The original concept of state sovereignty, enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was built on a simple premise: that each nation-state has the absolute right to govern its own affairs without external interference. This was a revolutionary idea in an era of religious wars and imperial conquest, and it served its historical purpose. But the world has fundamentally changed, writes former IAS officer V.S.Pandey
The current ongoing bloody conflict between Israel allied with USA versus Iran has brought the age-old conflict between sovereignty of states vs sovereignty of people center stage yet again. Sovereignty is one of the most consequential concepts in human political history but it carries within itself an unresolved contradiction — a fault line that has shaped centuries of conflict, oppression, and resistance. Whose sovereignty matters more: that of the state, or that of the people who constitute it? This question, long debated in philosophy and law, has never been more urgent than it is today, as authoritarian governments weaponize the language of sovereignty to suppress their own citizens while the international community watches mutely- bound by its own self-defeating rules.
The original concept of state sovereignty, enshrined in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was built on a simple premise: that each nation-state has the absolute right to govern its own affairs without external interference. This was a revolutionary idea in an era of religious wars and imperial conquest, and it served its historical purpose. But the world has fundamentally changed. Today, the same principle that was designed to protect nations from imperial domination is routinely deployed by governments to shield themselves from accountability for crimes committed against their own people.
The Historical Record: Sovereignty as a Shield for Oppression
The 20th century is a graveyard of cases where the inviolability of state sovereignty enabled mass atrocity. Nazi Germany proceeded to industrialize genocide under the full legal protection of sovereignty norms until external military force — not international law — stopped it. The world watched. The League of Nations, built on inviolable state sovereignty, collapsed precisely because it could not act against sovereign aggression.
The Soviet Union’s purges under Stalin, which killed millions through forced collectivization, gulags, and political executions, were carried out entirely within Soviet territory and were thus legally insulated from international scrutiny. Similarly in China under Mao, millions lost their lives to so called cultural revolution. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 saw nearly two million people — roughly a quarter of the population — exterminated, while the international community debated whether intervention would constitute a violation of Cambodian sovereignty. It took a Vietnamese military invasion, not a legal or diplomatic mechanism, to end it.
In Rwanda in 1994, approximately 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days while the UN Security Council — paralyzed by Cold War geopolitics and sovereignty concerns — withdrew troops rather than reinforced them. The then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali later called it a collective international failure. The word ‘genocide’ was deliberately avoided in official communications because using it would have triggered a legal obligation to act — an obligation that member states, hiding behind sovereignty, were unwilling to fulfill.
These are not gruesome wars of ancient history. The pattern has continued into this century: Myanmar’s military carried out documented ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya population from 2016 onwards, burning villages and killing civilians in operations that the UN described in 2018 as bearing the hallmarks of genocide. Myanmar’s government invoked sovereignty at every turn, calling international condemnation interference in its internal affairs. The same pattern can be observed in Xinjiang, where China has detained over a million Uyghur Muslims in what it calls ‘vocational education centers,’ and where any external criticism is met with accusations of meddling in Chinese domestic affairs.
The People’s Sovereignty: Where Did It Go?
The philosophical tradition of popular sovereignty — the idea that political authority derives from the people, not the state — is as old as Rousseau and as foundational as the American Declaration of Independence, which asserted that governments derive ‘their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Abraham Lincoln echoed this in calling democracy ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people.’
But this tradition has been systematically subordinated in international law and practice to the sovereignty of states. The United Nations Charter, signed in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, enshrines two competing principles in direct tension: Chapter I affirms sovereign equality of states and non-interference in domestic affairs (Article 2.7), while also proclaiming human rights as a foundational purpose of the organization. The drafters left this contradiction unresolved, and it has haunted global governance ever since.
