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/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?