Building upon my previous account of the antecedents of statehood, this chapter establishes five procedural principles that further condition the emergence of new states. These principles can be split into two sets: those that establish means for state creation through which valuable politics can either be instantiated or enhanced, and those that either prohibit or restrict state creation through means that violate or disrupt political action. The first set comprises the 'recognition principle' and the 'referendum principle', which determine the legal salience of foreign recognition and independence referendums. The second set comprises the 'negative self-determination principle', the 'international peace principle', and the 'territorial integrity principle'. These three relate, respectively, to the international legal prohibitions against mass disenfranchisement and political subordination, the unlawful threat or use of force, and the violation of an established community's territorial integrity. These five principles provide a procedural framework for state creation, which, along with the antecedents of statehood, collectively comprise 'statehood as political community'.

This chapter develops an original account of political ethics, which details not only what it means to belong to a political community but also the normative contribution that politics makes to the lives of private individuals. Advancing discrete conceptions of authenticity and reasonableness, it discusses two fundamentally political duties that we owe to those who share our communities with us: duties that partly define our membership within those groups and inform the ethical value of politics as a discrete form of human activity. It also describes two ways in which politics enhances our ethical lives in instrumental terms, articulating a conception of political action that foregrounds its objective value. This argument forms the normative core of 'statehood as political community', the conception of state creation advanced within the first part of the overall text.

This chapter draws upon the normative resources of political community to construct an account of the 'antecedents' of statehood: the factual prerequisites that nascent entities characteristically must demonstrate in order to mount a plausible statehood claim. These antecedents, which will be familiar to doctrinal lawyers from sources such as the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, are: a permanent population, a relatively determinate territory, an 'effective' government, and some degree of governmental independence. In addition to grounding each antecedent within both historical and contemporary practice, this chapter demonstrates their coherence with the ethical value of politics, thereby reconstructing these elements of international law into a normatively coherent whole. Several aspects of this reconstruction will strike readers familiar with state creation as controversial. In particular, I advance a novel conception of governmental 'effectiveness' that turns upon the capacity of nascent states to facilitate ethically valuable political action.

The Introduction establishes the topic of the book - the creation of states in international law - as well as the method adopted when investigating that topic. It argues that doctrinal debates over state creation have become deadlocked as a result of the prevailing method of 'legal positivism' and that this approach, which focuses exclusively upon the factual provenance of putative laws, should be abandoned. Advocating a form of 'rational reconstruction', whereby the normative appeal of putative laws must be assessed alongside their provenance within international legal practice, it connects this method of law identification to the earlier 'Grotian tradition' developed by scholars such as Hersch Lauterpacht. To aid readers who might be unfamiliar with the details of international legal reasoning, an extended summary of the legal framework endorsed by the text is then presented, followed by a brief overview of the structure of the argument to follow.

This chapter establishes the broader contours of politics, conceived as a discrete domain of ethical behaviour. It begins by detailing some paradigmatic instances of political action, organised into two categories: 'direct' and 'indirect'. Next, it examines the relationship between political action and violence, arguing that although individual violent acts might instantiate ethically valuable politics to some degree, truly endemic violence is inimical to politics. Having established this, it turns to the relationship between politics, equality, and inclusion, arguing that politics takes place primarily within geographically demarcated communities and that, as a result, we are justified in prioritising the participation of our compatriots. Finally, this chapter examines the role played by governance institutions within contemporary states, arguing that they fulfil an essential facilitating function. This grants them 'quasi-independent' value as political 'artefacts', 'focuses', and 'forums'. Taken together, these various arguments bridge the conceptual and normative gap between the analysis of the previous chapter and the account of state creation advanced later in the book.

This chapter examines the view that state creation requires the existence of a normatively legitimate government. It begins by defining governmental legitimacy, arguing that it is best analysed in terms of the moral justifiability of individual acts of governance, whether viewed individually or in aggregate. Next, it considers what it means for institutions, social conventions, and legal principles to be legitimate before moving on to consider the negative argument that no theory of state creation that excludes a criterion of governmental legitimacy could ever be morally plausible. Having dismissed this objection as mistaken, the chapter then examines a range of legitimacy-based reconstructions, which draw respectively upon the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke. Each position is critiqued and dismissed as an implausible approach to the law of state creation.