rights and states only exist in some people's heads
on its face, a demand for a state's "right to exist" is a requirement for a belief in a state's legitimacy and implicitly by extension its violence. but what should it matter what anyone thinks of a state?
Follow
popular legitimacy is in fact very important for statecraft because in a real sense "the state" doesn't exist, it is only a collective delusion whose duties and roles are carried out by believers, or by people who participate only because of threats administered by believers. but if the ratios of belief, doubt, passive non-participation, evasion, and hostility change beyond a dynamic threshold, the whole collective delusion can fall apart
