State Sovereignty is often presented as the bedrock of the International legal order—an equal right enjoyed by all States, regardless of size or power.
In practice, however, it operates less as a universal entitlement and more as a conditional privilege, respected or ignored depending on a state’s position within global power hierarchies.
Recent developments involving Venezuela, including reported U.S. actions directed at its leadership including the arrest and extraction of its President to the U.S. for trial, underscore this long-standing contradiction between law as proclaimed and law as applied.
What such episodes expose is not a sudden collapse of International order, but a deeper truth: sovereignty has never been evenly distributed. It has always been mediated by power.
Sovereignty in Theory and in Practice:
The Westphalian conception of sovereignty—non-interference, territorial integrity, and juridical equality—was an ideal crafted to stabilise relations among European powers. Its universalisation was aspirational, not descriptive.
As history has repeatedly shown, States are treated as fully sovereign only so long as they retain the material capacity to defend that status.
Where military strength, economic leverage, diplomatic influence, or alliance networks weaken, sovereignty becomes fragile.
It remains recognised in form but erodes in substance. In this sense, sovereignty functions less as a legal shield than as a status that must be continuously sustained through power and credibility.
Law, Enforcement, and Selective Exceptionalism:
From a strictly legal perspective, unilateral coercive actions against another state sit uneasily—if not incompatibly—with the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Yet International law has no independent enforcement authority. Its effectiveness depends on political will, collective action, and institutions shaped by the same power asymmetries the law is meant to restrain.
Invocations of doctrines such as universal jurisdiction or transnational criminality often blur the line between accountability and exceptionalism. While serious international crimes demand legal responses, the selective manner in which enforcement is pursued raises a persistent concern: law is not always constraining power; it is frequently used to justify it.
The Persistence of Imperial Logic:
What we are witnessing is not an aberration but continuity. From Cold War interventions to post-Cold War regime change operations, the pattern is consistent: sovereignty is robust for allies and precarious for adversaries. The language may have shifted—from anti-communism to human rights or counter-narcotics—but the underlying logic remains strategic.
In regions historically subject to external dominance, this dynamic is particularly stark. Assertions of hemispheric influence, long thought rhetorically obsolete, continue to find expression in practice. The message conveyed is implicit but unmistakable: autonomy exists, but only within limits set by stronger actors.
Morality and Decision-Making Authority:
Moral arguments are often central to these interventions, and they should not be dismissed outright. Authoritarianism, corruption, and human rights abuses are real and consequential. The harder question, however, is institutional rather than moral: who decides, through what process, and with what safeguards against abuse?
When decisions of such magnitude are made unilaterally, moral language risks becoming a tool of convenience rather than a principled standard. Justice, in such circumstances, appears contingent—not on consistent legal norms, but on geopolitical alignment.
A Sobering Conclusion:
Sovereignty today functions less as a guaranteed legal condition than as a negotiated and performative status—maintained by power, recognition, and strategic relevance. This does not mean International Law is meaningless, but it does mean it operates within limits that are rarely acknowledged openly.
The Global Order is not lawless, but neither is it governed by law alone. It is a system in which legal principles coexist uneasily with coercion, and where weaker states are sovereign in theory until circumstances—and interests—dictate otherwise.
That tension is not new. What is changing is how openly it is now revealed.
This brings us to an issue which is very pertinent to this dicuss:
_How can African countries like Nigeria adjust to this reality?
For countries like Nigeria, the future of State Sovereignty does not lie in louder invocations of International Law, but in quiet accumulation of leverage—economic, diplomatic, legal, and narrative.
In today’s emerging global system, you are sovereign not because the law says so, but because interfering with you is too costly, too complicated, or too consequential.That is the real adjustment.
By Tonye Sipoto-Pepple is a Legal Practitioner and Public Commentator
