Challenges to State Sovereignty — Globalisation and R2P

A government can lose control of its own currency to a global market crash it never voted for, and in the worst cases watch the international community debate whether to intervene inside its borders to stop it committing atrocities against its own people. Both are challenges to something the whole system is built on: the sovereign state's claim to be the final word within its own territory.

In two minutes

Globalisation and the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect are the two most significant modern pressures on state sovereignty — one economic and technological, working from the outside in; the other explicitly moral and legal, arguing that sovereignty itself carries a responsibility a state can forfeit.

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