To Be or Not to Be: The Ontological Predicament of State Creation in International Law
Journal: European Journal of International Law
Year: 2017

International law is classically based on a system of states whose members it attempts to identify by virtue of their effectiveness, their recognition by other states, and their creation in accordance with the rules of international law. In this article, I illustrate the indeterminacy of these three dimensions and argue that assessments of individual state creations are instead necessarily based on blunt, but silent, ontological commitments to any potential state's full presence or absence. Whil