The primary right of a sovereign State corresponds to the independence of that State and absence of subordination to any other State or entity (albeit not to international law). It protects the plenary jurisdiction of that sovereign State over its territory and the people on it. This is a principle of customary international law. Of course, in view of what was explained before regarding the limits to State sovereignty, jurisdiction is never absolutely plenary. With contributors from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, North and South America and Europe, this book offers a rich account of the potential for Indigenous data sovereignty to support human flourishing and to protect against the ever-growing threats of data-related risks and harms.

In case of violation of the minimal right to have rights and of minimal sovereignty duties as a result, ordinary mechanisms of international dispute settlement can be triggered, ranging from political recommendations to full adverse judgments depending on the sources of the rights violated and the mechanisms available. Those mechanisms imply some kind of international institutional framework through which other States but mostly individuals can initiate claims against a sovereign State. The first part of the 20 th century is usually regarded as the time of conception of modern international law and of the so-called law of international cooperation ( Co-operation, International Law of). The League of Nations was created in 1919 and new fields fell into the material scope of international law. First attempts to secure the prohibition of the use of force and to consolidate duties of peaceful dispute settlement were made, albeit not always successfully. Another classical and related distinction pertains to the divisibility of sovereignty. The issue whether sovereignty can be divided is as controversial as that of whether it can be limited. In fact, both issues are very closely connected and often conflated. Older and recent literature refer to absolute sovereignty to mean unlimited sovereignty as much as undivided sovereignty. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to absolute sovereignty by contrast to limited sovereignty only, although divided sovereignty can obviously no longer be deemed absolute either. Rousseau’s account of sovereignty does that by conceptualizing popular sovereignty and explaining how the exercise of the sovereignty of political institutions is submitted to the respect of the general will. Political sovereignty becomes a mere reflection of popular sovereignty; if the sovereign does not respect popular will, it risks losing its attributions. Seen in those terms, sovereignty can both be deemed absolute when it is original, and limited when it corresponds to derived political or institutional sovereignty. Sovereignty and democracy were clearly bound from then on.In the first instance, Tombs is too true to his profession to peddle the Brexiter myth that continued membership of the EU was incompatible with the historic identity of “our island nation”. He knows that other European countries have “histories of struggles for independence and democracy at least as proud as our own, but which so far they find compatible – if with some strain – with European integration”. Interestingly, one of the main challenges to the legitimacy of international law is that it allegedly fails to respect the sovereignty of States, intruding upon domains in which they should be free to make their own decisions. Sovereign States are the primary subjects to binding international norms. State sovereignty is often understood in international law as a competence, immunity, or power, and in particular as the power to make autonomous choices (so-called sovereign autonomy). And most duties stemming from international legal norms directly constrain the action of States. The legitimate authority of international law is as a result often opposed to State sovereignty the way the legitimate authority of domestic law is opposed to individual autonomy. WG Werner and JH de Wilde ‘The Endurance of Sovereignty’ (2001) 7 European Journal of International Relations 283–313.

Following the analogy between States and individuals entering private contracts discussed before, sovereign States are generally held as being able to bind themselves as free rational agents. For a long time, this was actually the only way in which the legitimate authority of international law over sovereign States could be justified. The paradox or dilemma of sovereignty implies indeed that States must be capable of binding themselves if international law is to exist, and also incapable of binding themselves through international law if they are to be absolutely independent. Among the different ways out of the paradox, self-limitation was deemed the least unobjectionable. This is explained by reference to the idea of normative immediacy, famously captured by the ICJ in the Wimbledon case (at 25), according to which those States that are immediately bound by law and vice-versa are sovereign and legal persons (see also Reparation for Injuries Suffered in the Service of the United Nations [Advisory Opinion]).T Broude and Y Shany (eds) The Shifting Allocation of Authority in International Law: Considering Sovereignty, Supremacy and Subsidiarity (Hart Oxford 2008). Even recited so suavely, these doctrines are no more convincing to the unbeliever. Given Tombs’s genuine intellectual standing, this is probably as good as it gets. Brexit, like it or not, is a fact, and it would be a great service to us all if someone could set out a half-convincing case for why it makes sense. Since Tombs can’t, maybe nobody can. Stephanie Russo Carroll (Ahtna-Native Village of Kluti-Kaah, Sicilian-descent) (DrPH, MPH) is Assistant Professor of Public Health and Associate Director for the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona, USA. A researcher active at the nexus of Indigenous governance, the environment, community wellness and data,　Stephanie　co-founded the US　Indigenous　Data　Sovereignty　Network and is a founding member and chair of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.

