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State Sovereignty After 9/11: Disorganised Hypocrisy

February 2007
Political Studies 55(06):274-296

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00664.x

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American University Washington D.C.

This article examines the implications of the 9/11 attacks and the US-led 'global war on terror' for debates about state sovereignty. To support its attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration put forth a 'selective sovereignty' thesis that would legitimise intervention in states that are accused of supporting terrorists.This new rationale for intervention was paradoxically justified as a means of ensuring a 'well-ordered world of sovereign states', which had been imperilled by transnational terrorist networks. This article argues that the 'selective sovereignty' thesis exaggerates the challenge posed by terrorist organisations to Westphalian sovereignty, and understates the US's own unprincipled violation of its core norm of non-intervention. A related argument of this article is that on the face of it, the 'selective sovereignty' approach fits the notion of 'organised hypocrisy' put forward by Stephen Krasner, which refers to 'the presence of long-standing norms (in this case non-intervention) that are frequently violated' for the sake of some 'higher principles' - violations that are generally tolerated by the international community. But the higher principles evoked by the US to justify its war on Iraq, such as the human rights of the Iraqis, and democracy promotion in the Middle East, are now clearly seen to have been a façade to mask the geopolitical and ideological underpinnings of the invasion. In this sense, the war on terror has revived national security and naked self-interest as the principal rationale for intervention, notwithstanding the self-serving efforts by some Bush administration officials to 'graft' the 'selective sovereignty' thesis on to the evolving humanitarian intervention principle.This policy frame- work is hypocrisy for sure, but as the international response to the war on Iraq (including the lack of UN authorisation for the war and the transatlantic discord it generated) demonstrates, it should be viewed more as a case of 'disorganised hypocrisy'.

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State Sovereignty After 9/11: Disorganised

Hypocrisy

Amitav Acharya

Nanyang Technological University

This article examines the implications of the 9/11 attacks and the US-led ‘global war on terror’ for

debates about state sovereignty. To support its attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration

put forth a ‘selective sovereignty’ thesis that would legitimise intervention in states that are accused of

supporting terrorists.This new rationale for intervention was paradoxically justiﬁed as a means of ensuring

a ‘well-ordered world of sovereign states’, which had been imperilled by transnational terrorist networks.

This article argues that the ‘selective sovereignty’ thesis exaggerates the challenge posed by terrorist

organisations to Westphalian sovereignty, and understates the US’s own unprincipled violation

of its core norm of non-intervention. A related argument of this article is that on the face of it,

the ‘selective sovereignty’ approach ﬁts the notion of ‘organised hypocrisy’ put forward by Stephen

Krasner, which refers to ‘the presence of long-standing norms [in this case non-intervention] that are

frequently violated’ for the sake of some ‘higher principles’ – violations that are generally tolerated by

the international community. But the higher principles evoked by the US to justify its war on Iraq, such

as the human rights of the Iraqis, and democracy promotion in the Middle East,are now clearly seen to

have been a façade to mask the geopolitical and ideological underpinnings of the invasion. In this sense,

the war on terror has revived national security and naked self-interest as the principal rationale for

intervention, notwithstanding the self-serving efforts by some Bush administration ofﬁcials to ‘graft’ the

‘selective sovereignty’ thesis on to the evolving humanitarian intervention principle. This policy frame-

work is hypocrisy for sure,but as the international response to the war on Iraq (including the lack of UN

authorisation for the war and the transatlantic discord it generated) demonstrates, it should be viewed

more as a case of ‘disorganised hypocrisy’.

Theoretical Argument

The 9/11 terrorist attacks have introduced a new complexity to the debate about

sovereignty in world politics. Before 9/11, this debate revolved around two main

issues. The ﬁrst was the impact of globalisation on the nation state framework,

including questions about whether sovereignty is being eroded by transnational

economic linkages, such as trade, production networks and ﬁnancial ﬂows. The

other centred on the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and the normative

question about whether the non-intervention principle should be relaxed or

bypassed to allow military action against genocide or state failure.1The principal

challengers to sovereignty in these debates were multinational corporations,

‘activists beyond borders’ and, to a lesser extent, multilateral organisations.

While the above debates about the place of sovereignty in the emerging world

order are by no means settled, they have been joined in the post-9/11 era by

debates about sovereignty from a new source: the ‘war on terror’ waged by the

world’s most powerful state and its allies against their ‘severest’ foe, transnational

terrorist networks led by al Qa’eda.2This challenge differs from the pre-9/11

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00664.x

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007 VOL 55, 274–296

(although still ongoing) challenges in two respects. First, it has returned the

rationale for limiting sovereignty to the overriding importance of national security,

rather than human security or welfare,which were central to the globalisation and

humanitarian intervention debates.Although one has to be mindful that terrorism

is not the same as aggression, and that the source of the terrorist threat is not

another state or alliance but a transnational network of non-state actors, the

response of the states to the terrorism has been framed overwhelmingly as a threat

to state security and international order. Hence the securitising metaphor: the

‘war on terror’. Second, the post-9/11 challenge to sovereignty is organised and

led by a hegemonic state (although it is also backed by a number of other states

allied with the hegemon) which is seeking simultaneously to safeguard and limit

Westphalian sovereignty to suit its particularistic interests. Indeed, the attempt by

the US to limit sovereignty is being justiﬁed in the name of protecting it, or

safeguarding the system of sovereign states.

To elaborate, the war on terror is justiﬁed as protecting ‘national security’ from a

transnational menace which challenges it by its very mode of organisation and

operation and its presumed political agenda, including an alleged aspiration to

restore the pre-Westphalian caliphate. But in so doing, the leading state waging

this war and its supporters also exempt themselves from the norms of the

Westphalian order, and approve instruments that could be profoundly subversive

of that order.It is this paradoxical framing of the war on terror and its implications

for the condition of state sovereignty in the post-9/11 world that constitute the

focus of this essay.

A good starting point for examining the paradox of Westphalian sovereignty in

the age of terror is the theoretical framing of sovereignty as ‘organised hypoc-

risy’ by political scientist and senior Bush administration ofﬁcial Stephen

Krasner (Krasner, 1999).3The essence of this concept revolves around an appar-

ent puzzle: ‘the presence of long-standing norms that are frequently violated’

(Krasner, 1999). Although previous studies of sovereignty tended to separate

two categories of challenges – voluntary efforts such as the European integra-

tion process or coercive efforts such as interventions of a geopolitical or

humanitarian variety, Krasner’s notion attempts to place both types of challenge

under the same umbrella, regarding them as manifestations of organised hypoc-

risy. The key aspect of organised hypocrisy is that the violators justify their acts

in the name of other, alternative or higher sets of norms. As Krasner states,

organised hypocrisy occurs when the rules of sovereignty are ‘worked around’,

and when ‘the workarounds, which have been things like claims about human

rights, minority rights, religious toleration, have always evoked alternative

norms’ (Krasner interview with Kreisler, 2003). Moreover, these transgressions

occur without much protest: ‘there are very clear rules about how sovereignty

works, and they were violated frequently, much more frequently than people

had imagined ... Yet people were not screaming and yelling about hypocrisy,

nor were they trying to ﬁnd new rules’ (Krasner interview with Kreisler, 2003).

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POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

The organised hypocrisy formulation does seem to capture some aspects of the

war on terror,which includes, but is not limited to, the war in Iraq. First, as a host

of observers and writers, from UN Secretary-General Koﬁ Annan (BBC, 2004) to

Krasner himself (who served twice in the George W. Bush administration)4have

noted, the US occupation of Iraq did breach Westphalian sovereignty. Annan

termed the US invasion ‘illegal’, while Krasner said rather unambiguously: ‘We

didn’t just go and say,“We’re going to reconstruct these countries and then allow

them to choose their own form of government”. We said, “We are going to

transform these countries” ’. This to him is ‘a total violation of Westphalian-

Vattelian sovereignty’ (Krasner interview with Kreisler, 2003). Second, the war in

Iraq was justiﬁed by the US in the name of alternative principles, e.g. human

rights and international stability, two of the four alternative norms which Krasner

identiﬁes (the other two being religious toleration and minority rights) as the

basis for violating sovereignty.

