Inter-state relations — Treaty signing as a Sovereign attribute, Declaration of War and Conclusion of Peace

In September 1960, India and Pakistan — two states that had already fought a war over Kashmir — sat down and signed the Indus Waters Treaty, with the World Bank standing as broker. No court forced them to sign. No higher authority could have. They signed because a sovereign state, and only a sovereign state, has the legal power to bind itself by treaty. That power is so old and so central to what a state is that a peace treaty signed in 1648, ending a war most students have never heard of, still shapes how India and Pakistan share a river today.

In two minutes

Treaty signing, declaring war, and concluding peace are all exercises of the same thing — a state’s sovereignty — and the modern rules that govern them trace back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and forward to the UN Charter and the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969).

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – III: International Relations on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.