In Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement: Premises of a Pluralist International Legal Order, Professor Brad R. Roth provides readers with a working knowledge of the various applications of sovereign equality in international law, and defends the principle of sovereign equality as a morally sound response to disagreements in the international realm. The United Nations system's foundational principle of sovereign equality reflects persistent disagreement within its membership as to what constitutes a legitimate and just internal public order. While the boundaries of the system's pluralism have narrowed progressively in the course of the United Nations era, accommodation of diversity in modes of internal political organization remains a durable theme of the international order. This accommodation of diversity underlies the international system's commitment to preserving a state's territorial integrity and political independence, sometimes at the expense of efforts to establish a universal justice that transcends territorial boundaries. Efforts to establish a universal justice, however, need to heed the dangers of allowing powerful states to invoke universal principles to rationalize unilateral (and often self-serving) impositions upon weak states. In Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement, Brad R. Roth explains that though frequently counterintuitive, limitations on cross-border exercises of power are supported by substantial moral and political considerations, and are properly overridden only in a limited range of cases.

The boundaries of the international order's pluralism remain variable, and relative convergences in both values and interests over time have led to the broadening of exceptions to sovereign prerogative, such as jus cogens, universal jurisdiction, and humanitarian intervention. With little prospect of these long term trends diminishing in either momentum or scope, this book weighs in to consider the enduring importance of sovereignty.

Offering a new interdisciplinary approach to global justice and integrating the insights of international relations and contemporary ethics, this book asks whether the core norms of international law are just by appraising them according to a standard of global justice grounded in the advancement of peace and protection of human rights.

The rise of the concept that all nations are equal has transformed international relations in the twentieth century, setting radically new terms for the conduct of war and peace, for economic relations, and for the organization of international society. It is the author's belief that uncritical adherence to this concept is a major stumbling block to the reorganization of the world community. This book is the first study of the historical antecedents and philosophical foundations of the concept of sovereign equality. The older concept of great-power primacy pictures states as abstract entities with a fictitious personality. Increasingly challenged since Alexis de Tocqueville, it has been supplanted by the opposing concept of sovereign equality, which was brought to world attention at the Second hague Peace Conference in 1907.

1. Equality of welfare

Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution. What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.

When is a de facto authority not entitled to be considered a 'government' for the purposes of International Law? In this book, Brad Roth offers a detailed examination of collective non-recognition of governments.