This chapter introduces the main approach developed in International Leviathans through (1) a sociological understanding of sovereignty and (2) the concept of international administration. First, the chapter presents a new take of the debate between Kelsen and Schmitt around sovereignty and presents the sociological understanding of sovereignty by unpacking sovereignty practices. It makes the case for analysing the socio-political or socio-legal struggles happening between competing claims of political authority and accountability. It then discusses and theorises the concept of ‘international administration’, pointing out the limitations of two strands of the literature: the functionalist approach, defining international administrations through the functions they ought to perform as underlined in their mandate, and the normative approach, focusing on self-proclaimed goals and objectives. I posit that sovereignty practices deployed by international officials are social practices which cannot be understood solely through mandates or stated goals – they need to be understood through the reality on the ground, created by claims of political authority deployed by actors and the concomitant claims of accountability these practices elicit.

This chapter presents the central claim of the book, arguing that sovereignty practices emerge at the confluence of struggles – on the one hand, by actors asserting the political authority over a specific territory and, on the other hand, through resistance to this move by actors pursuing accountability and the responsibilisation of sovereign actors. I claim that practices of political authority – expressed through effective rule over territory – are central, constitutive acts of world politics, entailing specific obligations. Broadening the study of sovereignty practices beyond state relations, I argue that understanding how specific actors such as international organisations act as sovereign actors opens up new perspectives on international accountability and obligations in world politics.

This first substantive chapter introduces readers to Truth Commissions as an institution and their relationship with international law; the core problem examined in the book, and the overall argument; the main debates in scholarship and practice, which frame the book’s intervention; and the book’s methodological approach and contribution. The chapter begins with an overview of Truth Commissions, their contemporary role, and historical transformation. The discussion focuses on how the jurisprudential tradition of ‘jurisdictional thought’ offers a way of examining how Truth Commissions have ‘authorized’ their accounts of violent events as the truth by drawing on different dimensions of international law. The chapter explains how the book approaches the analysis of Truth Commissions through the study of their representations of truth and authority. This involves setting out the book’s theoretical orientation, which includes the jurisprudence of jurisdictional thought, law and humanities scholarship, and the theory and history of international law; and explaining the importance of the author’s in-country visits and archival research.

This chapter examines the relationship between human rights and Chile’s 1990-1991 National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, and the way this relationship continues to shape state-society relations in the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990). The argument is two-fold. First, the Truth Commission draws on the language of human rights to authorize its account as the ‘major’ truth. Second, in doing so, the Truth Commission displaces from public life ‘minor’ truths, specifically the experiences of state-violence by Indigenous communities (Mapuche people) and women (Arpilleristas). The argument is based on an analysis of the representation of truth and authority embodied in Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights. The chapter shows how the Museum gives continuity to the work of the Truth Commission by giving it a material (spatial and experiential) form. While the Truth Commission and the Museum remain two distinct institutions, in visiting the Museo/Truth Commission it becomes apparent how human rights authorizes the Truth Commission’s account, and how the Museo gives it continuity in public life.

The book concludes with a short chapter that invites readers to re-consider the relationship between Truth Commissions and international law. It emphasizes the consequences of this relationship for the quality of state-society relations in the aftermath of violent conflict. It also highlights the importance of paying attention to who is authorizing the inclusion of local cultural expressions of violent conflict in the accounts produced by Truth Commission; who benefits from such inclusions; and what ends are being served.

This chapter analyses how the Argentinian Truth Commission (CONADEP 1983-1984) accounted for the dictatorship’s state-violence, and how international law is involved in the making of this account as truth. The argument is that the Truth Commission draws on international law’s promises of peace and democracy to authorize its account as truth. In turn, the Truth Commission deauthorizes, and thereby silences, accounts of the dictatorship’s state-violence that do not conform with the official version embedded in, and mobilized by, the promises of international law of the late-Cold War. To show this, I read the Prologue to the Truth Commission’s Final Report as a literary text that not only works to establish the account that is set out in the Final Report, but that also authorizes that account as the truth by connecting it to international law. This reading of the Prologue to the Final Report’s textual representation of truth and authority draws on scholarship in the field of law and literature. The chapter also discusses the ongoing role of the Prologue in Argentina’s contemporary public life, particularly during the Kircher, Macri and Milei governments.

