In 1944, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People drew up a list of complaints. The Allied powers had met at Dumbarton Oaks to lay a foundation for the creation of the United Nations. But, in the postwar world that the conference-goers envisioned, the imperial powers would continue to rule over their colonial subjects; the end of the war would not bring freedom for these people. W.E.B. Du Bois, one of the NAACP’s diplomatic liaisons to the conference, pointed out that under these terms “the only way to human equality” would be “through the philanthropy of masters.” He saw in the emergent order the roots of an arbitrary, anti-democratic system of states. Despite the universalist rhetoric of the United Nations’ framers, the great powers would only acknowledge the legitimacy of some peoples, foreclosing that same recognition for others.

INVISIBLE COUNTRIES: JOURNEYS TO THE EDGE OF NATIONHOOD by Joshua Keating Yale University Press, 296 pp., $26.00

In his new book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, Joshua Keating traces that disparity through the decades that followed. The book is a global study of contested nationalisms—institutions whose national status is, for various reasons, in a state of flux. The five cases he focuses on are Abkhazia, a war-wearied separatist area of northeastern Georgia; Akwesasne, a Mohawk territory that sits on both sides of the internationally recognized US-Canada border; Somaliland, a semi-autonomous region of northern Somalia; Iraqi Kurdistan, whose national status is a perennial tetherball of recent Middle Eastern proxy wars; and Kiribati, a sinking island nation in the Pacific Ocean. As well as these five cases together, he includes anecdotes about other aspiring states such as the uninhabited Balkan micronation of Liberland—so named for its dogmatic commitment to libertarian governance—that demonstrate the blurry boundaries of modern nationalism.

A staff writer at Slate, Keating is an established student of the idiosyncratic. His old blog at Foreign Policy was a daily record of the odds and ends of international relations: messy soccer disputes, futuristic technological achievements in middle-income economies, dispatches from global street culture. Invisible Countries extends Keating’s thesis that unusual cases can illuminate the major principles in world politics. In justifying his approach, he explains: “I wanted to go to the rare spots on earth where those rules”—of national recognition and territorial integrity—“don’t apply, where the system breaks down.” What these cases show is the contradictions on which the system is built—how, more than seven decades after the UN Charter’s creation, the philanthropy of the masters is as fickle as ever.

The set of criteria for modern statehood has its origins in the 1930s. Keating begins with the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which, signed by 19 countries in North, Central, and South America in 1933, describes the four features of a state: a population, a territory, a government, and “capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” Most international legal scholars view this secular, legal definition as a step forward from previous religious, dynastic, or imperial justifications for state rule. In contrast to these previous ideas of statehood, the modern state is now the partial product of a rules-based international consensus. In theory—if not necessarily in practice—this consensus guards against the constant, violent competition for territory and status that preceded the twentieth century’s world wars.

But the apparent simplicity of the Convention’s criteria is deceptive. Population, territory, and government are easy categories to define. By contrast, capacity for relations with other states is something of a tautology: In effect, the internationally recognized fact of statehood makes a state. This means that, in order to gain recognition, an aspiring state must get the collective support of the community of states.