Conceptualizing Politics

THE STATES
Power, peace and war in anarchical society

---

108  World politics and the future of politics
other countries or superior bodies and allows for autonomy or self-rule. External 
sovereignty is a pre-condition to the domestic one: a community can succeed in 
giving itself a state-like power structure, but without recognition even its domestic 
sovereignty remains uncertain and subject to anybody else’s claim or intervention. 
Sovereignty as recognised international actorhood lastly entails equality among the 
states, a formal or legal equality that matters regardless of different levels of indi-
vidual wealth or might.
This first description makes the two opposing sides of external sovereignty 
neatly visible. On the one hand, it signals the state’s ability to act as it pleases on 
the international stage: it can wage war, break up peace or negotiate a truce, invade 
and occupy, withdraw from treaties and deny cooperation or burden-sharing. On 
the other hand, as far as it seeks and achieves the recognition of other states, it 
is expected to bow to elementary diplomatic rules and to reshape its behaviour 
according to international law. Yet, if it falls short of those expectations, there is, 
or rather used to be (before institutions such as humanitarian intervention, the 
responsibility to protect and international criminal justice were created), neither an 
enforceable law that can restrain and punish it (except in certain cases) and no supe-
rior and common power that can impose the law. It is now clear that sovereignty is 
not a matter-of-fact feature, but rather a legal category: relations between sovereign 
states are clothed in international law, which is different from domestic law, being 
nevertheless a law that gives shape to and even constrains those relations.