Christians faced the specific problem of reconciling capital punishment with the belief in the sanctity of human life. ‘God made man in his own image’ (Genesis). However the Church, from the time of Constantine, found it advantageous to ally itself with the State in order to forward and exploit its influence and authority. This alliance involved the Church in a cruel penal system: in fact, it introduced a new capital crime, heresy. Such disquiet as there was largely went underground. When dissent was expressed, Jesus was called up as an advocate for the cause, not as a missionary for penal reform (his Kingdom was not of this world), but because of his life, teaching, and vision of a New Age. Of our two Italian abolitionists, the devout Catholic Pelli repeatedly invoked the Christian God and the Sermon on the Mount. Earlier it was a Protestant, Sébastian Castellion, who caused a stir. Castellion campaigned fiercely against the criminalization of heresy, following the brutal execution of Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553 in Calvin’s Geneva. Castellion, however, was striking a blow for freedom of belief rather than for the abolition of capital punishment as such.

Chapter 7 focuses on more local dynamics over cross-border voting in certain borderland localities where all scales merge, and where palimpsestic political communities emerge even more clearly. It emphasizes the question of authority in the recognition or contestation of belonging. By campaigning in the Togolese borderlands in the 2000s, the Ghanaian political parties aimed to instrumentalize cross-border ties and recognized the authority of the local level in confirming belonging to the nation. This chapter demonstrates that the local level is the authority on and the gatekeeper of national belonging. As a consequence it shows that the local level is the most powerful layer of belonging in the palimpsestic political communities of the region, since it is capable of influencing all the other layers of belonging.

This chapter explores the relationships between regulations (laws, senatorial decrees) and female visibility in Republican Rome. The focus is on the earliest epigraphic and literary evidence for regulations mentioning women, citizen and non-citizen. Key examples include the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus (186 BCE), one of the Clusium Fragments (late second to early first century BCE), the lex Osca Tabulae Bantinae (100–91 BCE), the Tabula Heracleensis (post-Social War), the lex Coloniae Genetivae (59 to 44 BCE), as well as Cicero’s references to a lex on female mourning from the XII Tabulae (Twelve Tables), the lex Voconia of 169 BCE and the pontifical responsum and senatus consultum on the Vestal Licinia in 123 BCE. These are compared with Republican regulations attested in later sources. This chapter argues that these regulations rendered some women visible, both physically and symbolically, and that they offer us valuable insight into women’s agency, authority and property in the Roman Republic.

Andrews ” Reath offers a new interpretation of the doctrine, set forth in the Critique of Practical Reason, that the moral law is given to us as a “fact of reason.” Reath proposes that we understand this doctrine through the idea that what is given in this fact is the reality of a basic rational power. He argues that Kant accepts a generally ‘Aristotelian’ conception of a rational power, so that pure practical reason is a rational power with its own formal end and its own formal principle, which we know to be the moral law. Exercises of this power are (in some sense) guided by a subject’s consciousness of its formal principle, and therein lies its spontaneity and self-activity.

This chapter lays out the book’s argument in two parts. First, it first develops the concept of self-determination as understood by state and non-state actors in the Global South to apply to the legitimate exercise of power in the international system. Rather than requiring strict sovereignty and exclusion of outside actors, self-determination is about the nature of cooperation and international involvement. It requires that people, through their governments, be able to domestically affirm international rules and to meaningfully participate in their enforcement. The second part of this chapter explains how establishing regional organizations as an authority over issue areas can be a strategy for realizing self-determination and why, in the case of human rights, it necessitated compromising on the norm of non-interference. This strategy is effective at deterring pressure from Western governments because it combines and appeals to widely held beliefs about the legitimacy of self-rule with beliefs about the importance of exercising power through international organizations.

Why have regional organizations become authorities over human rights and international intervention, and what explains the differences in regional authority across different regions? Why did leaders in some parts of the Global South go from rejecting any interference to arguing for the central role of regional organizations in international interference? This chapter introduces the central questions addressed by this book and provides an overview of its core argument, focusing on the creation of new regional authority at one important moment: the emergence of regional organizations as authorities over human rights. This was the first time when leaders in the Global South changed from arguing for complete non-interference to arguing that legitimate interference should be carried out by or with the involvement of regional organizations. They did so as a strategy of subtle resistance to new challenges to self-determination, in the form of economic enforcement of human rights by Western governments. In regions targeted by this enforcement, leaders responded by establishing their regional organizations as authorities over human rights, accepting regional interference for the first time.

This chapter explores implications of the argument made in this book for other areas of international relations scholarship and for contemporary international politics, with regional authority and self-determination continuing to occupy an important place in the international politics of the Global South. It considers how incorporating the importance of self-determination, and the idea of regional organizations as a means of realizing it, can provide more complete understandings of contemporary political phenomena. I discuss how the argument in this book sheds light on the Global South’s dissatisfaction with liberal norms and institutions, the openness of democratic states in the Global South to cooperation with illiberal powers, and present-day dynamics of regionalism, including the creation of “new” regions and the growth of “authoritarian” regional organizations.