For Palestine to be recognized, a second serious struggle begins regarding the extent to which this recognition can lead to changes in institutions, publics, and power dynamics. Such a struggle is clearly visible at a time when Palestine’s right to statehood has been recognized by more than 150 UN member states. Its legal claims have been put before the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court. Its experience of injustice has been circulated through the newsroom, campus, screen, digital sphere, and urban street with an intensity few modern political realities can match. Notwithstanding, the gap between recognition and protection remains considerable. If there has been an increase in recognition, Palestinian lives remain subject to occupation, displacement, fragmentation, and suspended governance. If there has been an improvement in the articulation of rights in legal discourse, their enforcement remains difficult. If there has been increased visibility, many people have become less materially secure. Such contradictions reveal what is perhaps the central issue of our current moment: that the institutionalization of rights has become increasingly challenged in its effectiveness.

This article argues that Palestine demonstrates the limits of recognition under conditions of mediatized international politics. For sovereignty remains anchored in law, territory, institution, and external recognition; but it also derives or loses strength through processes of visibility, narrative power, institutional performance, infrastructure development, and public credibility. I use mediatized sovereignty to name the passage through which a claim to sovereignty moves, or fails to move, from legal recognition into political force. The concept brings law, visibility, narrative authority, institutional performance and public credibility into the same field of analysis. This matters because a sovereign claim may be recognised by states, courts and diplomatic forums, yet still lose force when it travels through media systems, platforms/screens, classrooms, archives and publics without reaching protection. Therefore, mediatized sovereignty, as is used here, explores the ways sovereignty becomes legible, how it gains or loses consequence, and why recognition can remain present in language while absent in life. What I mean by this concept is to keep law and communication in the same field of analysis. A close look at the field shows how diplomatic acts create one kind of standing; a court ruling creates another. However, a video, a testimony, a university encampment, a legal archive, a press frame or a platform decision can alter how that standing is understood and whether it becomes consequential. In this context, the Palestinian case raises a question wider than Palestine itself: what happens to international legitimacy when recognition can be granted, narrated, celebrated and still left without protection?

Recognition after recognition

The significance of recognition lies in the fact that it gives legal and diplomatic form to political claims, which allows for the establishment of embassies, treaties, institutional engagement, and representation before international bodies. Within international law, recognition is inherently related to many long-standing discussions regarding statehood, capacity, territory, government, and foreign relations. In such a perspective, James Crawford’s pioneering work analyzing the law and practice of state creation is pivotal, showing how statehood is not a matter of opinion, but of legal and institutional status resulting from practice, recognition, and changing rules of international society.

The recent diplomatic history of Palestine shows just how powerful such a legal framework continues to be. As recently as in April 2024, despite widespread support within the Security Council, the Palestinian bid for membership to the United Nations had been vetoed by the U.S. Only a month later, in May 2024, UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/23 confirmed the eligibility of Palestine for membership in the United Nations and granted it further rights and privileges of participation. Nonetheless, Palestine gained additional rights and privileges, but still without the vote. This move was a telling compromise that allowed Palestine to advance towards the status of statehood through an exclusionary structure. Indeed, it is well known that for decades, Palestinian political existence has consisted in living around various forms of recognition without acquiring actual power from it. Indeed, a state may be recognized and the peoples acknowledged, but the borders may remain under someone else’s control and their own mobility restricted. Indeed, the institutional expectations are that governance occurs, and the language of diplomacy is that of eventual statehood, although the prerequisites for a cohesive governance keep being interrupted.

Such a perspective calls for Stephen Krasner’s description of sovereignty as organized hypocrisy. Sovereignty entails the basic claim of collective self-agency, protection, and self-governance. Krasner’s argument, however, is more subtle and notes that in the international community, the sovereign norms may be affirmed selectively by those in power due to interests. International legal sovereignty (the recognition of statehood by other states) may thus be easily recognized, even as effective authority over the territory, its borders, its population, and their protection remains limited. Such is indeed the case with Palestine, whose status is marked by the discrepancy between legal international recognition and material self-governance. This condition should not lead to cynicism about recognition, as cynicism would be a mistake. Recognition can widen the space of political possibility, and weaken the claim that Palestinian statehood is merely a future reward to be granted after endless compliance. It can further affirm that self-determination is a right rather than a concession. Yet recognition becomes fragile when it remains declaratory, as it begins to look like a language of conscience rather than an instrument of consequence.

Mediatized sovereignty

Mediatized sovereignty names the struggle that........

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