But in this article I raise three objections to applying the organised hypocrisy

concept to describe and analyse the condition of state sovereignty in the post-

9/11 era. First, the ‘limits to sovereignty’ thesis put forward by the US and allies

like the UK and Australia, and related policy instruments such as pre-emption and

regime change, are not so much transgressions of state sovereignty as instruments

to preserve and protect a‘well-ordered system of sovereign states’.In other words,

the question is not whether sovereignty is at stake,but whose sovereignty. Second,

while the war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq, has been justiﬁed for the

sake of higher principles – especially the human rights of the Iraqis – these are

now understood to have been a façade to mask the geopolitical and ideological

underpinnings of the invasion. The real justiﬁcation is not about a ‘higher’

principle, but the conventional requirements of ‘national security’, and an inter-

national order conducive to the protection and promotion of the national

security interests of the most powerful states.And even so, those at the forefront

of the global war on terror vastly exaggerate the capacity of their adversary to

subvert the Westphalian order and hence undermine their national security. The

ability, or even the intention, of terror groups to inﬂict such damage is limited by

their divergent and varied objectives,their lack of physical capacity fundamentally

to disrupt international security, and the need of at least some of these groups for

state-like institutions and territorial organisation to realise their professed political

objectives. And their actions have provoked retaliatory measures which have

strengthened the national security state domestically vis-à-vis the civil society and

externally in relation to the agents of and mechanisms of globalisation.

Third, while violations of sovereignty have occurred through history, and the war

on terror may thus simply be seen as the most recent manifestation of what has

been a long-standing and familiar story in world politics, it is simply wrong to

lump all sorts of challenges to state sovereignty under the single overarching rubric

of organised hypocrisy. Krasner accepts that Westphalian-Vattelian sovereignty can

be compromised either coercively (such as the United States in Germany or Japan

276 AMITAV ACHARYA

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

after the Second World War), or voluntarily, as in the European Union and

though the European Human Rights regime. But violations undertaken in the

name of a narrowly deﬁned conception of national security, which is what

America’s Bush Doctrine is really about, do not have the same moral weight or

legitimacy as collective violations of Westphalian sovereignty by the international

community for the sake of preventing genocide or protecting lives. Similarly,

voluntary surrenders of sovereignty by a group of states for the sake of long-term

paciﬁcation and community building, such as the EU’s integration agenda, can

hardly be treated in the same breath as violations of others’ sovereignty by a

hegemon committed unilaterally to fulﬁlment of an imperial (neo-conservative)

ideology. Humanitarian intervention, of the type outlined in the R2P report

(International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001), may be

considered a form of organised hypocrisy, but the norm it invokes as justiﬁcation

does not have moral equivalence with the strategic and national security justiﬁ-

cations advanced by the US in support of pre-emption or regime change.

In other words, the rationale for violations of sovereignty and the mode of the

violations differ. More importantly, these variations do matter. This leads to a

fundamental problem with labelling post-9/11 sovereignty as organised hypoc-

risy: how ‘organised’ is the ‘organised hypocrisy’ in the war on terror? To qualify

actions undertaken by the Bush administration such as the invasion of Iraq and

the doctrine of pre-emption as ‘organised’ would accord them a legitimacy that

they simply do not enjoy. At the very least, the degree of complicity in the

organisation of hypocrisy varies between those who joined the coalition of the

willing and those who did not.The most powerful state bears a disproportionate

share of the responsibility for the organisation of these particular acts of hypocrisy.

The idea that sovereignty is open to interpretation and construction, which lies

at the heart of the organised hypocrisy thesis, is hardly new in itself. A good

deal of the constructivist literature on sovereignty grapples with this question

(see, for example, Bartelson, 1995; Biersteker and Weber, 1996; Onuf, 1991;

Weber, 1995; Wendt, 1999). What is distinctive about the Krasner thesis,

however, is not that such interpretations and constructions occur, but that they

occur without evoking much protest or challenge (people do not scream and

yell, or try to ﬁnd new rules). This assertion, however, is open to serious

question.The US pronouncements about limits to sovereignty after 9/11 are far

from being accepted or tolerated by the majority of the international com-

munity, including many of its allies in Western Europe. And people are trying to

ﬁnd new rules; not to replace sovereignty per se, as the Grundnorm of international

politics, but in order to reframe it as ‘responsibility to protect’ people through-

out the world. Governments as well as civil society organisations are indeed

‘screaming and yelling’, even though this may not be reaching the ears of senior

US ofﬁcials.The term ‘organised hypocrisy’ obscures real divisions and struggles

over the meaning of sovereignty in the international community, and variations

in the ways in which different actors or groups of states violate the norms of

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POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

Westphalian sovereignty. The more appropriate term for describing the war on

terror’s reshaping of the concept and practice of state sovereignty is not orga-

nised hypocrisy, but disorganised hypocrisy. Disorganised hypocrisy occurs

when the leading state, backed by a small number of like-minded allies (often

in disregard of their own domestic opinion), unilaterally changes (or attempts

to change) the rules of sovereignty (or any other meta-norm) by falsely basing

the change on previous and legitimate attempts at limiting sovereignty, and

when such transgressions are contested by others in the international commu-

nity who are themselves striving, through alternative arguments and modes of

action, for a consensus on how to limit state sovereignty in a more legitimate

and multilateral manner. A review of the war on terror conducted by the US

attests to the relevance of my reformulation.

Selective Sovereignty: The Responsibility to Attack

In order to ascertain whether the war on terror ﬁts the representation of

sovereignty as ‘disorganised hypocrisy’, we need to examine whether actions

undertaken in the name of the war on terror constitute a violation of sovereignty

and if so,under what pretext or in the name of which other, higher principles are

such violations justiﬁed. From the perspective of the US post-9/11, there is little

doubt about the US argument that the war on terror constituted a turning point

requiring limitations to the traditional notion of sovereignty. President Bush’s

speech immediately after 9/11 warned:

we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in

every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with

the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support

terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime (Bush, 2001).

This speech, presaging the US attack on the Taliban in December 2001 in

retaliation against the Taliban’s sheltering of Osama bin Laden and other terrorist

leaders and groups, was the basis of the administration’s ‘limits to sovereignty’

thesis, put forward by Richard Haas, the director of Policy Planning in the US

State Department:

Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people.Another

is not to support terrorism in any way. If a government fails to meet these

obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty,including

the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other governments, including

the United States, gain the right to intervene. In the case of terrorism, this can even

lead to a right of preventive, or peremptory, self-defense.You essentially can act in

anticipation if you have grounds to think it’s a question of when, and not if, you’re

going to be attacked (Lemann, 2002).

Haas’s words should not be construed as the philosophical musings of a lone

administration intellectual heading the think tank-like Policy Planning ofﬁce of

the State Department led by Colin Powell, whose own inﬂuence over issues

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POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

related to the war on terror was eclipsed by Dick Cheney’s White House or

Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Indeed, more than four years after 9/11, Douglas

Feith, Haas’s counterpart in the Pentagon as Under Secretary of Defense for

Policy, would argue in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations (now

headed by Richard Haas):

The United States strengthens its national security when it promotes a well-

ordered world of sovereign states: a world in which states respect one another’s

rights to choose how they want to live; a world in which states do not commit

aggression and have governments that can and do control their own territory; a

world in which states have governments that are responsible and obey, as it were,

the rules of the road. The importance of promoting a well-ordered world of

sovereign states was brought home to Americans by 9/11, when terrorists enjoying

safe haven in remote Afghanistan exploited ‘globalization’ and the free and open

nature of various Western countries to attack us disastrously here at home. Sover-

eignty means not just a country’s right to command respect for its independence,

but also the duty to take responsibility for what occurs on one’s territory, and, in

particular, to do what it takes to prevent one’s territory from being used as a base

for attacks against others (Feith, 2005).

Two aspects of the‘limits to sovereignty’thesis stand out.The ﬁrst is its conscious

linking or equating of the war on terror with the earlier discourse about

humanitarian intervention. And from a more long-term perspective, it adds

terrorism to the list of causes, including acute human rights violations, that could

justify disregarding the Westphalian norm of non-intervention. The second is

its extension of the mode of intervention from reactive to preventive. Together,

they constitute a signiﬁcant broadening of the framework of intervention.

