S. Statehood

International law is fundamentally structured around states. This seminar will explore questions about how international law depends on, constitutes, regulates, and empowers states -- and about the inherent compromises and tradeoffs that it makes in the process. We will tackle these questions through a mix of historical, critical, doctrinal, and theoretical methods and in a range of geographic contexts. Topics will include the processes and criteria for creating states; the normative principles that are advanced or sidelined by recognizing certain entities (and not others) as states; the current levers of support for and threats to statehood; and the implications of these questions for the future of the discipline.