Humanitarian Intervention and Sovereignty: Samuel Pufendorf's Via Media

• In Event: War and Empire in Early Modern Thought

Abstract

Humanitarian interventions and state sovereignty are hard to reconcile and they are most often treated as mutually exclusive. A look into Samuel Pufendorf’s assessment of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Westphalia and his theoretical discussion on sovereignty can offer important insights for contributions to more recent discussions on sovereignty after intervention in the name of human rights. In both instances, sovereignty is typically measured against a stencil borrowed from an absolutist perspective that can be traced back to the writings of Jean Bodin in the context of the 16th century religious wars in France. However, borrowing from republican security theory and its conceptual triad related to restraint, anarchy and hierarchy will allow to look beyond a clear and rigid separation line between the domestic and international realms. The dilemma between saving foreign populations from oppression or give primacy to state sovereignty opens a conceptual field towards irregular political forms that has a thick line of intersection with republican thought and old assessments about empire. I argue that an in-depth look into the writings of Samuel Pufendorf can lead to new research avenues in terms of how sovereignty is viewed in the context of humanitarian intervention. The writings of the German jurist and philosopher will be studied in the light of the republican security theory.

Author

• Oana-Cosmina Mihalache, SNSPA, Bucharest