Humanitarian occupation is a new phenomenon in international law and presents a powerful challenge to traditional notions of state autonomy. This book has asked two questions about the occupations: why have they been undertaken and what is the legal basis for doing so? The answer to the first question encountered a conventional wisdom about the vitality of the state in contemporary international law: the view that globalization and accretions of authority to new international actors have marginalized the state. I argue to the contrary that humanitarian occupations mirror an important normative trend to strengthen the state. This trend is manifest in human rights norms that seek to preserve ethnic, religious and other forms of demographic diversity. It is also present in norms favoring retention of existing state borders. The legal conception of borders is “conservative” in the sense that it rejects alternatives to existing states. But its conception of national politics is liberal (in the nineteenth century sense) in that it is a view of the state that finds value in heterogeneity and inclusive political processes. Thus, it is not the state per se that is being marginalized in the eyes of international law but the politically illiberal state.

Humanitarian occupations seek to remake the occupied state in ways that mirror this particularist conception. The occupations in Kosovo, East Timor, Bosnia and Eastern Slavonia – as well as the UN nationbuilding missions that are their direct antecedents – all initially affirmed the borders of the states involved and sought to build democratic institutions.