The price to be paid for this honesty, though, is that for most of the book Tombs is writing less as a scrupulous historical scholar and more as a political polemicist. The difficulty is that the two sides of his persona never really cohere. He makes, for example, a good historical case that the declinist narrative of the 1950s and 60s that led Britain to see membership of the common market as its only route to salvation was exaggerated. But he then bases most of the book on a very similar trope of Europe as “a declining Continent”. What the historian challenges, the polemicist embraces.Chapter 8: Data Governance in the Basque Country: Victims and Memories of Violent Conflicts, Joxerramon Bengoetxea JA Camilleri and J Falk The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Elgar Aldershot 1992). I Boerefijn and JE Goldschmidt (eds) Changing Perceptions of Sovereignty and Human Rights: Essays in Honour of Cees Flinterman (Intersentia Antwerpen 2008). Marsilius of Padua on Sovereignty, Vasileios Syros (Universities of Helsinki and Jyva¨skyla¨, Finland)

Ryan also writes about how most men live goal-less life, living each day to make money for their boss and for their family, only to go home to their kids and wife, watching TV till evening, going to sleep, and repeating. According to some authors, sovereignty can only be absolute; this is the classical conception of sovereignty one finds in Bodin and Hobbes in particular. The modern conception of sovereignty understands it, however, as inherently limited through domestic law, but also, since the second half of the 20 th century, through international law and this even without the consent of the sovereign State and hence beyond self-limitation. Whereas classic international law saw sovereignty as self-limited at the most, modern international law binds sovereign States in their internal and external dimensions, often without their consent. where sovereign entities ally, trade, make war, and make peace. 2. The Rise of the Sovereign State: Theory and PracticeMost of the other, if not all institutions and principles of international law rely, directly or indirectly, on State sovereignty; it suffices to mention, for instance, the relationship between the conditions and attributes of statehood or the principles of territorial or personal jurisdiction, immunity, and non-intervention, on the one hand, and considerations of sovereignty, on the other. The 1945 United Nations (UN) system itself is based, albeit not directly on the principle of sovereignty itself, on a necessary corollary of that principle: the principle of sovereign equality of its Member States as guaranteed in Art. 2 (1) UN Charter ( States, Sovereign Equality). Provided States have supreme authority within their territory, the plenitude of internal jurisdiction, their immunity from other States’ own jurisdiction and their freedom from other States’ intervention on their territory ( Art. 2 (4) and (7) UN Charter), but also their equal rank to other sovereign States are consequences of their sovereignty. International sovereignty and domestic democracy are sometimes held to be in tension. As in the human rights context, however, this approach to their relationship is misleading. Thomas Hobbes, Sovereign Representation, and the English Revolution, Glenn Burgess (University of Hull, UK) The King 'Should Be' Sovereign: Christine de Pizan and the Problem of Sovereignty in Fifteenth-Century France, Kate Forhan (University of Southern Maine, USA) Interestingly, many of those democratic limitations to internal sovereignty are not consent-based and top-down, but stem bottom-up from customary norms or general principles. This may be explained by the fact that these norms are the reflection of the minimal common denominator to the practice of all democratic sovereign States constituting the international community and are produced as a result by accretion through the gradual recognition of those norms at the domestic level in modern democracies. Once internationalized, those norms may as a result work as legitimate minimal constraints on the autonomy of those States to contextualize and hence to flesh out those minimal international standards in their respective jurisdictions, thus contributing in return to the consolidation of those standards at the international level (see generally Buchanan [2010]).