Humans seek not happiness but “power after power,” says Hobbes, and so we are perpetually at odds. We are equals in cunning and therefore equally insecure and equally error-prone. Our language contains “words of inconstant signification,” which means we must ever disagree about right and justice. Reason requires us to submit our disagreements to an arbiter – a “Common Power” – lacking whom we must be perpetually at war or on the verge of war with one another over things that matter.

Chapter 5 focuses on the period stretching from the Catalonian Civil War’s outbreak into the early sixteenth century. The civil war led to Perpignan’s conquest by France and three decades of nearly continuous French rule, followed by the town’s return to the Crown of Aragon. This chapter examines how these experiences affected matters treated in the preceding chapters. Although kings of France and Aragon fought each other for control of Perpignan, they pursued similar policies there during and after the civil war. They eliminated twelfth- and thirteenth-century customs and privileges on an unprecedented scale, including the foundational ma armada. And they assumed a thoroughgoing control of municipal elections, especially with King Ferdinand II’s establishment of a system that he called insaculation, and that I will call royal insaculation to differentiate it from earlier forms of insaculation. Together, the lasting suppression of the ma armada and the imposition of royal insaculation constituted the royal state’s triumph.

The Feyerabend lectures (1784) anticipate many fundamental theses of Kant’s political thought in the published writings of the 1790s. In three fundamental topics – 1) the transition from the state of nature to the civil state, 2) the conception of sovereignty and of the division of powers, 3) the infallibility of the sovereign, with the related topics of the non-coercibility of the executive and the denial of the right to rebel – Kant has the basic structure of his political thought already clear and his intellectual debt to Achenwall is limited. These lecture notes also include a fundamental distinction between two senses of legislative power: understood as constituent and operative in the defining moment of the constitution of the state (what Achenwall would call the moment yielding fundamental laws) and understood as the specification of the fundamental laws agreed upon in their hypothetical origin. This distinction is never fully spelled out by Kant but is absolutely crucial to making sense of his body of political thought and addressing some apparent difficulties, including a proper understanding of his (in)famous denial of people’s right to rebel.

Jurisdiction refers to the ability of a State to make and enforce its laws. While often related to sovereignty, and intrinsically linked to its territory, jurisdiction can exist without a connection to territory. Jurisdiction can be held to exist in a variety of contexts, depending on the location of events, the nationality of participants or the surrounding circumstances, and will also indicate whether a State may be able to undertake enforcement action to uphold its law. This chapter considers the nature of jurisdiction insofar as it affects persons, corporations, ships and aircraft. The different types of recognised international law jurisdiction are each assessed, including territorial jurisdiction, nationality jurisdiction, universal jurisdiction, the protective principle, and passive personality jurisdiction. Jurisdictional immunities as they apply to States, Heads of States, State officials and diplomats are also considered.

The idea of sovereignty over territory is fundamental to international law. No State can exist without land, and thus the ways in which land can be acquired and retained are concerns of great importance for States. Many international disputes involve land, and are intrinsically bound up with land, and relative to the use of land, so as an issue, sovereignty sits at the heart of international relations as well as international law. This chapter begins by assessing occupation and acquiescence, and then turns to review the distinctive issue for Australia of terra nullius and indigenous rights. The significance of each of critical date, discovery and accretion is reviewed. Postcolonial critiques regarding sovereignty over territory are considered, as are distinctive issues associated with sovereignty over Antarctica and the principle of common heritage.

Chapter 23 stresses that four sets of ideas need to be added to the principles and the topics of focus mentioned in Chapter 22. First, neither international order nor national order can be sustainable if the contradiction that exists today between, on the one hand, the celebration of human rights and, on the other hand, the tendency to treat individuals as disposable, deepens or simply persists. Second, the global justice agenda cannot credibly claim to be feasible if it does not factor in the views of the rest of the world. It is imperative to integrate what the non-West thinks. The ownership of a global agenda cannot be lopsided. Third, a cosmopolitan approach does not have to call for the removal or elimination of the state and sovereignty; rather, it is their reconceptualization and the application of this reconceptualization that are recommended. Fourth, institutional innovation will help implement this agenda.

The worldwide scope and depth of the present international system and its sense of legitimacy have not been applied in the same way everywhere. There is still much diversity among countries and the courses of action and the policies that they embrace. This explains, in part, the tensions and disagreements concerning the nature and dynamic of this international system as well as the claims of legitimacy in it. The redistribution of power currently underway at the international level, epitomized by the rise of China, could create more stress in the future. Nevertheless, overlooking the scope and depth of the present international order and its culture of legitimacy would be a mistake. The scope and depth of the present international order and its culture of legitimacy are the manifestations and the products of the following elements working together: position of power dominance, means of penetration and integration, values and norms, and secularization and democratization.

As the second lowest-lying country in the world, and because of its fragile economy and social and environmental vulnerabilities, Tuvalu is severely affected by the impacts of climate change. The country has been very active in developing ways of responding to these challenges at the national policy level and has also included the issue of loss and damage in official documents since 2012. At the same time, Tuvalu has played an active role in international loss and damage negotiations, including advocating for a separate article on loss and damage in the Paris Agreement. This chapter explores how Tuvalu’s policy actors make sense of and attempt to govern loss and damage at the national level. Using interpretive policy analysis and thirteen semi-structured interviews, it suggests that loss and damage in Tuvalu is developing as a “complex governance system” with competencies and agency spanning across multiple scales. The chapter finds that loss and damage does not feature as a stand-alone policy domain, nor is it explicitly distinguished from adaptation, but rather is treated as an issue which cuts across different sectors and policy areas, including climate-induced human mobility, infrastructure investment, national sovereignty and the protection of the country’s exclusive economic zone.

