"The author provides us with a valuable effort to address a key normative puzzle in international politics, what she labels the “Moral Standing Problem” in which states are assigned responsibilities without having any of the correlative rights associated with moral agency. Through a deep engagement with the practical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Vaha provides a novel account of how we might conceptualize the state as a complete moral person with a right to exist, and illustrates the value of her account by addressing the question of the international community’s obligations arising from the potential physical extinction of low-lying insular states."
--Harry D. Gould, Florida International University