this raises the age-old question of state sovereignty. we still live in a world of sovereign state and there is a strong feeling, in our age of democracy, that countries should govern themselves and should not be governed by foreigners,whether they are colonial powers or international organizations. however,the same democratic age has produced numerous declarations of human rights which reduce,at least in theory,the sphere of state sovereignty.john vincent observes 'boundaries'between domestic societies,and international society became'fuzzier'in the last half of the twentieth century with the accumulation of many international declarations and conventions on human rights(vincent 1990). in other words,there is an ambiguous and confusing relation in international law today between the responsibilities of national citizenship on the one hand,and universal human rights on the other. a leading item on the research agenda of international society has been the analysis of that ambiguity in contemporary world politics.