Sovereignty is often seen as a liminal concept. It is thought to inhabit the frontier territories between law, ethics and political science, where, as James Bryce once put it with Victorian verve, ‘the limits of conterminous sciences or branches of learning have not been exactly drawn’ and which therefore have been ‘infested by a number of vague or ambiguous terms’. The fact that the word ‘sovereignty’ has found its way into the vocabulary of various disciplines is hardly very interesting in itself. There is, however, a more fundamental sense in which the concept of sovereignty can be thought of as a liminal one. It has often been taken to stand for the rootedness of law in factual power that ultimately determines the limits of its reach. Hence the double nature of sovereignty as a quality somehow poised between facts and norms, simultaneously both political and legal. Thinking along these lines, one could say that the reason why sovereignty is a liminal concept is because it points to the paradoxical possibility that, when illegality becomes extreme, it can convert itself into a new standard of legality. One sovereignty is replaced by another so that what was before a punishable act of resistance becomes the founding act of a new state.

For a long time, lawyers, and especially international lawyers, have been interested in the question as to whether the formation of a new state is a fact or a legal fiat.