The invasion of Iraq, which after Afghanistan was the next stage in the war on

terror, produced an additional rationale for, and broadening of, the ‘limits to

sovereignty’ thesis. This came a year after 9/11 in the form of the National

Security Strategy of the United States, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine.

John Lewis Gaddis has described the Bush Doctrine, including its emphasis on

regime change and pre-emption, as ‘a grand strategy of transformation’ (Gaddis,

2002). Already indicated in statements like Haas’s comments cited earlier, the

Doctrine called for using force, pre-emptively if necessary, to deal with regimes

which pose a threat to US strategic interests, not just by sponsoring or shel-

tering terrorists but also by acquiring or seeking to acquire weapons of mass

destruction. Postmodern terrorists, ever so elusive and willing to commit

suicide, are ‘undeterrable non-state enemies’, ill-suited for deterrence and con-

tainment which work only against a clear and identiﬁable adversary (Record,

2003). ‘If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long’

(O’Hanlon et al., 2002).

The resulting Bush Doctrine was not a lone American crusade.Although the US

as the world’s sole superpower was at its forefront,it was also endorsed, to varying

degrees, by a number of other countries, especially Australia (Acharya, 2005).

SOVEREIGNTY AND 9/11 279

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

What are the conditions or provocations that would justify limiting sovereignty?

The war on terror has identiﬁed several immediate and long-term reasons,

ranging from the removal of terrorist sanctuaries to the threat posed by the

weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists and their sponsoring states,

and the protection of human rights from abusive regimes which are also sponsors

of terrorism and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.5Interestingly, the

Bush administration’s promotion of democracy in the Middle East is not seen as

a violation of sovereignty because it could be undertaken without resort to force.

‘Respect for sovereignty’ did not ‘require us to ignore the depredations of

tyrannical regimes’, since ‘one can ... encourage countries to adopt democracy

without offending the principle of sovereignty’ (Feith, 2005). This is notwith-

standing the fact that the ideology behind the Iraq invasion, promoted by the

neo-conservatives, is not shy of sanctioning the use of military power to realise

and maintain US pre-eminence, and places the promotion of democracy at its

core.

To be sure, an expanded agenda of intervention is nothing new in world politics.

The debate about humanitarian intervention has been going on for decades. In

1992, an International HeraldTribune editorial noted:‘In just a few years the idea has

been established that countries which fail to care decently for their citizens dilute

their claim to sovereignty and forfeit invulnerability to outside political-military

intervention’ (International Herald Tribune, 1992, p. 6). Some writers had taken it

much further, adding ecological and proliferation issues to the agenda of inter-

vention. Laurence Martin, then President of the Royal Institute of International

Affairs, had argued that despite the end of the Cold War, there would ‘remain

substantial motives for the greater powers ... to interest themselves in the third

world’, because of the dangers of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,

migration caused by demographic pressures and ‘moral concern for the welfare of

fellow men’.To this, he would add ‘the current wave of enthusiasm for democracy

and the market, lest failure should engender new authoritarian and potentially

aggressive tendencies’ (Martin, 1992, p. 21).Alan Henrikson has suggested ‘three

classes of purpose warranting possible intervention’:

intervention to prevent or stop the wide-spread violation of human rights

(‘humanitarian intervention’); intervention to halt the imminent and continued use

of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological, and nuclear

weapons, perhaps borne by ballistic missiles (‘security intervention’); and interven-

tion to block or contain the release of materials causing severe and wide damage

to the climate, landscape, or seascape (‘environmental intervention’) (Henrikson,

1992, pp. 70–1).

Yet the war on terror’s challenge to sovereignty assumes a special signiﬁcance

that could not have been foreseen by the post-Cold War ideas about interven-

tion. First, it links different types of reasons for intervention within its ‘axis of

evil’ formulation, bringing together sponsorship of terrorism, weapons of mass

destruction and abuse of human rights as reasons for intervention. Second, this

280 AMITAV ACHARYA

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

consolidated agenda for intervention is spearheaded by the world’s most pow-

erful state, thereby upsetting the balance between what Hedley Bull had called

the Cold War era balance between the ‘interveners’ and the ‘intervened

against’.6

Moreover, as noted, the war on terror, unlike the logic of humanitarian inter-

vention, is not aimed at eroding (in however principled a manner) the Westpha-

lian system, but at strengthening it.7Fighting terrorism through intervention is

just as important to national security, and the sanctity of the Westphalian order, as

ﬁghting conventional aggression to preserve territorial integrity, which had

historically been the most important concern for protecting the Westphalian

order.This is because while the war on terror may involve some transgressions of

sovereignty of states which are part of or similar to the ‘axis of evil’ members, from

the perspective of those waging the war on terror, the threat to Westphalia posed

by the US and the coalition of the willing is nothing compared to the threat to

sovereignty posed by terrorist organisations and networks.

Westphalia and Caliphobia

This brings us to the next challenge to framing the war on terror as organised

hypocrisy. This concerns the possible justiﬁcation for the war on terror for the sake

of a ‘higher principle’. Given that the protection of human rights and promotion

of democracy were not offered as the only or most important justiﬁcations for the

war, even by the Bush administration (it was weapons of mass destruction and

alleged Iraqi support for al-Qa’eda),8the question of higher principles has to do

with the preservation of the Westphalian system, or as administration ofﬁcials

would put it,‘promoting a well-ordered world of sovereign states’.

In redeﬁning sovereignty in the wake of 9/11, the US initially targeted two

categories of actors: failed states which offer, either deliberately or due to a lack

of capacity to control their borders, sanctuary to terrorists; and regimes which

export terrorism and acquire weapons of mass destruction.This basically reﬂected

the administration’s rationalisation of its attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, respec-

tively. As the insurgency in Iraq worsened, it came up with another target – this

time a non-state actor, but with the aspiration to restore a pre-Westpahlian state:

the caliphate.9

Thus, speaking at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced

International Studies on 5 December 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

warned: ‘Iraq would serve as the new base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend

throughout the Middle East and which would threaten legitimate governments

around the world ... This is their plan. They have said so’ (US Department of

Defense, 2005). Eric Edelman, the new Under Secretary of Defense for policy

argued: ‘Iraq’s future will either embolden terrorists and expand their reach and

ability to re-establish a caliphate, or it will deal them a crippling blow. For us,

SOVEREIGNTY AND 9/11 281

POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

failure in Iraq is just not an option.’ (Council on Foreign Relations, 2005).

General John Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, warned:

‘They will try to re-establish a caliphate throughout the entire Muslim world’

(cited in Bumiller, 2005). And Vice President Dick Cheney reminded:‘They talk

about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the seventh-century

caliphate’, to be ‘governed by Shariah law, the most rigid interpretation of the

Koran’ (cited in Bumiller, 2005). (Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser,

has also warned of the caliphate.) Bush himself, although not using the term

‘caliphate’ per se, has warned of ‘a totalitarian Islamic empire that reaches from

Indonesia to Spain’ (cited in Bumiller, 2005).

But the US is not alone in invoking the caliphate, nor is al-Qa’eda seen as its only

agent. Founded in 2003, the Jemaah Islamiyah ( JI, also spelled Jamaah Islamiyah)

is not only South-East Asia’s ‘principal’ terrorist network, it is also said to be the

‘regional franchise’ of al-Qa’eda, with aspirations for creating a regional Islamic

superstate. In 2002, CNN reported its ‘breathtaking’ plan ‘to create one Islamic

state from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore to parts of the Philippines,Thailand and

Myanmar’ (CNN, 2002). Singapore’s Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong spoke

before the Council on Foreign Relations to warn:

JI’s objective was to create a Daulah Islamiyah, an Islamic state in Southeast Asia.

