ABSTRACT
Liberal international sovereignty embodies elements of both the law of states and the law of peoples. This chapter focuses on the extent of the transformations underway in the international political realm. It explores the classic regime of sovereignty and examines a number of transformations affecting the subject, scope, and sources of international law. The focus is on the nature of these legal and political changes, and an appraisal is offered of their strengths and limits. The institutional requirements of political cosmopolitanism include: Multilayered governance, diffused authority. The sovereign states system became entrenched in a complex of rules that evolved, from the seventeenth century, to secure the concept of an order of states as an international society of sovereign states. The human rights regime consists of overlapping global, regional, and national conventions and institutions. The political and legal transformations of the last fifty years have gone some way toward circumscribing and delimiting political power on a regional and global basis.
