ABSTRACT
International law depends as much upon what behaviour by states comes to be accepted as upon international declarations and the like. The statist conception of authority is less straightforward and can, doubtless, take several forms. The case is made by claiming that a state which grossly violates its subjects' human rights loses its title to political authority because this depends precisely upon its upholding their rights. External assistance to secure secession should not be thought of as necessarily aimed at advancing self-determination. It is that the idea of self-determination as conferring a systemic right of secession becomes irrelevant when a minority is repressed just in virtue of being the minority that it is. The group whose circumstantial right of secession is recognized is one whose identity is determined by the repressive state itself. Walzer does countenance humanitarian intervention in those most extreme cases of massacre and enslavement 'that shock the moral conscience of mankind'.
