ABSTRACT
It is often argued that humanitarian interventions in the post-Cold War era present a new challenge to state sovereignty. In this debate, sovereignty is typically understood to mean nonintervention, so that humanitarian interventions necessarily violate sovereignty. This chapter attempts to address the issue by tracing the genealogy of sovereignty and intervention. Decolonization at the end of World War II gave birth to new states that had to face the same challenge of establishing relative sovereignty. At the height of the Cold War, many strategically located developing countries suffered from overt and covert interventions by the two superpowers. Stephan Krasner does not go far enough in problematizing sovereignty. He still views Westphalian sovereignty as nonintervention and intervention as its negation. This is evident in his efforts at compiling instances of its violations in the history of the modern states system. Krasner focuses his attention on Westphalian sovereignty and international legal sovereignty but brackets domestic sovereignty and interdependence sovereignty.
