At the end of his study on legitimacy, Rodney Barker notes that unless an author is ‘suddenly to do in five pages what he has failed to do in two hundred …, the conclusion must be … a necessarily didactic summary and an allusive indication of things undone’. Following these recommendations, this appraisal attempts to bring together the strands of a long argument by recalling the main themes. At the same time, it offers some concluding thoughts which transcend the preceding discussion.

The research puzzle required the application of four conceptual frames. In chapter 1, the study viewed the methodology of internationalisation as the result of a transfer of imperium from a sovereign power to a protecting entity, leaving the former with a claim as a ‘bare title’. In the positivist framework, suspending sovereignty represents a legal process through which the conceptual hallmarks of dominium and imperium are divorced from each other. We discussed the processes and methods of transferring effective control and focused on territories under international administration as experimental models of restricted sovereignty. International legal sovereignty has increasingly been suspended by the SC by its reliance upon Chapter VII. Both UNMIK and UNTAET were created on this basis, and in both cases an international territorial administration assumed exclusive administrative authority over the territories placed under its effective control and supervision. Moreover, we established that the special normative quality of Resolution 1244 lies in its ‘vertical’ imposition of the transfer of effective control.