Sarah, I’d like to focus a bit on your paragraph on “Absent sovereignty.” You give the example of Somalia and I cite: “…despite its anarchy, there has always been a formal state of Somalia. If Somali state authorities are ‘manifestly failing’ to protect (due to incapacity), the responsibility passes to the United Nations Security Council. In this case, the UNSC is working with the relevant regional organization—the Africana Union—to take, albeit scarcely effective, action.”
Some states today do not represent actual polities that are recognizable, bounded entities, culturally or otherwise. To put it bluntly, is the maintenance of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, as a singular subject of international law, however decentralized, a means that is fundamentally at odds with the strategic effect sought by nation-building?
