Drawing on a combination of the human rights turn in international relations, deliberative democracy and conditional sovereignty, the author puts forward the Most Affected Principle as a mechanism for delineating and limiting polities when issues are detached from geopolitical borders. Stating that those who are most affected by a policy should have the largest say in the making of that decision, the Most Affected Principle proposes an ethical foundation for the creation of cosmopolitical governance structures. The ramifications for the current Westphalian-UN system of state sovereignty are investigated, proposing that sovereignty needs to be conditioned upon the provision of human rights by the state. A reformation of the United Nations is suggested, with the author proposing a system of overlapping deliberative bodies from local levels up to an International Senate being created in its place. A case study of the history of malaria treatment in sub-Saharan Africa is performed, arguing that policies based on the Most Affected Principle would have had multiple positive benefits in the past, and that it would also provide faster and better results than the Global Malaria Action Plan that the international community has adopted. The author argues that the Most Affected Principle is innovative through creating a forum in which moral claims can be translated into legal claims, by creating a process through which conflicts of right can be resolved, and by creating a formal weighting process to measure which interests take precedence when interests are found to compete.
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