Introduction

intervention and state sovereignty in the international system

Ian Forbes

Mark Hoffman

pp. 1-10

in: Ian Forbes, Mark Hoffman (eds), Political theory, international relations, and the ethics of intervention, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1993

Abstract

if the starting point of the study of international relations is a world of separate states, a political theorist is right not to be interested in the subject.... If, on the other hand, we do not start with this assumption of separate states, there is all the international theory in the world to be done. For there is now a primordial community of [hu]mankind; separate states are but an arrangement of it.1