The legalization of international human rights norms and the globalization of human rights discourses challenge the way we think about sovereignty, legitimacy, and international law. The international human rights regime that began after World War Two, blossomed in the mid-1970s and took on new force after 1989 has led some cosmopolitan moral and legal theorists to conclude that the sovereignty and external legitimacy of governments should be considered contingent on their being both non-aggressive and basically just (i.e. rights-respecting). A radical idea is at stake: that the “international community” may articulate moral principles and create legal rules regulating the conduct of governments toward their own populations when human rights are at issue.

It is also argued that the international community has the default obligation to protect individuals and enforce basic human rights when states fail to do so or when they violate the rights of those under their authority or control. The changing norms of the international system seem to be indicative of a new political culture regarding sovereignty that has shifted from one of impunity to one of responsibility and accountability. The expansion of human rights law and the expectation, since the mid-1990s, that it should be backed up, in cases of grave violations, by sanctions imposed at the international level including military (humanitarian) intervention, suggest to some that the internal legitimacy of governments as well as the sovereignty of the state have become contingent on outside judgments based on cosmopolitan principles of justice. From this perspective too, the rules protecting state sovereignty such as the principles of non-intervention and domestic jurisdiction enshrined in the UN Charter appear to be out of date, and the international legal and political order based on them increasingly illegitimate. Accordingly those embracing this perspective advocate redefining sovereignty as the responsibility to protect (R2P) rather than as state autonomy.