on a presumption against war, but on a presumption against injustice: One matter deals with the kind of moral foundations presupposed for just war theory itself. Some appeal to transnational ethical norms about rights or duties, whether expressed as universal natural law principles about rights of defense or duties correlated with universal human rights. Discussions often challenge the adequacy of the analogies: At one extreme, the world community is inter-national, a community of nations or sovereign states relating to one another by mutual agreement with one another; an opposing conception thinks of a global ethical order of trans-national norms about people that is, human rights.
In effect, some of the debate is couched in broad issues of how state-centered or people-centered the world ethical order is to be. Intention, or purpose, and authority have both been basic considerations in determining whether the recourse to military force is justified. Matters of intention, or purpose, have since not always been accorded independent status. As noted in sec. I, the issue emerges as a matter of definition, and some maintain purity of motive is essential to being a humanitarian intervention. The classic just war tradition emphasizes issues about the locus of authority to deploy military force.
For this and other reasons much discussion is devoted to whether interventions are justifiable when unauthorized by the United Nations and thus, illegal. In as much as impartiality is an ethical norm, there may be a strong presumption for only centrally authorized or multi-lateral interventions being justifiable. In as much as speed of response to a supreme humanitarian emergency saves more lives and a single state can be more decisive, there is support for permitting unilateral and unauthorized interventions.
Three additional jus ad bellum requirements also must be satisfied for a war to be justified. As applied to justifying an armed intervention, then, using military force to address a humanitarian emergency must be likely to succeed. If such success is not likely, then the intervention is not justified. Aside from the inherent vagueness of the standard, estimating the likelihood of a successful intervention is complicated, a function of at least two general factors among others: It also follows that inequality of military power among states is normatively significant.
A humanitarian intervention is not likely to succeed against large, powerful states, like China or Russia, while success is more likely for emergencies occurring in smaller, weaker nations; furthermore, large, militarily powerful states are more likely to be successful interveners than smaller, weaker nations or organizations.
Indeed, on a literal construal of the requirement, no war ever satisfies this jus ad bellum requirement. On the other hand, in law and morality, reactive wars of self-defense are justified, even though non-military means of resolution, in fact, are not attempted after an armed attack occurs.
So, justifying a war as a last resort depends on at least two features of the specific situation: Supreme humanitarian emergencies often exhibit urgency akin to that of a state facing a surprise attack or invasion: The Rwandan genocide of vividly illustrated this sort of urgency. Aside from temporal considerations, intervening as a last resort involves assessing the likelihood of any non-military means being effective, but not necessarily actually implementing or trying all those means.
But it does mean that there must be reasonable grounds for believing that … if the measure had been attempted it would not have succeeded. This way of proceeding points to a second temporal feature of war as last resort. Some opponents of intervention bemoan the lack of infrastructure, for example, that would enrich and support effective, non-military means of defending and protecting basic human rights. The idea is that more could have been done to prevent horrors and to be ready to react non-militarily when emergencies do emerge. An issue here, then, is the time framework for constructing possible means of addressing the emergency.
A circumscribed last resort principle requires assessing the effectiveness of those means available at the time of the emergency, however rich or limited they may be. A broader last resort principle seems to deny armed force is a last resort if more could have been done in the past to enrich the availability of effective non-military means today. This broader construal, however, seems to conflate a call to build better prevention mechanisms with assessing military and non-military options available when supreme humanitarian emergencies actually occur and decisions have to be made.
The ad bellum principle addresses the general concern that the deaths, destruction, and other negative effects of war must be balanced by its benefits that is, success. This breadth of considerations brings to the fore difficult matters of the commensurablity of values and, as for any consequentialist argument, epistemic challenges related to the causal impacts of action. But a few thousand armed soldiers quickly deployed to Rwanda in April, , would likely have saved many, many lives, whereas militarily stopping the suffering of Chechnyans or Tibetans would very likely bring exorbitant costs in death and destruction.
In other cases the benefits of an armed intervention includes rescues of suffering peoples, a cost might be significant eroding of the stability and order of a system of states on the planet. Contributing to the challenges for the proportionality requirements are controversies about its structure: Applied to justifying armed interventions, then, the macro-proportionality requirement speaks to a central concern, but cannot reliably discriminate finely among many humanitarian emergencies that arise.
The general idea of proportionality is one that links the traditional division of just war theory into jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles. The latter just war requirements govern how a war is to be conducted: Given the just war theory framework for justifying humanitarian interventions, these in bello considerations are relevant and applicable to uses of military force to address humanitarian emergencies.
If an armed intervention is be a fully just war, then, the rules of engagement ROEs need to reflect both in bello principles. These principles raise many issues for just war theory and some challenging ones for the morality of interventions. The in bello micro-proportionality requirement governs military operations during a war. The general idea is to minimize the armed force used, and destruction caused, in order to attain a militarily necessary objective.
