Governmental Illegitimacy in International Law

When is a de facto authority not entitled to be considered a `government' for the purposes of International Law? Central to the relationship between human rights and non-intervention is the question of whether a government, when it asserts rights against the coercive intervention of foreign states, is irrebuttably presumed to be speaking for the true right-holders, the people over whom it maintains effective control. Yet governmental illegitimacy, a concept hardly unfamiliar in the political realm, has been underexplored and undertheorized as a question of international law. This book is a long-overdue effort to subject collective non-recognition of governments to painstaking and systematic examination.