ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how mankind is used to define the status of certain spaces or territories and how do these definitions relate to understandings of sovereignty. It also explores the relation between sovereignty and the commons of mankind embedded in legal imaginaries of globality. The chapter analyses the legal idiom and rationalities in which the politics of globality is and has been conducted. In contemporary debates on human rights, environmentalism and humanitarian intervention, sovereignty is often treated as the antipole of mankind and/or the global. The pairing of sovereignty and mankind is a central component of very different practices of globe management in both the sixteenth and the twentieth century. The gradual opening up of the globe and outer space has evolved into different understandings of mankind as a governing concept in international law. These variant notions of mankind, in their turn, have affected understandings of sovereign membership of the global legal community.