But unlike the ad bellum the macro-proportionality requirement, in assessing the effects of a military operation, it matters much who benefits or suffers. First, combatant and non-combatants are to be distinguished. This is the in bello principle of discrimination. As Michael Walzer expresses it, the general idea is that wars are waged between combatants: The traditional in bello requirements of just war theory leads to challenges for this approach to the morality of humanitarian interventions.
Interveners are there to protect and defend, akin to the mission of a police force. The 18 th century work of Immanuel Kant, in Perpetual Peace and elsewhere, is often credited with originating the notion of jus post bellum , though Vitoria and Suarez both earlier distinguish this facet of just war theory. How one ends a war — even a just one — affects whether peace will follow, for how long, and the structure of the peace that will or should be. For example, is a just end of war establishment of the status quo ante bellum , which is perhaps plausible for wars of self-defense against an invasion?
In international law and among just war theorists, this third major component of just war theory has received comparatively little attention. One important exception is the work of Brian Orend. Jus post bellum issues are important to the morality of humanitarian interventions. Jus post bellum considerations lead to tensions and challenges for thinking about the purposes and morality of humanitarian interventions.
Humanitarian Intervention
For example, given the nature of supreme humanitarian emergencies, stopping the violence leaves a great need for extremely difficult reconciliation processes, a facet of rebuilding a functioning social order. Perhaps justice requires some punitive action towards perpetrators and accomplices, whether heads of state, government officials, or local militia leaders and private citizens. These kinds of post bellum considerations effectively broaden and perhaps challenge just war thinking about the morality of humanitarian interventions.
For example, if the ad bellum success requirement is more than rescuing, defending, or protecting victims, but also includes justice retributive, distributive, restorative or rebuilding, then the challenges of success are much greater, the likelihood of success is much less, the capabilities for success including political will are rarely available. It would follow that virtually no interventions are justifiable by just war standards: On the other hand, one can look at the responsibility to rebuild or seek justice post bellum as a distinct phase following the humanitarian intervention proper.
A fully just use of military force — even seen as rescue, protection, or defense — may require that some organization or states address post bellum issues and rebuilding once the violence is ended, but those needs need not be addressed by the interveners themselves. Just war thinking then requires that interveners use military force with consideration of post bellum requirements, but the post-intervention missions need not be the action of the rescuer themselves.
Just war theory, in its entirety, articulates appropriately high standards for morally judging war and for justifying humanitarian interventions. There are some significant implications of the just war framework for assessing the moral justifications for humanitarian interventions. There are, for example, daunting epistemic issues in establishing that threshold conditions are satisfied or in assessing the complex consequences of an intervention. The latter is only aggravated by the near certainty of unintended consequences for military campaigns and by the frequent situation of estimating effects of using armed force in foreign lands and cultures.
The same inequalities of capability result in an unequal distribution of the right or responsibility to intervene militarily on humanitarian grounds, with all the attendant costs of such interventions. There is a basic deontic category issue in exploring the moral merits of humanitarian interventions via just war theory. Is a justified war a matter of a right, responsibility, or duty?
And what kind of right or duty is signaled by establishing that a war is justified? Parallel questions then apply to justified humanitarian interventions: What kind of right or duty, then? Addressing such questions from a just war framework intersects with varying conceptions or analogies employed in discussing interventions. For example, one might consider interventions in defense of others as a right associated with rights of self-defense.
Such a right of defense — of self or of others — is one that the right-holder chooses whether to exercise or not: Humanitarian interventions, then, are a matter of moral right, not duty or obligation; and they are what are called liberty-rights or discretionary rights of intervention.
Humanitarian Intervention
In as much as jus ad bellum principles identify when there is such a right to wage war, then they can be used to identify when there is a moral right to intervene militarily for humanitarian purposes. In contrast, armed interventions are often portrayed in ways suggesting there is a duty to use military force to address humanitarian emergencies. A common conception is the notion of interventions as rescuing others. Such imperfect duties are not correlated with others having a right to be rescued, and wide discretion is accorded the obligated as to when, where, and how to discharge the duty.
It has also been suggested that interveners are more akin to a police force, which suggests that justified interventions are discharging a duty to protect and defend others in grave danger. A humanitarian intervention, it would seem, is justified under conditions analogous to those for domestically dispatching S. A challenge for either of these conceptions of interventions — as rescue or as constabulary — is a dissonance between a moral duty to use military force for humanitarian purposes and the kind of moral justification for waging war the jus ad bellum principles provide.
Does just war theory establish a moral duty to wage war?
Military Intervention, Humanitarian | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
If not, how can jus ad bellum principles ever support a duty to intervene militarily? To speak of a moral duty to wage war is today not obviously plausible. The notion of a duty to wage war may be consistent with some classic contributors to the just war tradition, such as Aquinas.
Late 20 th century theorists, like Michael Walzer, argue that sometimes there is a duty literally to combat evil. But the idea that just war theory establishes duties to wage some wars is controversial and defended by some for only quite unusual circumstances, of which, of course, a supreme humanitarian emergency may be one. As some have argued, jus bellum can establish at most the moral permissibility or right of intervening; additional considerations are needed to establish humanitarian interventions as morally obligatory.
