The Sovereignty of Sentience: A Phenomenological Approach to Peace for International Law

Key takeaways

• The article proposes a standard by which international law can be judged against its stated purpose of maintaining peace. The standard, the Sovereignty of Sentience, defines peace as universally protected self-determination and violence as the impairment of that protection.
• In practice, the standard asks whether four social protections hold for everyone: subjecthood, jurisdiction, liberty and security. Peace is the condition in which all four hold; violence is the condition in which any one of them fails.
• Read against the standard, some rules of international law, such as the prohibition of the use of force, uphold these protections, while others, such as the right of self-defence, permit force that the standard classifies as violence even when it is lawful or necessary. The article presents these conclusions for testing and states that applying them requires “institutional design, indicators, and case testing”.

Abstract

The published abstract of the article reads, with two passages left out:

“Maintaining international peace is the United Nations’ first purpose, yet international law lacks an agreed definition of peace by which to assess its design. This article proposes one such standard: the Sovereignty of Sentience (SoS). … The article’s methodology is phenomenological, accepting as apodictic only what first-person experience can verify. Within those limits, a subject can confirm its own sentience but can neither prove it to others nor verify theirs. … The derived normative theory, the SoS, defines peace as universally protected self-determination and violence as the impairment of that protection. Applied to selected international legal provisions and doctrines, the SoS classifies force against possible sentient subjects as violence, even when lawful or necessary. It concludes that international law must prohibit force against all possible sentient subjects to align with its peace-oriented purpose.”

In plain words, the article starts from what each person can know for certain: that they have experiences of their own, which no one else can see from the inside. A rule that protected only those who could prove their experience to others would protect no one. The article therefore asks what rule would protect every person, and what international law would look like if it followed that rule.

The article is part of a forthcoming special issue of the journal on peace in international law. The special issue grew out of the workshop “Peace in International Law: Myth, Reality, or Legal Obligation?”, held at the University of Geneva on 6 and 7 November 2025, at which the author presented an earlier version of the argument. It builds on the author’s 2023 article “Reframing the Ontology of Peace Studies”.

Citation

Publications from the same programme

• CommentaryPeace in Law, Policy and Institutions

  What would it take for law to be built for peace?

  Anders Reagan. October 2026. A plain-language summary of this article. Read

• Journal articleCommon Ground for Peace

  Reframing the Ontology of Peace Studies

  Anders Reagan. May 2023. Peace and Conflict Studies, volume 29, issue 2, article 1; open access. Read the article

See all publicationsHow to cite and reuse