This was to be centred in Indonesia but would include Malaysia, Southern

Thailand, Southern Philippines, and, inevitably, Singapore and Brunei ... Their

followers want to recreate the Islam of 7thCentury Arabia which they regard as the

golden age.Their ultimate goal is to bring about a Caliphate linking all Muslim

communities (Goh, 2004).10

What is the evidence that terrorist organisations have embarked on such a grand

design? Among other things, US ofﬁcials cite a letter purportedly written by

Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Aiman al-Zawahiri, to the now-deceased leader of

the Iraqi insurgents,Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.Dated 9 July 2005, the letter outlines

four ‘incremental goals’ of the Iraq insurgency. The main goal during the ﬁrst

stage is to expel the Americans from Iraq. The second stage would involve

establishing an Islamic authority or amirate and developing it ‘until it achieves

the level of a caliphate – over as much territory as you can to spread its power

in Iraq’. The third stage would see the jihad wave extended ‘to the secular

countries neighboring Iraq’, while the fourth stage will ‘coincide with what

came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge

any new Islamic entity’ (Al-Zawahiri, 2005).

The JI’s plans for an Islamic superstate in South-East Asia are even more elabo-

rate.An unprecedented insight into its ideological and organisational make-up is

provided by a document, known as PUPJI, or ‘General Guide for the Struggle of

Jemmah Islamiyah’.11 Released by JI’s Central Leadership Council, it may be one

of the most important documents on the transnational terrorist movement’s ideas

and approaches to an Islamic state, since there is no comparable comprehensive

strategy document recovered for al-Qa’eda.

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POLITICAL STUDIES: 2007, 55(2)

Jemaah Islamiyah Structure (2001–2):

mir: leader

Markaz: leadership council

Shura: consultative councils

Mantiqi: geographic divisions

Mantiqi 1 and IV mainly assigned fundraising

Mantiqi II mainly assigned leadership and recruitment

Mantiqi III mainly assigned training

Wakalah and Fiah: sub-groups

Note: Although the mantiqis and wakalahs were originally defined as districts and subdistricts, they were

“actually a territorial command structure of brigades, battalions, companies, platoons, and squads.”1

Source: Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia (Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and

Trade, 2004)

1 “Jemaah Islamiyah in South East Asia: Damaged but Still Dangerous,” Asia Report N°63 page i, Paris: International Crisis Group, 26 August

Amir

Markaz Shura

Mantiqi I

Singapore and

Malaysia

Mantiqi II

Indonesia

Mantiqi III

Sabah, Sulawesi and

South Philippines

Mantiqi IV

Australia and Papua

New Guinea

Wakalah Wakalah Wakalah Wakalah

Fiah Fiah Fiah Fiah

2003.

According to this document, the goal of the JI’s struggle is to ‘restore the

Islamic Caliphate and the sovereignty of the Syariah all over the world’. The

ﬁrst part of PUPJI, ‘The Principles for the Methodology to Establish the Reli-

gion’, which consists of principles for understanding the religion, maintains that

‘establishing the religion means establishing the Islamic state and subsequently

the Islamic Caliphate’. This implies that a national or regional Islamic state is a

ﬁrst step towards an Islamic caliphate, or world state. Principle 4 of Part I

restates the ‘aim in the struggle’ as ‘to guide mankind to submission to Allah,

only by the restoration of the caliphate on earth’. Part III, containing the

Constitution of the JI, states its objective as ‘to ensure that the administration

of Jamaah Islamiyah is organized in order to establish the caliphate in accordance

with the way of the Prophet, which guarantees the implementation of the

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Syariah in a comprehensive way’. And Article 4 of the Constitution deﬁnes the

‘aim of the struggle’ as ‘to establish the daulah [state] as a step towards the

restoration of the Caliphate’.

Can we then take this as a manifesto for an Islamic state that would subsume

Westphalian sovereignty? First, the objective of the caliphate or even the national/

regional state is presented very generally and vaguely. PUPJI is basically a docu-

ment about the objectives and organisation of the jamaah (group), not of the

daulah (state) or khilafah (caliphate). Second, while PUPJI mentions ‘coordination

and collaboration with other Islamic states’, under ‘Methodology to Establish the

Religion’, there is no explanation of how this is to be achieved. And the very fact

that it envisages cooperation with other Islamic states implies that it accepts a

plurality of sovereign states, even if they may all be Islamic, at least in the interim,

before the khilafah is established.There is no sense in the PUPJI of how the move

from the daulah to khilafah is to be achieved.

The JI is an offshoot of the Darul Islam (DI),a long-established Indonesian national

group whose goal was the creation of an Islamic state within Indonesia.Only when

this goal proved unattainable, despite the opportunity offered by the chaos

accompanying the toppling of the Suharto regime in 1998, did the DI move

towards its regional aspirations. Indeed, there is growing evidence that internal

disunity in JI has led its Indonesian members to moveaway f rom the goal of a regional

superstate and focus on creating a local Islamic state or Islamic areas within Indonesia

(Jones, 2005; Ross-Harrington, 2005). If an Islamic movement could not achieve

its goals domestically, how could it be in a position to do so regionally, despite the

support from al-Qa’eda, the extent of which remains disputed?

Indeed, the actual motivations and capabilities of terrorist organisations assume

importance in view of the Bush administration’s caliphobia. Most terrorist groups

aspire to a national state, not a supranational polity. They develop transnational

linkages as a matter of tactics, because external aid is necessary to compensate for

their own limited resources, rather than as a strategic ambition. Even the Taliban,

often seen as an extreme form of an Islamic state, was more concerned with

establishing its authority within the internationalised frontiers of Afghanistan

vis-à-vis its main foe, the Northern Alliance, rather than sponsoring a regional or

global caliphate. As one assessment in 1999 put it, while the goal of the Taliban

was to ‘establish an Islamic government in Afghanistan where the shariah law ...

will be the law of the land’, it also ‘believes in non-interference in the affairs of

other countries and similarly desires no outside interference in their countries’

internal affairs’ (Matinuddin, 1999, p. 42). And it was quite willing to cooperate

with the US over oil matters (Rashid, 2001).

The terror warriors in the Bush administration who invoke the spectre of the

caliphate exaggerate the unity of terrorist organisations in challenging the West-

phalian order.‘It’s like saying the Christians will be united under one banner’, said

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one critic of the Bush administration’s caliphobia, adding: ‘It sounds nice, but

whose banner will it be?’ (Brown, 2005).

On a theoretical level, the radical Islamic ideology supposed to motivate terrorist

organisations does challenge the Westphalian conception of state sovereignty.

Radical Muslim political thinkers like Maulana Maududi, Syed Qutb, Ayatollah

Khomeini and Ali Shariati argued that Islam placed sovereignty in God,while the

modern Western state placed it either in the state or people (popular sovereignty)

(Khan, 1999).Their ideas also challenge the decentralisedWestphalian state system

to the extent that sovereign authority is supposed be ‘universal’; ‘the Muslim

community is seen as one Ummah [people] ... united under one sovereign by

virtue of their faith and submission to the will of God’ (Khan, 1999).

Yet what happens when the champions of Islamic sovereignty and statehood take

the reins of power either through elections or revolution? There is no single

model of a contemporary Islamic state. Entities which have called themselves

Islamic states have differed widely in terms of their institutional structures: Iran

displays clerical supremacy over political institutions; in Saudi Arabia and Sudan

rulers govern in consultation with the clerics without being subordinate; and the

fusion of clerics and government was the key feature of the Taliban regime

(Hassan, 2005). Furthermore, whether there is any such thing as an Islamic state

is a matter of debate among Muslim intellectuals. Asgar Ali Engineer, a pro-

minent Indian Muslim thinker, argues:

The Prophet, in a way, took a revolutionary step, in dissolving tribal bonds and

laying more emphasis on ideological boundaries on one hand, and territorial

boundaries, on the other. However, the Prophet’s aim was not to build a political

community but to build a religious community instead. If Muslims evolved into a

political community it was accidental rather than essential. Hence the Qur’an lays

more emphasis on values,ethic and morality than on any political doctrines. ...The

political system had to evolve over a period of time and in keeping with the needs

and requirements (Engineer, 1999).

Engineer claims that ‘the later emphasis on integral association between religion

and politics is ... totally absent in the Holy Qur’an’ (Engineer, 1999). Indeed, the

leader of Muhammadiyah, the second largest Muslim organisation in the world’s

largest Muslim state, Indonesia, and which is more conservative than the largest

organisation, Nadhlatul Ulama, argues that ‘There is no Islamic state’(Rais, 2000).

