Gentili sought to develop a set of rules to help regulate warfare. However, given his positions on absolutism and the value of the reason of state tradition, it is hard to see what resources he had available for encouraging sovereigns to actually play by those rules. In this chapter, I argue that Gentili squared the circle through a dichotomy at the heart of his legal framework: the distinction between violence carried out by a “public” entity and all other forms of violence. In Gentili’s framework, those carrying out the latter would immediately be discredited as “pirates” or “enemies of mankind.” The key, of course, was what Gentili meant by “public.”

Chapter 5 delves into the relationship between sovereignty and the sovereign, and between the sovereign and the state. Who decides who is sovereign, which is to say who controls the property rights associated with state sovereignty? The chapter addresses this question, arguing that the rules about who gets to be sovereign are, at least in part, both imposed and enforced by the cartel. Which is to say that the sovereign is a member of the cartel because she is recognized as sovereign by the other members of the cartel. The norms underlying this recognition change over time, and the chapter notes four different major changes in these norms since the Westphalian settlement, from feudal to monarchical to national to territorial to citizenship legitimation. But these norms are sticky, and new ones often do not fully displace earlier ones. Sovereignty disputes are therefore often messy; not only are the norms that govern what sovereign property is mutually contradictory, but the norms governing whose property it is are mutually contradictory as well.