When Sulaiman Al-Adsani traveled from the United Kingdom to Kuwait to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1991, he never dreamed he would depart with bruises and burns inflicted by the very government he had sought to defend. According to Al-Adsani, his troubles began when he was accused of releasing sexual videotapes of Sheikh Jaber Al-Sabah Al-Saud Al-Sabah, a relative of the emir of Kuwait, into general circulation. After the first Gulf war, with the aid of government troops, the sheikh exacted his revenge by breaking into Al-Adsani’s house, beating him, and transporting him to a Kuwaiti state prison, where his beatings continued for days. Al-Adsani was subsequently taken at gunpoint in a government car to the palace of the emir’s brother, where his ordeal intensified. According to Al-Adsani, his head was repeatedly submerged in a swimming pool filled with corpses and his body was badly burned when he was forced into a small room where the sheikh set fire to gasoline-soaked mattresses.

Although much criticized, the concept of “sovereignty” is still central to most thinking about international relations and particularly international law. The old “Westphalian” concept in the context of a nation-state’s “right” to monopolize certain exercises of power with respect to its territory and citizens has been discredited in many ways (as discussed below), but it is still prized and harbored by those who maintain certain “realist” views or who otherwise wish to prevent (sometimes withjustification) foreign or international powers and authorities from interfering in a national government’s decisions and activities. Furthermore, when one begins to analyze and disaggregate the concept of sovereignty, it quickly becomes apparent that it has many dimensions. Often, however, the term “sovereignty” is invoked in a context or manner designed to avoid and prevent analysis, sometimes with an advocate’s intent to fend off criticism orjustifications for international “infringements” on the activities of a nation-state or its internal stakeholders and power operators.