What are unmistakable are the differences between various interpretations of the

political aspects of Islam as they relate to the possibility, nature and objectives of

an Islamic state.When it comes to state and sovereignty, Islamic ideology, like any

other religious doctrine, is hardly a homogeneous body of thought.There is little

reason to give more credence to the Bush administration’s portrayal of the

caliphate as the ultimate goal of today’s terrorists than to the interpretation by

scholars of Islam like Engineer regarding the apolitical nature of Islam.As M. A.

Muqtedar Khan argues, ‘sovereignty is a complex concept and any attempt to

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simplify it can only cause problems’(Khan, 1999).While various strands of Islamic

thinking may well agree that ‘sovereignty belongs to God’,Khan argues that Islam

also delegates sovereignty to ‘human agency’ (Khan, 1999). If human agency

matters, then the foreign policy of Islamic states and their attitude towards state

sovereignty should be expected to vary from state to state, depending on the

leadership and regime in power.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the notion of the caliphate is about to

sweep over the Islamic world.This would not be the ﬁrst time that a pan-national

ideology has challenged the Westphalian system in the Middle East. In the

post-war period, the Arab state system was imperilled by the idea of a single Arab

nation state. But despite the emotional appeal of pan-Arabism, it was the West-

phalian concept which prevailed in the Arab state system (Barnett, 1995).The idea

of the caliphate may well suffer a similar fate especially because, while pan-

Arabism was backed by state power from Nasser’s Egypt, few states are backing

the caliphate idea and most seem to be ﬁghting it as part of their campaign against

terrorism. According to a poll taken by Shibley Telhami of the University of

Maryland, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates

and Lebanon, only 6 per cent sympathised with al Qa’eda’s goal of seeking an

Islamic state (cited in Bumiller, 2005).The toppling of Westphalian sovereignty in

the hands of a terrorist group, a scenario painted darkly by the Bush administra-

tion, is thus plain fear-mongering inspired by failure in Iraq.

According to the Bush administration, a terrorist victory in Iraq would spread

chaos to neighbouring states, causing the death of nation states there and thus

paving the way for a caliphate.Yet state death is a relatively rare phenomenon in

international relations (Krasner and Pascual, 2005). Moreover,causes of state death

or failure have had little to do with terrorism.The lesson of Taliban’s Afghanistan

is not that terrorism causes state failure, but that state weakness and failure cause

and aggravate terrorism.Afghanistan was already a failed state before the terrorists

took over. The reality is that few terrorist organisations have the capacity to

challenge the contemporary state system, even though some may come close to

achieving secession, as in Sri Lanka. As Robert Phillips notes, ‘Terrorist acts are

profoundly immoral. In addition, they are not as politically effective as their

practitioners claim’ (Phillips, 1986). International norms have been, and remain,

robustly in favour of the territorial sovereignty that lies at the heart of the

Westphalian system. Indeed, the territorial integrity norm is one of the most

successful legal and political norms of our time, and no combination of the

world’s contemporary terrorist groups is about to challenge the status quo

(Zacher, 2001).

The war on terror has reversed popular thinking about whether globalisation

undermines state sovereignty. States which have been at the forefront of globali-

sation have, since 9/11, reasserted control over global ﬁnancial ﬂows for the sake

of cutting off the ﬁnancial lifelines of terrorist organisations ( Janda, undated;

McNeil, 2001). Transborder ﬂows of capital, people and goods are increasingly

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subject to state surveillance and control, supported by homeland security doc-

trines and mechanisms and growing information and intelligence sharing among

governments, joint border patrols,visa regulations and monitoring of tourism and

travel (Acharya, 2002a).

Moreover, paradoxically for terrorist organisations, instead of helping their cause

of restoring the global caliphate, their actions have actually strengthened the

modern national security state (Acharya, 2004a).As Koﬁ Annan notes, the war on

terror has helped governments:

to demonize political opponents, to throttle freedom of speech and the press, and

to delegitimize legitimate political grievances. We are seeing too many cases

where States living in tension with their neighbours make opportunistic use of

the ﬁght against terrorism to threaten or justify new military action on long-

running disputes. Similarly, States ﬁghting various forms of unrest or insurgency

are ﬁnding it tempting to abandon the slow, difﬁcult, but sometimes necessary

processes of political negotiation, for the deceptively easy option of military

action (Annan, 2002).

This is ironic, especially when one looks at the US portrayal of ‘sovereignty as

freedom’. As Feith put it, ‘Our nation’s most basic interest is to protect the

freedom of the American people – our ability to govern ourselves under the

Constitution.The sovereignty of the United States is another way of referring to

this freedom’ (Feith, 2005). If so, then the setback for civil liberties after 9/11

(Acharya, 2004a) would constitute a setback for US sovereignty, at least in the

sense of popular sovereignty, even as its government goes about defending

national sovereignty and security from transnational terrorists allegedly commit-

ted to recreating the caliphate.

Moreover, while defending its national sovereignty, the US not only limits the

freedom of its own citizens,but also the freedom of other nations.A case in point

is ‘rendition’ (to the US) of ‘illegal enemy combatants’, which after 9/11 has

‘expanded beyond recognition’ (Mayer, 2005).Scott Horton, in a report issued by

New York University Law School and the New York City Bar Association,

estimates the number of people rendered under the programme since 2001 to be

150. To bypass the Geneva Conventions, the Bush administration classiﬁed

detainees in the war on terror, including those from Afghanistan, not as civilians

or prisoners of war, since both these categories would be protected by the

Conventions, but as ‘illegal enemy combatants’ (Mayer, 2005). In a replay of its

invocation of humanitarian intervention as a justiﬁcation for pre-emption

without regard to principles of multilateralism, the administration violated well-

established norms and procedures of rendition, including the requirement for an

extradition treaty, and judicial proceedings in the country where the arrests have

been made during which some evidence to support the charge must be produced

(Mandiberg, 2005).

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Conclusion: Post-9/11 Sovereignty as Disorganised Hypocrisy

The attempt to hang the war on terror and the regime change and democracy

promotion agendas on the prior and evolving justiﬁcations for humanitarian

intervention is one of the most remarkable ironies of US foreign policy after

9/11. It also concerns my third objection to the application of the organised

hypocrisy formulation to the war on terror.

The most serious effort to offer a rationale for pre-emption and preventive war by

linking it with the earlier justiﬁcations for humanitarian intervention can be found

in a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies on 13 September

2002 by Richard Haas (2002).In that speech, Haas traced the‘departure from the

traditional notion of near-absolute sovereignty’ in three stages. First, Rwanda

triggered and Kosovo upheld the belief that ‘sovereignty should only provide

immunity from intervention if the government upholds basic, minimum standards

of domestic conduct and human rights’. 9/11 was the second stage; it was not a

whole new development, but merely ‘accelerated new thinking that had already

begun about the limits of sovereignty’, and ‘expanded the circumstances in which

most countries condoned external intervention in the affairs of a state’ by adding

terrorism to the list of triggers. The impending action against Iraq, Haas argued,

would constitute ‘a third adjustment’ to this evolving thinking about sovereignty,

whereby classical notions of deterrence and containment had little effect in

countering groups like al-Qa’eda or Saddam Hussein. Hussein, argued Haas, was

‘someone who has repeatedly violated his international obligations and who is

doing everything in his power to develop and conceal weapons of mass destruc-

tion’. In view of his ‘history of violence against his neighbors and his own people

... and his aggressive pursuit of nuclear and other weapons’, and in the ‘new

international environment where terrorism and WMD are intersecting ... a strong

case can be made for preventive military action’ (Haas, 2002).

