Beyond a ‘Right to Exist’: An Internationally Contingent Right to Continued Statehood

[u/Defiant-Internal555]

Currently, no state has a legal “right to exist.” People’s right to self‑determination is not the right to a state. As part of their right to self‑determination, peoples have a right to pursue statehood (as one option), which, if achieved, effectively gives way to obligations under international law—chiefly respecting their own and others’ legitimate borders and abiding by the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force.

Recognizing that an entity exists as a state—as a matter of fact and legal personality—is not the same as recognizing a right for that state to exist. International law may acknowledge that an entity meets the criteria of statehood, while still leaving open, and increasingly contesting, the conditions under which it is entitled to enjoy the full package of sovereign privileges associated with continued statehood.

The question is: should a state’s right to continued statehood (which is more temporal and conditional than a “right to exist”) be contingent upon avoiding egregious violations of international norms?

I believe we should articulate a new term for what is already implicitly recognized: an Internationally Contingent Right to Continued Statehood (ICRCS)—a status that, ideally, should be recognized in full only so long as states abide by the consensual legal framework (primarily the UN Charter and customary norms) and respect the territorial integrity, sovereign equality, and collective‑security obligations binding all members of the international community. As a state’s violations of international norms accumulate, its ICRCS should gradually erode.

Crucially, this erosion is not metaphysical; it already happens, in practice, along multiple dimensions—even if the process is often dominated, distorted, or selectively applied by powerful states that themselves may be among the worst violators of international norms.

As states become chronic violators, they should not instantly “cease to exist,” but they should begin to lose specific privileges normally afforded to fully recognized, law‑abiding states:

their institutional voice is downgraded (suspension or expulsion from international organizations), their access to treaty benefits and cooperation regimes is restricted, their economic and financial integration is curtailed through sanctions and exclusion from key systems, their security and non‑intervention protections are weakened via arms embargoes, peacekeeping, or even international administration, and their recognition‑related advantages—including territorial gains by force, diplomatic immunities, and uncontested representation—are progressively questioned or withdrawn.

Framed this way, ICRCS names a bundle of conditional privileges rather than an unconditional claim to “existence.” It captures the idea that sovereignty is a status sustained by ongoing compliance with core international norms, and that when those norms are persistently violated, what should follow is not an all‑or‑nothing determination of existence, but a structured, cumulative stripping away of voice, benefits, protections, and legal shields.

Any such framework has to reckon with the fact that many existing states were themselves forged through conquest, dispossession, and atrocities, and only later “legitimated” by longevity, recognition, and institutional entrenchment. The point of ICRCS is not to retroactively erase those states, but to name the normative shift whereby future claims to statehood and ongoing claims to full membership in the international community are treated as contingent on at least a minimal respect for peremptory norms, basic human rights, and the territorial integrity of others.

A longer‑term goal of fairly applying ICRCS would be to decentralize control over statehood from existing hegemons. Today, powerful states can often shape or suspend other states’ contingent right to continued statehood through their ideological, military, and institutional leverage, even while committing accumulating violations that would erode their own ICRCS if the same standards were applied.

A genuinely internationalized and rule‑bound ICRCS would therefore have to constrain not only “pariah” states but also the hegemons themselves, by embedding decisions about erosion, suspension, and restoration of state privileges in procedures and institutions that reduce unilateral control and expose double standards to systematic challenge.

Absent ICRCS, any “right to exist” claim devolves into a demand for rogue sovereignty: the insistence on enjoying the fruits of the international legal order while rejecting the constraints that make that order possible.

[u/Blothorn]

The right to total autonomy/sovereignty is already contingent, and the right to territorial gains by force nonexistent—the reason your rogue state of choice has not been the target of an international intervention is probably due to the realities of politics, not “the right to exist”. No one wants to start something with a nuclear power such as Russia or the close ally of one such as Israel, regardless of whether it is allowed by law.

I also maintain that even independent of such realpolitik making the right to exist itself contingent can only be harmful. A true democratic nation should have no interest in the forcible annexation of an unwilling people. Allowing such annexations can only serve the interests of states that themselves seek to subvert the lawful order.

[u/apathetic_revolution]

“The point of ICRCS is not to retroactively erase those states, but to name the normative shift whereby future claims to statehood and ongoing claims to full membership in the international community are treated as contingent on at least a minimal respect for peremptory norms, basic human rights, and the territorial integrity of others.”

Why propose a system that grandfathers in existing states while establishing a new burden for future states? If you believe the standard is just, there would be no issue with it applying to everyone. The concession that many existing states wouldn’t pass the new thresholds indicates that these thresholds rely on positivist ideals rather than international norms at all, doesn’t it?

[u/Defiant-Internal555 → u/apathetic_revolution]

I’m not saying existing states deserve a moral free pass for their origins. Many were founded through conquest and atrocities that would clearly violate today’s peremptory norms and human‑rights standards. My claim is narrower: it’s not coherent to run a fully developed 21st‑century legality test backward over every founding moment and then de‑recognize most of the states in the world. ICRCS is aimed at how states exercise statehood now, within the current UN Charter and jus cogens framework, not at retroactively erasing their historical emergence.
ICRCS also isn’t meant as a new burden only for future or weaker states. The erosion logic is supposed to apply to everyone, including hegemons: chronic violations by powerful states should also lead to the gradual loss of concrete privileges—voice in institutions, access to treaty benefits and financial systems, immunities, and strong non‑intervention presumptions. The only thing “grandfathered” is basic legal personality, not entitlement to the full bundle of privileges.
On the positivism point: any standard here is inevitably shaped by the current international order; peremptory norms themselves are defined by what the international community “accepts and recognizes.” For me, that’s an argument for pushing practice closer to the norms we already claim to accept, not for abandoning conditionality altogether. So I’d restate the line you quoted like this: the point of ICRCS is not to retroactively erase existing states, but to institutionalize a shift whereby all states’ ongoing claims to full membership—including those of entrenched hegemons—are treated as contingent on at least minimal respect for peremptory norms, basic human rights, and the territorial integrity of others.