Today, authoritarian governments have become extraordinarily sophisticated at exploiting this contradiction. They hold staged elections to claim democratic legitimacy, suppress civil society, imprison journalists, and then invoke sovereignty and ‘non-interference’ when other nations raise concerns. The playbook is strikingly consistent from Belarus to Venezuela, from Iran to North Korea and many other countries ruled by kings and despots. The state’s sovereignty is treated as paramount; the people’s right to choose their government, to speak freely, to assemble, to live without fear — these are treated as secondary, as matters for the state to determine on its own schedule.
The Failures of International Law: Explicit and Structural
International human rights law, in theory, represents the world’s commitment to the sovereignty of the person over the sovereignty of the state. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention Against Torture (1984) all establish individual rights that states are bound to respect regardless of domestic law. But the enforcement mechanisms are catastrophically weak.
The UN Human Rights Council, supposedly the world’s premier human rights body, is regularly populated by some of the world’s most egregious human rights violators. Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, and Russia have all held seats on the Council. This structural flaw means that the body that is meant to hold states accountable is routinely controlled by states with the most to hide. Resolutions are watered down, investigations are blocked, and the culture of ‘diplomatic courtesy’ ensures that states rarely confront each other too aggressively, because each knows it may be in the dock tomorrow.
The ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine (R2P), adopted at the 2005 UN World Summit, was meant to resolve the tension between sovereignty and human rights once and for all. It established that sovereignty is conditional — that when a state fails to protect its population from mass atrocities, the international community has both the right and the responsibility to intervene. It was heralded as a paradigm shift. In practice, it has been applied selectively to the point of irrelevance. The NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, justified under R2P, was subsequently used by Russia and China as justification for never allowing R2P to be invoked again. Since then, the doctrine has been effectively dead.
- The Present Crisis: Democracy Under Siege
The current global moment represents perhaps the most serious regression of popular sovereignty since the 1930s. Freedom House’s global democracy index has recorded eighteen consecutive years of democratic decline worldwide. The means of oppression have become technologically sophisticated: mass digital surveillance, algorithmic censorship, the weaponization of artificial intelligence for population control, and cross-border transnational repression — where authoritarian states pursue dissidents on foreign soil — have created new instruments of control that international law has yet to adequately address.
The Path Forward: Rethinking Sovereignty
The choice between state sovereignty and people’s sovereignty is often presented as a binary, but it need not be. A mature, reformed international order could establish that sovereignty is not a fixed grant of unlimited authority, but a conditional trust — earned by governments that genuinely represent their people and protect their rights, and forfeited when they systematically violate them. This is not a new idea; it is the theoretical premise of R2P and of the entire post-WWII human rights architecture. The problem is that it has never been operationalized consistently.
What the current moment demands is political will, not new legal frameworks. The frameworks exist. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is clear. The Rome Statute is clear. The problem is selective enforcement driven by geopolitical interest. Powerful states are never held accountable; weaker ones are sometimes subjected to sanctions that harm populations more than governments. Until this structural inequity is addressed — until enforcement mechanisms exist that are genuinely universal and insulated from great-power vetoes — international human rights law will remain a utopian aspiration rather than a legal reality.
The people of Belarus, of Xinjiang, of Myanmar, of Gaza, of Afghanistan , of Venezuela, of Iran , of Pakistan and of dozens of other states currently living under repression did not surrender their inherent dignity at birth. They have not consented to tyranny. Their governments’ claim to sovereign immunity from accountability is, at its core, a claim that power is its own justification — that the state’s existence supersedes the rights of the people it exists to serve. That claim is both philosophically bankrupt and historically catastrophic. It is the logic of every authoritarian who has ruthlessly turned the machinery of the state against its own citizens.
Sovereignty, properly understood, must flow upward from the people — not downward from the state. Until international law reflects that truth consistently and enforceably, it will remain complicit in the oppression it was designed to prevent. The resolution of this age old paradox is rule by democracy, nothing less than that , no kings and queens , no military dictators , no despots, no theocratic rulers.Then peace will prevail .
(Vijay Shankar Pandey is former Secretary Government of India)