Scholars of norm diffusion would see such American framing of the war on terror

in terms of an evolving debate about intervention as a form of ‘grafting’(Acharya,

2004b). On the one hand, the US has sought to capitalise on the humanitarianism

debate which was undercutting the rationale for absolute sovereignty. Yet, by so

doing, it also drew attention to the evolving criteria for such intervention which

would render its attack on Iraq illegitimate. Those criteria had been offered,

ironically, a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, in the form of the Report of the

International Commission for Humanitarian Intervention and State Sovereignty

(International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2001).12

Among other things, the Report set down speciﬁc conditions for intervention,

including ‘right authority’, ‘just cause’,‘right intention’,‘last resort’, ‘proportional

means’ and ‘reasonable prospects’.A brief discussion of these criteria would be in

order here.13

In deﬁning ‘just cause’ the Report excludes intervention to restore democracy or

to stop human rights abuses that do not entail large-scale killing and ethnic

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cleansing, or intervention by states to protect their nationals in foreign territory.

‘Right intention’ is similarly limited to alleviation of acute human suffering rather

than alteration of boundaries or even supporting claims of self-determination.

Outright overthrow of oppressive regimes is not justiﬁed, while destroying their

ability to cause harm to their own people is justiﬁed.

From this perspective, the R2P can hardly be construed as a justiﬁcation for

Bush’s ‘regime change’ agenda. Regime change would be grounds for interven-

tion only if suppression of such demands by a government entails large-scale loss

of life and ethnic cleansing.

In a similar vein, the ‘last resort’ principle is a point marked by the failure of

negotiations to achieve compromise due to the intransigence of one or both

parties accompanied by the prospect of imminent violence.‘Proportional means’

implies a minimalism in terms of the scale, intensity and duration of military

action, all of which must be commensurate with the provocation. This entails

ensuring a minimal impact on the target country’s political system and strict

observance of international humanitarian law. ‘Reasonable prospects’ is deﬁned

not in terms of the defeat of a state, but of a tangible chance of success in stopping

or avoiding the atrocities and suffering that acted as a trigger for the intervention.

Actions that stand no chance of offering protection or which could aggravate an

existing crisis are to be avoided.

The R2P deemed the ‘right authority’ criterion, key to the legitimacy of humani-

tarian intervention, to be important enough to deserve treatment in a separate

chapter. The UN is designated as the most appropriate authority, the chief

‘applicator of legitimacy’ in humanitarian interventions.While acknowledging its

limitations and imperfections, the Report leaves ‘absolutely no doubt’ that the

Security Council remains the best place for authorising humanitarian interven-

tion.The task of the Report is not to seek alternatives to the Council, but to make

that mechanism work better. The Report mandates Council approval in all cases

of intervention while urging it to act promptly to such requests.

While the Bush administration justiﬁed its war on terror and related instruments

– regime change, pre-emption and democracy promotion – in terms of ‘how the

concept of sovereignty ha[d] evolved over the years’ (Feith, 2005), it paid scant

attention to the fact that this evolving discourse of sovereignty included consid-

eration of criteria that would legitimise/delegitimise intervention. As Nicholas

Wheeler put it,‘In seeking to frame the Bush Doctrine as a natural development

of the norm of “sovereignty as responsibility”, Haas sidestepped the crucial issue

of who should decide when a state has forfeited its right to be treated as a

legitimate sovereign’, and ‘where authority should be located for deciding when

a state has forfeited its right to be protected by the principle of non-intervention’

(Wheeler, 2002).

The R2P was not a unilateral effort by any one state or grouping of states (such

as the Third World coalition) dominated by those with a vested interested in

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pushing for or arresting the reform of the international order.Although it drew

heavily from the ‘just war’ principles, if anything it reﬂected as genuine an

international consensus on the fate of Westphalian sovereignty as was possible. Its

membership was representative of the international community in political,

civilisational and developmental terms. And going by its criteria, the doctrine of

asymmetrical sovereignty fell far short of the criteria for legitimacy for humani-

tarian intervention that was supposed to be the prior rationale for the war on

terror. Moreover, the R2P would justify intervention, even that aimed at prevent-

ing large-scale loss of life and ethnic cleansing and undertaken through a legiti-

mate multilateral framework, only as an‘extreme’,‘extraordinary’ and‘exceptional’

measure.Yet few members of the international community would agree that Iraq

necessitated such a response, especially when the evidence of its weapons of mass

destruction programme and links with al-Qa’eda had not been conclusive.

Indeed, there is a strong case to be made, as Dale T. Snauwaert has argued, that

‘from the perspective of the Just War tradition the [Bush] doctrine’s linkage with

a power-driven, hegemonic foreign policy strategy undermines the moral cred-

ibility of the doctrine, and thus the moral credibility of the United States’

(Snauwaert, 2004). On the Iraq War, among other commentators, Jimmy Carter

has argued that ‘clear alternatives to war’ did exist. Moreover,Carter points to the

lack of legitimate authority for the war. The Security Council’s authorisation

which forms the administration’s stated legal basis of the war was meant to

eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and not ‘achieve regime change and

to establish a Pax Americana in the region, perhaps occupying the ethnically

divided country for as long as a decade. For these objectives, we do not have

international authority’ (Carter, 2003).

The disjunction between the ‘limits to sovereignty’ thesis integral to the war on

terror and the humanitarian intervention principles was highlighted by UN

Secretary-General Koﬁ Annan, who refused to see the Bush Doctrine as an

‘extension’ of the humanitarian intervention rationale and challenged the attempt

by Messrs Haas and Feith to link the war on terror with the intervention in

Kosovo. As Annan noted,

The attacks that struck the United States on 11 September 2001 shifted the global

debate – and action – away from military intervention on behalf of others, to

intervention in self-defence; from a Kosovo-like debate about how far – and under

what conditions – the international community would act against a State perceived

to be abusing its own citizens in gross and systematic ways, to considering how far

– and under what conditions – individual States, alone and in concert, would act

to halt terrorism and root out its cells in dozens of countries (Annan, 2002).14

In the chaos that the attack on Iraq generated, the recommendations and signiﬁ-

cance of the R2P Report were temporarily sidelined. But the Report did cast a

shadow over the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion.15 And its recommendations did

get a new lease of life in the Report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level

Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change in 2004.The Report:

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endorse[d] the merging norm that there is a collective international responsibil-

ity to protect, exercisable by the Security Council authorizing military inter-

vention as a last resort, in the event of genocide and other large-scale killing,

ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law which

sovereign Governments have proved powerless or unwilling to prevent (UN

Report, 2004, p. 57).

The criteria speciﬁed by the Report to justify humanitarian intervention corre-

spond closely to the criteria found in the R2P Report (UN Report, 2004).This

norm of humanitarian intervention was one of the few substantive items from the

High Level Panel Report, along with the Secretary-General’s subsequent report

In Larger Freedom, to survive the UN Summit in September 2005.16

The war on terror and the attack on Iraq have produced an extended crisis in

the global multilateral order. There have been thousands of protests. Anti-

Americanism throughout the world is growing. In Asia, the Bush Doctrine has

caused deep uneasiness about US power and intentions (Pereira, 2003). The

US–Europe fracture over Iraq cannot be seen as the kind of acquiescence that is

supposed to mark the consensual organisation of hypocrisy in the global sover-

eignty regime. Even Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed the ‘end of history’ after

the end of the Cold War, acknowledged that the US–Europe divisions raise the

question ‘whether the West is really a coherent concept’, since ‘an enormous gulf

has opened up in American and European perceptions about the world, and the

sense of shared values is increasingly frayed’ (Fukuyama, 2002).

Against this backdrop, to assert that the challenge posed by the war on terror

to state sovereignty has not led to people ‘screaming and yelling’ or that it has

not generated efforts to ﬁnd new rules (not to replace sovereignty, but to

identify legitimate ways of limiting it) would be simply untrue. The rationali-

sation offered in the name of the war on terror is an extension of the logic of

humanitarian intervention as a form of organised hypocrisy, but this overlooks

the fact that different forms of violation of sovereignty may have differing

degrees of legitimacy. The legitimacy of humanitarian intervention cannot be

equated with the legitimacy of the war on terror. Failure to distinguish prin-

cipled and organised departures from Westphalian sovereignty aimed at pro-

tecting human security (as outlined in the R2P Report) from unilateral

breaches of sovereignty aimed at protecting national or coalitional security and

fulﬁlling an ideology-driven foreign policy agenda, is a critical ﬂaw in Krasner’s

organised hypocrisy thesis. The current state of affairs is more accurately

regarded as ‘disorganised hypocrisy’ since the responsibility for this particular act

of hypocrisy is not evenly distributed, and the actions of the hegemonic power-

led coalition have severely undermined the multilateral system, including the

unity of the so-called ‘West’.