One form of the argument is that, as a matter of international law, practice, and practicality, these correlative obligations fall largely upon national governments and international organizations for example, the United Nations. Others argue more forcefully that the logic of basic human rights establishes correlative duties to respect, protect, and defend. In Basic Rights Princeton, , Henry Shue famously argues that a basic right such as the right not be killed arbitrarily entails not only duties not to kill, but duties to protect or enforce the right: Furthermore, Shue argues later, if and when the primary holder of the correlative duties that is, the state fails to meet its obligations, then the duty to protect and defend human rights defaults to others.
Thus, humanitarian interventions are justifiable as discharging a default duty to protect and defend basic human rights not being respected by the target state. Another, related argument to support a duty to intervene derives from theories of global distributive justice. Arguments appealing to rights and correlativity relations are not uncontroversial. For those who distinguish positive and negative rights, for example, the correlative duty for a right to life is simply and only not to kill.
Thus, so long as a state or international organization is not the perpetrator of atrocities against its own people, it would seem that correlative obligations have been satisfied without coming close to establishing military intervention as a duty. An issue in the background is what one takes to be the model for understanding human rights and the extent to which duties of respect and protection correlate with those rights and for whom or what. Just war theory has been the most prominent framework for philosophic discussion of the morality of humanitarian interventions.
Other relevant approaches include attention to international law and its ethical implications and an issue central to political philosophy, the concept of state sovereignty. Political realisms deny the applicability of moral norms to state behavior, including uses of military force. Pacifism typically denies the premise of just war theory, namely, that some wars are morally justifiable, even if waged for humanitarian purposes. Much discussion of humanitarian interventions involves legal issues under the Charter of the United Nations, the central and paramount text of the international law of force.
Philosophers of law have accorded relatively little attention to international law. Attending to the international law of force and human rights involves issues of interpretation, sources of law, ethics of acting illegally and reform, as well as the extent to which states or people ought to be at the center of the system.
At the center of the international law about interventions are explicit provisions of the United Nations Charter and human rights treaties. The text seems unequivocally clear: And since humanitarian emergencies typically do not threaten international peace and security, the text permits authorizing few, if any, interventions. Furthermore, the nine core human rights treaties and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly require only that each state respect, protect, and enforce the provisions listed, such as rights to life.
Human rights, for example, may be transnational norms, but international law makes the respect, defense, and protection of those rights almost exclusively a domestic matter for each state. So, to promote international peace and security, inter-state uses of armed force are severely limited by law, even when domestic violence against people may be widespread and systematic. There are ethical dimensions to the system of international law as it relates to interventions. The United Nations Charter has been accepted by consent of all and each members of the United Nations — virtually every state on the planet.
State consent is among the established procedures for creating international law and consent creates compliance obligations for states.
So, for positivists, it follows that states and international organizations ought to obey the law and therefore ought not conduct unauthorized humanitarian interventions. Legal positivists maintain that there are legal and moral obligations not to interfere militarily with the domestic affairs of states, even in the face of a humanitarian emergency. Challenges to this line of reasoning take several forms. First, some legal scholars quite carefully parse the specific Charter texts in ways consistent with humanitarian interventions being permitted.
For example, Article 2 4 does not prohibit all uses of military force, but only those aimed at the independence or territory of another state. Legally permissible, then, would be any humanitarian interventions having neither those aims nor those effects. Disagreements about interpretation raise philosophic issues about how best or properly to interpret legal texts. Some dispute such textual parsing as ignoring the original intent of the language.
Others deny that original intent is probative, granting a more significant role for contemporary attitudes, beliefs, and norms about interventions, or appealing to a political morality implicit in legal texts and their interpretive history. Some argue that long-standing state practice has established a customary right of humanitarian intervention; others deny this claim of fact about state practice, or assert that the written law of the Charter supersedes any putative customary rule.
In effect, there is much controversy about what H. One final issue deals with the ethics of acting illegally. At the heart of creating customary law about interventions is establishing a state practice of intervening. This requires that states begin creating a custom by acting in ways neither required nor permitted by international law at the time: Given sufficient moral grounds for reforms to permit humanitarian interventions, then, a moral argument can be made for illegally intervening now to address emergencies and thereby contribute to reforming international law.
Unauthorized humanitarian interventions then can be seen as a kind of international civil disobedience by states or international organizations. State sovereignty is a major issue for humanitarian interventions, whether as source of opposition or of significant challenge for proponents. For centuries the general idea has been that a sovereign state has supreme authority over its territory, its people, and its relation with other states; and so, other states or organizations are not to interfere with exercises of that supreme authority.
Matters of sovereignty have been central to political philosophy, international relations, international law, and the institutions and practices constitutive of the modern world order. The literature is vast, the issues complex, the notion of sovereignty contentious and controversial to the core.
Subsequent political philosophers, like Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the utilitarians, have focused much on the source, locus, and limits of sovereignty within a state, while merely acknowledging an accompanying externally directed authority to make war, peace, alliances, and treaties with other powers.