Content area
Full text
Divided Sovereignty: International Institutions and the Limits of State Authority. By Pavel Carmen E. . Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. 211p. $78 cloth.
Critical Dialogues
Divided Sovereignty pivots on the following conundrum. On the one hand, the coercive capacities of states allow them to protect their citizens from harm by other citizens, while the sovereign integrity of states gives them the right to protect their citizens from harm by other states. On the other hand, states can redirect their coercive capacities against their citizens, either by actively attacking them or by passively refusing to protect them when they come under attack by other members of society. In such cases, the non-interference principle that governs international relations morphs from a benefit into a drawback, at least if one looks at politics from a moral point of view. Carmen Pavel's solution to this conundrum is a division of sovereign power both between states and international institutions with the muscle to put a stop to egregious human rights abuses, and among international institutions of a variety of types, with the International Criminal Court in the lead.
While lucidly defending this complex division, Pavel puts warranted pressure on three intellectual postures at odds with her own. First, she chastises political theorists who float in a heavenly sphere of "oughts" without attending to the earthly sphere of "is" or, more specifically, without thinking about the institutions that would align reality with some approximation of their ideals. In insisting that political theorists focus on, not pure abstractions, but regulative ideals that make sense in established contexts and are plausible for institutions to actualize, Pavel displays a certain affinity with the critical realist school of political thought, which contends that political theory should consider ideals not in the abstract but as those ideals are intimated in and enabled by concrete political actualities. Second, in viewing fundamental human rights violations as cause for international intervention in state affairs, Pavel pits herself against classical IR realists who take an absolutist view of the sovereign independence principle and mistrust international cooperation for being either utopian or a cover-up for the pursuit of big-power interests. Third, Pavel's pitch for institutional pluralism without the umbrella of a higher authority or master plan...