ABSTRACT
The decade since the end of the Cold War witnessed a number of developments that challenge conventional norms concerning the nature and legitimacy of contemporary states. Those developments speak directly to the core assumptions and practices of international recognition. In some cases recognition is granted readily or, more typically, persistently maintained in spite of conditions on the ground which are tantamount to legal fiction. In other cases, recognition is stubbornly withheld even though the realities on the ground themselves expose the legal fictions which the international community supports in the defence of the principle of territorial integrity. We are thus faced with an absurd combination of states and would-be states existing in a legal fog: some widely-recognized states can claim only the rudimentary conditions for statehood; indeed, in some instances, even those minimal conditions seem ephemeral and random. In other cases, fullyfunctioning and self-contained states are quarantined as pariahs, excluded from the mainstream channels of international diplomacy, existing in conditions beyond the pale of normal international intercourse. In short, they have been ‘sent to Coventry’!