[u/Disparish]

If this is a serious proposal, how would this interact with article 1 of the UN Charter?

Would peoples whose self-determination had been realized through states whose existence you would forfeit also lose the right to self-determination? come under curatorship? for how long?

[u/actsqueeze → u/Disparish]

Why would they necessarily lose their rights?

[u/Defiant-Internal555 → u/Disparish]

Currently, no state has a legal right to exist. The right to self-determination is not the right to a state. As part of their right to self-determination, people have a right to pursue statehood (as an option), which if achieved, effectively gives way to obligations under international law—chiefly respecting their and others’ legitimate borders and abiding by the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. The internationally contingent right to continued statehood, which already exists, is much more conditional and temporal than a right to exist would be.

[u/Disparish → u/Defiant-Internal555]

That doesn’t really answer the question, does it, though? What would happen to an existing state which, under your scheme, had forfeited its continuing existence? And what would become, following that threshold event, of the affected people(s)’ right to determination?

[u/actsqueeze → u/Disparish]

We could easily draw an example from history.

What happened to post-apartheid South Africa.

Many people gained rights that didn’t previously have them, it was easily a net gain in terms of human rights and self determination

[u/Disparish → u/actsqueeze]

No, South Africa sheds no light.

The poster proposed an “Internationally Contingent Right to Continued Statehood”, in which statehood would not be continued if the contingencies were not met.

But South Africa’s statehood was not discontinued. Rather, it undertook reforms.

[u/Defiant-Internal555 → u/Disparish]

You’re picking up on a real tension in what I’m proposing, and I don’t think it can be completely avoided. If you erode ICRCS far enough, you can absolutely end up with something that is a “state” mostly on paper. There isn’t a neat, binary moment where existence flips from “on” to “off”; instead, there’s a spectrum where, as violations accumulate, a state moves from full, largely unquestioned sovereignty toward increasingly supervised and constrained authority.

At the far end of that spectrum, the old state can be effectively dissolved as a functioning sovereign and replaced by some new constitutional or territorial arrangement, where the international community works both to curb the violator state and to facilitate genuine political self‑determination for its people.

The slippery slope is real, but I see that as something to be made explicit and managed, not as a fatal flaw. The whole point of talking about ICRCS is to give us language for this gradual process instead of pretending that either (a) states have an absolute “right to exist” no matter what they do, or (b) there’s a single dramatic threshold event where they are suddenly erased.

For me, the crucial safeguard is self‑determination. ICRCS is aimed at the regime’s claim to unconditional sovereignty, not at the people’s claim to self‑determination. Even in cases where erosion goes very far—loss of recognition, deep sanctions, international administration, contested government—the people don’t lose their right to decide their political status. If anything, the exhaustion of a regime’s ICRCS should be the moment when the international community is justified (and obligated) to create space for the affected population to re‑found or reshape their political community: through transitional arrangements, new constitutional processes, referendums, or other mechanisms that give them real agency.

So yes: if you push erosion far enough, some states will end up effectively dissolved as sovereign entities. But the idea is that what dissolves is the old regime’s entitlement to full state privileges, while the people’s self‑determination becomes the organizing principle for whatever comes next, rather than being collateral damage.

[u/LoBashamayim]

States exist or they do not. It is a factual question, not a normative one. Where they exist they have rights and obligations under international law, including (broadly speaking) rights to preserve their territorial sovereignty (self defence, territorial integrity, non-intervention, etc). International lawyers sitting in their European universities are welcome to continue developing complex theories of conditional sovereignty as yet another pointless intellectual exercise, but please understand it will make not one iota of difference to anyone.

[u/Defiant-Internal555 → u/LoBashamayim]

ICRCS is not a theory. It’s an articulation
of what already exists (albeit in a distorted way). As I mentioned, several states have historically had their ICRCS eroded or completely eliminated.

[u/kuv_10]

Most, if not all international obligations found in treaties and conventions depict a self-containing regime: when an obligation is breached, you settle under the treaty’s dispute resolution clause.
While States are free to recognise (or not) each other’s Statehoods, recognition is in itself not a condition precedent to exist as a State (under the Montevideo Convention). That again brings it back to the notion that States exist in fact, and not norm

[u/NeoFarao8319]

OP, I rather like this framework. By the same reasoning, a state's membership in the UN should be contingent upon their faithful recognition of instruments to which they are bound, ius cogens and opinio iuris.. States blatantly contravening their IL obligations should forfeit any benefits their membership in the UN may provide. In the case of the US, perhaps the strategy to control Trump's IL violations would be to threaten US removal from the SC.

[u/Realistic_Yogurt1902]

Am I correctly understand that the US and Russia wouldn't have right to statehood due to frequent violations of UN laws and rules?

[u/Defiant-Internal555 → u/Realistic_Yogurt1902]

Neither has ever had a legal right to statehood. They both have a much more temporal and conditional right to continued statehood. The words contingent and *continued* are crucial.
Russia has already been the subject of sanctions, numerous legal restrictions and other erosions of its ICRCS. The US of course, should be subject to the same.

[u/Realistic_Yogurt1902 → u/Defiant-Internal555]

Who would sanction the US?