ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Second World War, the traditional Westphalian notion of sovereignty that emphasizes the autonomy of individual states and the doctrine of non-intervention has evolved into a new understanding that complements the allegedly supreme power of a sovereign state with duties and obligations that deny the theoretical possibility of absolute state rights. As a juridical entity, the state is consequently understood as an analogy of the moral person that is capable of both rights and duties. But with no unequivocally recognized normative substratum that could account for such rights and duties, the theory supporting this new understanding of sovereignty would have to either retract to transcendental accounts of human rights and ‘individual sovereignty’ overriding any absolute notion of state sovereignty, relapse into realist arguments, or accept the challenge of an ‘other sovereignty’ as proposed by Jacques Derrida.5