This chapter examines the role of property rights as foundational institutional genes influencing social, economic, and political systems. It argues that the distribution of property rights, whether dispersed as those in ancient Greece and Rome or centralized as those in Imperial China, deeply affects the evolution of institutions such as the rule of law, constitutionalism, and democracy. Broadly held private property rights foster the development of these institutions, which become self-replicating over time. In contrast, centralized property rights lead to monopoly power and coercive institutions that not only frequently restrict individual freedoms but can also lay the foundation for totalitarianism. The chapter seeks to clarify the concept of property rights to offer deeper insights into these institutional dynamics.

MacCormick’s nationalism and constitutionalism are inseparable from his theorisation of Europe as holding out political promise for stateless nations, like Scotland. But MacCormick’s interest in Europe also yields conceptual innovation of its own kind, with MacCormick characterising Europe as ‘a post sovereign commonwealth’ governed by ‘subsidiarity’, also embracing ‘constitutional pluralism’ in Europe. This chapter examines MacCormick’s philosophical engagement with Europe, alongside his direct, political involvement in it, first as a Member of the European Parliament (1999–2004) and, at the same time, as a Member of the Convention on the Future of Europe, where MacCormick made important contributions to the writing of the European Constitution. Emphasising MacCormick’s sensitivity to the quality of political discourse, this chapter reads MacCormick’s approach to Europe as a matter of character, e.g., how he deployed a conceptual language – speaking of subsidiarity rather than sovereignty – that he thought could facilitate better relations between political communities.

This chapter theorizes payment infrastructures as crucial material sites of hegemonic power in three different regards. First, the material form of payment technologies and the uneven routes of circulation produced by them are an integral part of the ways in which modern money and finance exercise power. Payment technology is not a neutral infrastructure, but a carrier of hegemonic power and potential site of hegemonic contestation. Second, payment infrastructure is inextricably connected to state security and sovereignty. State security and sovereignty were enabled and made durable with and through the payment infrastructure. Third, infrastructures are historically durable, though they may be rerouted or reinscribed. This chapter distills three elements that typify the hegemonic power of infrastructure and that can be used when taking “infrastructure” as the starting point for analysis. These elements are (1) sedimentation, (2) reach, and (3) disposition. The arguments are illustrated empirically by reference to the so-called financial war on terror, where financial infrastructures became a major but highly depoliticized site of security power. Empirically, this chapter focuses on the way in which the payment technology SWIFT and financial transactions are being appropriated for security purposes.

A hybrid legal discipline dealing with the relationships between the right to punish and state sovereignty, international criminal law (ICL) overturns classical conceptions of the state, law and justice. Its existence, foundations, scope and effectiveness are determined by the outcome of an attempt – which has proved more or less successful throughout the different phases of its evolution – to reconcile it with the founding principles of the modern state, sovereignty and legality, inherited from the Enlightenment. Adopting a historical perspective helps us its development, on either side of the pivotal moment represented by the creation of the League of Nations: the starting point marked by the 1919 Paris Conference and the immediate aftermath of the First World War; and the turning point marked by the work of the League and international legal doctrine in the interwar era. These two crucial phases saw a string of initiatives which, rather than failures, can be interpreted as a series of necessary transformations for the emergence of a new discipline and, more generally, a profound change in the global legal and judicial order.

This chapter contains four snapshots depicting the state of international legal scholarship at the time of the League of Nations. The first captures the zeitgeist of scholarship during the interwar period and identifies some features that defined this emerging epistemic community. It also considers the extent to which scholars may have had an influence outside academic circles. The second and third snapshots focus on various intertwined debates of the time. In this regard, consideration is given to the debates on the ultimate source of international obligations and the broader discussions about scientific method and the place of ideology in international law. This is done by reference, in particular, to the approaches and/or theories followed by Kelsen, Lauterpacht, (French) legal sociology and jus naturalism. The fourth snapshot elaborates on these debates by focusing on state sovereignty as the vantage point where most doctrinal trends of the time intersect. It identifies liberalism as the ideology underpinning such criticisms and compares them with the views held, first, by controversial German scholar Carl Schmitt and. second, by Soviet legal theorists.

Colonies and mandates, along with protectorates, belong to the wider group of ‘dependent’ territories. Colonies were under the total control of a foreign power which decided all aspects of the administrative, executive and legislative organisation. Public international law was mainly relevant for slavery, forced labour and ‘open-door’ policies. The mandates system was certainly inspired by colonialism, especially in the eyes of contemporaries, for whom colonialism was the ‘white man’s burden’ for the benefit of ‘uncivilised peoples’. However, it also had fundamental structural differences: their purpose – the ‘civilising mission’ – and the triangular relationship (League of Nations, territory, mandate), stand in sharp contrast to the colonial institution. In addition, the mandatory power was not the holder of sovereignty over the mandated territory. The triangular relationship refers particularly to the control that is supposed to embody it. The control exercised by the League marks a notable difference from the colonial system, establishing for the first time in the history of international relations a sophisticated form of indirect international administration of territories.

This chapter deals with questions of sovereignty, territory and jurisdiction during the League of Nations era. It discusses how the concept of sovereignty developed until the League era and how it was understood then. Questions of territory and jurisdiction are closely linked with sovereignty, but, given the immense scope of this topic, it will only be considered as far as it affects the central substance of the chapter. This general exposition of the concept of sovereignty will be followed by an explication how the interwar period saw the emergence of, first, its general principle of horizontal protection of the territorial and jurisdictional aspect of states by international law; second, structured exceptions to this principle qua its vertical limitation of sovereignty through the League system; and third, curious cases where the territorial and jurisdictional powers of states had to be reconciled with other innovative legal principles such as human rights and self-determination. These explications will be illustrated and substantiated by a selection of the relevant cases decided by the Permanent Court of International Justice and other judicial bodies.