Reviewed by Conway W. Henderson, Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina, Spartanburg. Mills offers his readers a constructivist tour of human rights that directly challenges the traditional conception of sovereignty. The author thinks we are constructing a world of our choosing that will embellish self-determination, a right to migration, and the duty of humanitarian intervention as a way to protect a broad spectrum of rights. States, already caught in a web of interdependence based on trade, communications, and environmental concerns, will be unable to deal with their own peoples as an exclusive jurisdiction. With little reverence for the state, Mills finds it easy to champion the rights of ethnic minorities as an expression of self-determination.
Individuals share citizenship both in an ethnic group and the state as overlapping jurisdictions.
However, like many writers on the subject of self-determination, Mills backs off from recommending an absolute right of secession for ethnic minorities and seems to favor some form of autonomy. The author also advocates a very liberal view of migration as a right, a view that clearly knocks holes in the walls of sovereignty. Human rights treaties, as Mills notes, recognize a right to leave and return to one s country, and there is a refugee treaty for those fleeing political repression. Otherwise, states can legally control their borders as they see fit. For hundreds of years, sovereign rulers have guarded borders as a way to provide physical and economic security for their peoples, not to mention deterring health hazards.