(Accepted: 24 November 2006)

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About the Author

Amitav Acharya, Professor of International Relations, Nanyang Technological University, Block S4,

Level B4, Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798; email: isaacharya@ntu.edu.sg

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Muhammad Haniff Bin Hassan for sharing his expertise on Islamic

conceptions of the state and offering valuable research assistance in preparing this article.

Notes

1 See for example, Vernon (1971); Camilleri and Falk (1992); Keohane (2000); Mann (2000); Ostry (1998);

Weiss (1998); Keck and Sikkink (1998); Finnemore (1996; 2004); Hoffman (2001); Wheeler (2000); Lyons and

Mastanduno (1995). For a sceptical appraisal of the erosion of sovereignty thesis, see Jackson (2007) in this issue.

2 Bush administration ofﬁcials have described ter rorism as the ‘greatest threat to peace in our time’. Cited in Walker

(2004).

3 Krasner was not the ﬁrst to note the violations of sovereignty, however. Many others who do so nonetheless argue

that these violations do not constitute ‘obsolescence, irrelevance, or transformation’ (Holsti, 2004, p. 140). See also

Hinsley (1986); James (1986); Jackson (1999); Philpott (2001).

4 As the head of policy planning in the State Department after having served an earlier term in theWhite House staff

where he claims to have written a memo arguing that ‘sovereignty was contingent on responsibility, which has

actually been achieved throughout the history of sovereignties’, which ‘is something that we’ve echoed since

September 11th’ (Krasner interview with Kreisler, 2003).

5 ‘The world has decided that sovereignty should not protect a government per petrating large-scale crimes against

humanity within its own borders. Before us all now hangs the question of how long-standing ideas about

sovereignty can be squared with the dangers of biological or nuclear weapons. Should governments with troubling

records of aggression, support for terrorism, human rights abuses and the like be allowed to invoke sovereign rights

to protect their development of catastrophic weapons that threaten the sovereign rights of others in the world?’

(Feith, 2005).

6 Bull had identiﬁed four major constraints onWestern intervention in the Third World: (1) ‘a remarkable growth in

Third World countries of the will and capacity to resist intervention’;(2) ‘a weakening in the Western world of the

will to intervene, by comparison with earlier per iods, or at least of the will to do so forcibly, directly and openly’;

(3) the growing Soviet capacity to project power,which ‘facilitatedThird World resistance to Western intervention’;

and (4) ‘the emergence of a global equilibrium of power unfavourable to intervention’ in the sense that ‘there has

emerged a balance among the interveners which has worked to the advantage of the intervened against’ (Bull, 1984,

pp. 138–44).

7 This apparent contradiction is easily explained by the stimulating thesis presented by Adriana Sinclair and Michael

Byers (2007) in this issue. Analysing American discourses about sovereignty they point out that these debates

combine a statist conception which privileges territorial sovereignty, and political independence of states irrespec-

tive of their regime types, and a popular conception which stresses the rights of the people against abuse by their

own governments. Although seemingly distinct, these conceptions reﬂect a single and exceptionalist American

conception of sovereignty that seeks to protect the US from external inﬂuences while sanctioning intervention

against other states. Strong evidence for this can be found in the Bush administration’s justiﬁcation of its

‘responsibility to attack’ and ‘selective sovereignty’ formulations, which would preserve a ‘well-ordered world of

sovereign states’ (a self-evidently statist formulation that would protect Amer ican sovereignty as well) on the basis

of the normative arguments about humanitarian intervention (rooted in conceptions of popular sovereignty) which

justify its interventions abroad. (See Sinclair and Byers, 2007).

8 For further discussion of the various justiﬁcations for the war, see Acharya (2004a).

9 The caliphate,according to media representation,‘was a period of centralized rule over much of the Muslim world

in ... the seventh and eighth centuries ... an empire that stretched from Spain to Central Asia’ (Brown, 2005).

10 See also: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore, ‘MFA Press Statement on the Request for Addition of Jemaah

Islamiah to List of Terrorists Maintained by the UN’, 23 October 2002.

11 Pedoman Umum Perjuangan Al-Jama’ah Al-Islamiyyah (PUPJI, General Guide for the Struggle of Jemaah Islamiyah).

Released by the Central Leadership Council, Jemaah Islamiyah. Translated by the International Center for

Political Violence and Terrorism Research, Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological

University, Singapore.

12 Hereafter, cited as the Report.

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13 The following discussion draws heavily from Acharya (2002b).

14 Annan himself was a champion of limited sovereignty. See Annan (1999); Luttwak (1999–2000).

15 See also Thakur (2004a; 2004b).

16 The Resolution of the Summit stated that the world leaders ‘are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and

decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII, on a

case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be

inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes,

ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’, Resolution adopted by the General Assembly, 24 October 2005

60/1, 2005 World Summit Outcome, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N05/487/60/PDF/

N0548760.pdf?OpenElement [Accessed 16 December 2005].

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296 AMITAV ACHARYA

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Making Sense the Conception of ‘Unrecognized Statehood’: Taiwan’s Protracted Struggle for Seizing International Recognition

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Jan 2022

International Law, Necropolitics, and Arab Lives: The Legalization of Creative Chaos in Arabia

Book

Full-text available

Oct 2022

Khaled Al-Kassimi -خالد القاسمي

International Relations and International Law continue to be accented by epistemic violence by naturalizing a separation between law and morality. What does such positivist juridical ethos make possible when considering that both disciplines reify a secular (immanent) ontology? International Law, Necropolitics, and Arab Lives emphasizes that positivist jurisprudence (re)conquered Arabia by subjugating Arab life to the power of death using extrajudicial techniques of violence seeking the implementation of a "New Middle East" that is no longer "resistant to Latin-European modernity", but amenable to such exclusionary telos. The monograph goes beyond the limited remonstration asserting that the problématique with both disciplines is that they are primarily "Eurocentric". Rather, the epistemic inquiry uncovers that legalizing necropower is necessary for the temporal coherence of secular-modernity since a humanitarian logic masks sovereignty inherently being necropolitical by categorizing Arab-Islamic epistemology as an internal-external enemy from which national(ist) citizenship must be defended. This creates a sense of danger around which to unite "modern" epistemology whilst reinforcing the purity of a particular ontology at the expense of banning and de-humanizing a supposed impure Arab refugee.

Third-Party Countries in Cyber Conflict: Understanding the Dynamics of Public Opinion Following Offensive Cyber Operations

Conference Paper

May 2022

From Disorganized Hypocrisy to Political Neo-medievalism: Rohingya Crises in Bangladesh

Chapter

Jun 2022

Lailufar Yasmin

Prior Rohingya influxes changed character from August 2017: neo-medievalism arguably imposed a different context. Bangladesh’s generally successful accords with Myanmar and previous Rohingya repatriation resulted from power rivalry, and its unwritten structural derivative, stability. Such a consent hardly existed, as exposed in Russia’s 2014 Crimean crisis. Yet, aggravated by a COVID-19 pandemic quashing great power willingness to preserve structural stability, a normative shift still may be unfolding. Accordingly, prompting this study examines a possible shift from Amitav Acharya’s disorganized hypocrisy to political neo-medievalism under which the contemporary sovereignty-based structure persists, amid rogue impenetrable tendencies due to the absence of any responsible check and balance power. The key finding of this study is precisely that: beyond geopolitics, the lack of structural stability is what sustains the Rohingya crisis.

Negotiations of the »New World«: The Omnipresence of »Global« as a Political Phenomenon

Book

Full-text available

Dec 2017

Sabine Selchow

State Sovereignty and the Legitimacy of Aggression

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Wilfried von Bredow

The formerly uncontested acceptance of sovereign States’ right to wage war has been legally reduced to the right of self-defence against military aggression. The recently adopted definition of the crime of aggression paved the way for criminal proceedings against military aggressions by States before the International Criminal Court. This further taming of state sovereignty in traditional (‘Westphalian’) terms is a consequence of the dynamic process of globalization. Globalization has restricted many traditional functions of the modern State. However, this does not mean that organized violence and war are currently on the decline. On the contrary, in parallel with the de-legitimizing of organized violence and war by States, their re-legitimation in the post East-West conflict era has also proceeded apace. Two main reasons for this are growing pressure by internationally linked terrorist groups, and the emergence of new destructive technologies.

