Sovereignty beyond Borders: Sovereignty, Self-Defense, and the Disciplining of States

Abstract

Originally, the right to self-defense was included in the UN Charter as a limited and temporary exception to the prohibition on the use of force. In that way, it underscored the fundamental transformation in the reading of sovereignty and war that emerged in the twentieth century. Where in the Jus Publicum Europaeum sovereignty entailed the right to determine the ways to fight a public enemy, including war, the UN Charter linked sovereignty to the protection against acts of aggression. Paradoxically, the attempts to outlaw the use of force resulted in the creation of several new discursive spaces to legitimize the use of force: armed force could (and should) now be justified in terms of exceptions, as exceptional measures aimed at restoring normalcy. This discursive practice already started in the late 1940s but gained new momentum after the 9/11 attacks. This chapter focuses on the recent attempts to further stretch the limits of self-defense and to link this right to large-scale reconstructions of domestic societies through the alleged connection between state failure and terrorism.