Beyond Forcible Intervention: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Foreign-Funded Civil Society

This paper is concerned with the normative legitimacy of non-forcible and non-diplomatic ways in which states engage in the social and political life of other states, particularly through funding civil society organisations. This issue is not only theoretically very interesting but also of the utmost practical concern. Recently many states worldwide have raised concerns that such acts constitute a wrongful intervention in their internal affairs, which undermines their sovereignty and national self-determination. Some states have even taken all sorts of measures to restrict foreign-funded entities. These measures were met with strong condemnations, coming from foreign-funded entities, their foreign-funders, and various international organizations. According to these condemnations, restricting foreign-funded entities violates not only individuals' rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association and freedom of expression; it also violates individuals' right to take part in the government of their state and thus actually undermines its sovereignty and national self-determination. Alas, the academic normative literature that deals with international intervention has been virtually silent on this controversial issue. It focuses instead almost exclusively on the issue of humanitarian (forcible) intervention. Moreover, in spite of the importance of the principle of non-intervention in international law, even the literature in this field has very little to offer on this issue, particularly by way of normative analysis. The aim of this paper is therefore to fill this gap in the literature and analyse from a normative perspective the non-forcible and non-diplomatic ways in which states engage in the social and political life of other states. This paper focuses, more specifically, on the question of whether or not foreign-funded civil society organizations necessarily undermine the national self-determination of the states in which they operate.