Building upon my previous account of the antecedents of statehood, this chapter establishes five procedural principles that further condition the emergence of new states. These principles can be split into two sets: those that establish means for state creation through which valuable politics can either be instantiated or enhanced, and those that either prohibit or restrict state creation through means that violate or disrupt political action. The first set comprises the 'recognition principle' and the 'referendum principle', which determine the legal salience of foreign recognition and independence referendums. The second set comprises the 'negative self-determination principle', the 'international peace principle', and the 'territorial integrity principle'. These three relate, respectively, to the international legal prohibitions against mass disenfranchisement and political subordination, the unlawful threat or use of force, and the violation of an established community's territorial integrity. These five principles provide a procedural framework for state creation, which, along with the antecedents of statehood, collectively comprise 'statehood as political community'.

This chapter draws upon the normative resources of political community to construct an account of the 'antecedents' of statehood: the factual prerequisites that nascent entities characteristically must demonstrate in order to mount a plausible statehood claim. These antecedents, which will be familiar to doctrinal lawyers from sources such as the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, are: a permanent population, a relatively determinate territory, an 'effective' government, and some degree of governmental independence. In addition to grounding each antecedent within both historical and contemporary practice, this chapter demonstrates their coherence with the ethical value of politics, thereby reconstructing these elements of international law into a normatively coherent whole. Several aspects of this reconstruction will strike readers familiar with state creation as controversial. In particular, I advance a novel conception of governmental 'effectiveness' that turns upon the capacity of nascent states to facilitate ethically valuable political action.

The Introduction establishes the topic of the book - the creation of states in international law - as well as the method adopted when investigating that topic. It argues that doctrinal debates over state creation have become deadlocked as a result of the prevailing method of 'legal positivism' and that this approach, which focuses exclusively upon the factual provenance of putative laws, should be abandoned. Advocating a form of 'rational reconstruction', whereby the normative appeal of putative laws must be assessed alongside their provenance within international legal practice, it connects this method of law identification to the earlier 'Grotian tradition' developed by scholars such as Hersch Lauterpacht. To aid readers who might be unfamiliar with the details of international legal reasoning, an extended summary of the legal framework endorsed by the text is then presented, followed by a brief overview of the structure of the argument to follow.

This chapter examines the view that state creation requires the existence of a normatively legitimate government. It begins by defining governmental legitimacy, arguing that it is best analysed in terms of the moral justifiability of individual acts of governance, whether viewed individually or in aggregate. Next, it considers what it means for institutions, social conventions, and legal principles to be legitimate before moving on to consider the negative argument that no theory of state creation that excludes a criterion of governmental legitimacy could ever be morally plausible. Having dismissed this objection as mistaken, the chapter then examines a range of legitimacy-based reconstructions, which draw respectively upon the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke. Each position is critiqued and dismissed as an implausible approach to the law of state creation.

Building upon the analysis of the previous chapter, this final critical chapter examines theories of state creation focused upon the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government. Both approaches are examined through the lens of governmental legitimacy, and both are finally dismissed as implausible reconstructions of the relevant legal practice. In the course of this argument, significant attention is given to whether the protection of human rights and the provision of representative government are sufficient to render contemporary governments legitimate, to which a negative answer is ultimately given. In particular, neither the egalitarian credentials of representative government nor its facilitation of popular accountability are as normatively conclusive as many 'democratic statehood' theorists suggest.

This chapter considers the first of two additional reconstructions of state creation under international law, both of which present alternatives to statehood as political community. I call this first alternative 'the stability thesis', given its core claim that the law of state creation is primarily explicable and provisionally justifiable, not in terms of international peace and friendly relations, rather than political community. Two versions of this rational reconstruction are considered. Under the first, stability is secured by seeking to eliminate controversy: on this 'modus vivendi' approach, only those standards that meet broad international consensus should be considered legally relevant to the creation of states. Under the second, which prioritises substance over consensus, international practice is reconstructed so as to prioritise legal standards that are maximally conducive to stability in and of themselves. Ultimately, I argue that we should reject both versions of the stability thesis. Although international peace is morally important, both within state creation and otherwise, it cannot function as the primary normative foundation for this area of law.

This conclusion briefly summarises the argument of the book before considering its implications for two connected questions: the 'nature' or 'essence' of statehood under international law and the principle of state continuity. In relation to the latter, it advances a tentative additional principle for political membership that might be taken to explain the presumption of continuity as it applies to contemporary states. It also considers, albeit briefly, the current position of small island states, many of which are at risk of losing their inhabitable land due to human-caused climate change. As regards the nature or essence of statehood, the conclusion takes a somewhat sceptical view of attempts to characterise states in relation to one or more discrete concepts, arguing that not even statehood as political community should be viewed as an exhaustive account of what states 'really' are.