March 21, 2007
Jurisdiction without sovereignty
I just got out of a talk by someone who has worked in the DRC on the child-soldier problem. She was talking about efforts to disarm and reintegrate ex-child-soldiers and ongoing efforts to prosecute war criminals before the International Criminal Court. The conversation didn't have anything to do with sovereignty and jurisdiction, but that's what I was thinking about.
The ICC was founded in 2002 as an international tribunal to prosecute things like genocide, crimes against humanity, etc. One big problem though: the ICC does is not part of a sovereign entity. It's kind of posited by international convention, but represents no entity that is capable of enforcing its decisions.
Cue my previous post on sovereignty. Here we've abstracted sovereignty to the point that a lot of people think it's perfectly okay to assert the power of a sovereign without any actual sovereignty. I think I'm going to object to this just on principle. There's something right, honest, and good about swearing fealty to a true sovereign. The converse of this is that there's something wrong, delusional, and twisted about swearing fealty to an impostor. Recognizing things like the ICC not only dignifies a non-entity with inappropriate status but in so doing also demeans true sovereignty where it does exist.
