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Call For ApplicationsThe International Burke Institute (IBI) invites applications from early-career scholars for our inaugural Nonresident Research Fellowship Program. This initiative supports emerging researchers working at the intersection of sovereignty, global studies, and contemporary geopolitical transformation through targeted micro-grants that enable academic dissemination and professional development.
Sovereignty vs. Intervention: Re-examining International Law after the 2026 United States Intervention in VenezuelaThis study critically examines the tension between state sovereignty and external intervention through the lens of the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela, situating the event within the broader framework of contemporary international law. Traditionally, sovereignty has functioned as a foundational principle safeguarding territorial integrity and political independence, reinforced by the prohibition on the use of force under the United Nations Charter. However, evolving global challenges—including humanitarian crises, transnational threats, and contested governance—have increasingly tested the rigidity of this norm. The 2026 intervention presents a complex case in which legal justifications, including counter-narcotics operations, democratic restoration, and humanitarian considerations, intersect with geopolitical interests. This paper evaluates the legality of the intervention by analyzing its alignment with established exceptions such as self-defense and Security Council authorization, while also interrogating emerging doctrines like the Responsibility to Protect. It further explores the implications of unilateral action for the credibility and consistency of international law, highlighting concerns over selective enforcement and precedent-setting behavior by powerful states. Ultimately, the study argues that the incident underscores an urgent need to recalibrate international legal frameworks to better reconcile sovereignty with evolving norms of intervention, ensuring both the protection of state integrity and the promotion of global stability and human rights.
RESEARCH
El Salvador vs. Cyprus: The Paradoxes of Manifold SovereigntyThe present
text explores the phenomenon of "manifold" sovereignty, a state in
which the political independence of a State exists simultaneously with stable
external restrictions, legally fixed through treaties and de facto fixed
through military presence, financial dependence or territorial division. El
Salvador and Cyprus demonstrate fundamentally different, but structurally
comparable configurations of this phenomenon: El Salvador experienced state-forming
external interventionism in the form of American financing and post-conflict
international control over reforms; Cyprus experienced direct military
intervention by a foreign state, enshrined in treaty law, which led to the de
facto division of the island and persists to this day.
Latest
Sovereignty vs. Intervention: Re-examining International Law after the 2026 United States Intervention in VenezuelaThis study critically examines the tension between state sovereignty and external intervention through the lens of the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela, situating the event within the broader framework of contemporary international law. Traditionally, sovereignty has functioned as a foundational principle safeguarding territorial integrity and political independence, reinforced by the prohibition on the use of force under the United Nations Charter. However, evolving global challenges—including humanitarian crises, transnational threats, and contested governance—have increasingly tested the rigidity of this norm. The 2026 intervention presents a complex case in which legal justifications, including counter-narcotics operations, democratic restoration, and humanitarian considerations, intersect with geopolitical interests. This paper evaluates the legality of the intervention by analyzing its alignment with established exceptions such as self-defense and Security Council authorization, while also interrogating emerging doctrines like the Responsibility to Protect. It further explores the implications of unilateral action for the credibility and consistency of international law, highlighting concerns over selective enforcement and precedent-setting behavior by powerful states. Ultimately, the study argues that the incident underscores an urgent need to recalibrate international legal frameworks to better reconcile sovereignty with evolving norms of intervention, ensuring both the protection of state integrity and the promotion of global stability and human rights.
The Limits of Sovereignty and Post-War Okinawan Migrants in BoliviaThis paper examines the legal implications for Okinawan migrants of Article 3 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty (hereafter SFPT), signed between Japan and most of the Allied Powers in 1951. Particularly, it analyses the case of post-war Okinawan migrants in Bolivia, showing how the legal conditions in the Ryukyu Islands were extended to the Andean country. The Japanese defeat in the Asia-Pacific War (August 1945) was followed by the occupation of the country by the United States. The peace treaty, signed six years later, originated during the early years of the Cold War and was fraught with geopolitical implications. The SFPT allowed the U.S. military to retain control of Okinawa prefecture without formally severing it from Japan. In other words, the treaty-makers allocated de jure sovereignty over Okinawa to Japan while the U.S. enjoyed de facto sovereignty. This distinction gave rise to a legal conundrum concerning the future of the islands and the legal situation of the Okinawan people onshore and abroad. Building on Japanese and English primary sources I examine the reaction of American and Japanese jurists to Article 3 and the approach of both governments toward offshore Okinawan migrants.
Venezuela: Popular Sovereignty Versus Liberal DemocracyIn order to evaluate accurately the state of democratic governance during the first years of the Chávez presidency, one must sharpen the distinction between democracy narrowly defined as popular sovereignty versus the more conventional notion of liberal democracy. Venezuela was no longer a liberal democracy in every respect. Instead, it became an extreme case of delegative democracy. The president enjoyed widespread popular support for almost everything he and his followers did, and this fact qualified his government as “democratic” in the narrow sense of popular sovereignty. But the systematic elimination of constraints on presidential action after 1998 increased the risk that Venezuela would cease to be a democracy by any definition in the future. Governability also suffered because the new formulas regulating relations between government and opposition, among branches of government, and between state and civil society were both unstable and far from mutually acceptable. Chávez and his supporters saw themselves as agents of a deliberate and self-conscious revolutionary process and believed that expediency and unilateral impositions of new rules were justified by the need for a radical break with the past. Needless to say, this attitude also condoned a cavalier disregard for the rule of law, extending even to the constitution.
Sovereign Democratic Transformation in Ecuador (2007-2016)Between 1981 and 2007, Ecuador experienced neoliberal reforms coupled with an elite form of democracy. These led to slow growth, upwards redistribution, and political and economic instability. Since then, Ecuador adopted a Citizens’ Revolution to counteract these economic and political forms of domination. This paper advances a few elements of the theoretical understanding of democratic justice inspired by the constitutional vision of Buen Vivir, and their policy applications in reconfiguring the political institutions that shape the state and its international relations. The application in the Citizens’ Revolution movement and historical phase has helped advance the democratization of the Constitution, the Executive, the Legislative, the Judicial system, political rights, the right to life, freedom of expression, national natural resources and investments, external public debt, as well as social rights and the welfare state.