The Legal Principles of Bethlehem & Operation Timber Sycamore: The “Islamist Winter” Pre-Emptively Targets “Arab Life” by Hiring “Arab Barbarians”

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2021

Khaled Al-Kassimi -خالد القاسمي

The following legal-historical research is critical of “Islamist” narratives and their desacralized reverberations claiming that Arab-Muslim receptivity to terror is axiomatic to “cultural experiences” figuring subjects conforming to Arab-Islamic philosophical theology. The critique is founded on deconstructing—while adopting a Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL)—the (im)moral consequences resulting from such rhetoric interpreting the Arab uprising of 2011 from the early days as certainly metamorphosing into an “Islamist Winter”. This secular-humanist hypostasis reminded critics that International Law and International Relations continues to assert that Latin-European philosophical theology furnishes the exclusive temporal coordinates required to attain “modernity” as telos of history and “civil society” as ethos of governance. In addition, the research highlights that such culturalist assertation—separating between law and morality—tolerates secular logic decriminalizing acts patently violating International Law since essentializing Arab-Muslims as temporally positioned “outside law” provides liberal-secular modernity ontological security. Put differently, “culture talk” affirms that since a secular-humanist imaginary of historical evolution stipulates that it is “inevitable” and “natural” that any “non-secular” Arab protests will unavoidably lead to lawlessness, it therefore becomes imperative to suspiciously approach the “Islamist” narrative of 2011 thus deconstructing the formulation of juridical doctrines (i.e., Bethlehem Legal Principles) decriminalizing acts arising from a principle of pre-emption “moralizing” demographic and geographic alterations (i.e., Operation Timber Sycamore) across Arabia. The research concludes that jus gentium continues to be characterized by a temporal inclusive exclusion with its redemptive ramifications—authorized by sovereign power—catalyzing “epistemic violence” resulting in en-masse exodus and slayed bodies across Arabia.

Unarmed sovereignty versus foreign base rights: enforcing the US-Icelandic defence agreement 1951–2021

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2021

Valur Ingimundarson

The post-war US global base system was established through bilateral agreements with states where the boundaries between domestic legislation and extra-territoriality were frequently blurred. With references to theories of sovereignty, the article discusses the enforcement of the US-Icelandic defence agreement from 1951 to the present. The focus is on the tension between state sovereignty, involving an unarmed state, and the foreign base rights of a world power. It is shown that during the Cold War, the United States interpreted its military rights broadly, claiming to have the right to interfere in Icelandic internal affairs to thwart a communist coup and to transfer nuclear weapons to Iceland. Conversely, Iceland sought to control the scope of the US presence by putting a limit on the number of troops and lessen its societal impact by curtailing fraternization between US troops and Icelandic civilians. After the Cold War, Iceland’s efforts to keep the base proved unsuccessful, when the United Stated decided to close it down. Yet, since the 2014 Ukrainian crisis, the United States has re-established a rotational military presence in Iceland through the defence agreement, regaining many of the jurisdictional territorial rights, it gave up with the base closing.

The Molecularization of Threat: Jihadist Terrorism, Islamist Radicalization, and the Mediterranean Tragedy

Chapter

Jul 2021

Vittorio Emanuele Parsi

In this chapter, the concept of ‘molecularization of threat’ is introduced as the main feature of the post-9/11 era. Two devastating wars in the last twenty years (Afghanistan and Iraq) stemmed as a response to the action of terrorist groups. The War on Terror has become the legitimization for the resort to force at the domestic and international levels. In Syria, the repression exerted by the Assad regime led to civil war and then to the internationalization of the conflict. The War on Terror changed the Mediterranean Sea, turning it from the ‘American lake’ into the logistic rear of American power projection in the Middle East. The Mediterranean has become Europe’s weak link, the porous wall for the migration flows that the European countries refused to manage in a humane, common, and organized way. The ‘securitization of the migration issue’ was a complete failure, contributing to the conflation of the migration issue and the terrorist threat. The European policy toward Islam and Islamist radicalization was another failure, making the EU more vulnerable to the attacks perpetrated by ‘lone wolves’, pledging allegiance to Al-Qaeda and ISIS/IS and the main furnace of Jihadist foreign fighters.

The Decline of American Leadership and the Rise of Chinese and Russian Authoritarian Powers

Chapter

Jul 2021

Vittorio Emanuele Parsi

In this chapter, I argue how during the last decade, China and Russia have grown in power and influence. In comparison to the unipolar era, the two authoritarian powers are now able to strategically exploit the mistakes of the United States. (1) Putin’s Russia considerably reorganized its military capacity. It was also able to capitalize on Western indecisiveness and division, as seen in Syria (2013) and Crimea (2014), while in the Middle East, it cleverly profited the most from the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program (JCPOA) and started its own triangulation (with Iran and Turkey) as a response to the one between the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. (2) China improved its armed forces qualitatively and quantitatively, with an intense naval rearmament program aimed at the creation of a ‘deep water fleet’. These assertive policies in the Chinese Sea marked the beginning of a political action characterized by greater nationalism. China also increased its soft power with the Belt and Road Initiative, an international economic and financial infrastructure. The US–China relationship seems bound to remain a competitive one, both in (a) security and (b) economic-financial terms.

Myth of the Powerless State

Book

Full-text available

Jan 1998

Linda Weiss

The Bush Doctrine and Asian Regional Order: The Perils and Pitfalls of Preemption

Article

Jan 2003

Amitav Acharya

Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy

Book

Dec 1999

Stephen D. Krasner

A Genealogy of Sovereignty

Book

Apr 1995

Jens Bartelson

The concept of sovereignty is central to international relations theory and theories of state formation, and provides the foundation of the conventional separation of modern politics into domestic and international spheres. In this book Jens Bartelson provides a critical analysis and conceptual history of sovereignty, dealing with this separation as reflected in philosophical and political texts during three periods: the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity. He argues that the concept of sovereignty and its place within political discourse are conditioned by philosophical and historiographical discontinuities between the periods, and that sovereignty should be regarded as a concept contingent upon, rather than fundamental to, political science and its history.

Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics

Book

Jan 2004

K. J. Holsti

Many analysts claim that international politics has recently entered a new era, following the end of the Cold War and then the events of September 11th. In this book, Kalevi Holsti asks what we mean by 'change' in international politics. How do we identify it? How do we distinguish between significant and unimportant changes? Do we really live in a new era or do we see more continuity than transformation in the texture of international politics? Combining theoretical and empirical argument, Holsti investigates eight major international institutions including the state, sovereignty, territoriality, international law, diplomacy, trade and war. Having identified the types of change these institutions have undergone during the last three centuries, Holsti analyses the sources of those changes and speculates on their consequences. This is a major book, likely to have lasting influence in the study of international politics.

Asian Institute of International Studies

Article

Jan 1967

Eleanor H. Finch

Asian Institute of International Studies - Volume 61 Issue 1 - Eleanor H. Finch

The End of Sovereignty: The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World.

Article

Oct 1992

The Myth of the Powerless State

Article

Jan 2000

Linda Weiss

Developing Countries and the Intervention—Sovereignty Debate

Chapter

Jan 2004

Ramesh Thakur

The terrain on which the conceptual and policy contest over “humanitarian intervention” has been fought is essentially normative. It takes the form of norm displacement, shifting from the established norm of nonintervention to a claimed emerging new norm of “humanitarian intervention.” The United Nations lies at the center of this contest both metaphorically and literally. Its Charter encapsulates and articulates the agreed consensus on the prevailing norms that give structure and meaning to the foundations of world order, and the international community comes together physically primarily within the hallowed halls of the UN. It is not surprising, therefore, that the organization should be the epicenter of the interplay between changing norms and shifting state practice.

The responsibility to protect revisited

Chapter

Oct 2013

Ramesh Thakur

State Sovereignty After 9/11: Disorganised Hypocrisy

Abstract

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