Simultaneously with the changes in the contemporary world, characterized by processes of integration, regionalization, globalization has changed the concept of sovereignty and its content. In the respective article we have tried to follow this correlation between sovereignty and the basic principles of international law. If external sovereignty recognition problems occur, this lately is not treated as a precondition of state sovereignty. Researchers say that sovereignty is not created for recognition, but is not destroyed by the recognition. But international recognition, expressed usually by accepting young state established by the United Nations is seen as the legalization and international legitimacy statehood political entity. Non-recognition affects statehood and making it one of the essential characteristics of the state - the ability to enter into relations with other states. On the other hand, non-recognition is conditioned by objective factors (illegality of the founding of the state, the danger it poses to the international commu- nity) that make statehood a political entity to be undesirable. The problem arises when an unrecognized political entity fails to demonstrate independence and is ready to seek international recognition. Internal sovereignty of the state is limited by the obligation to respect human rights and citizen in the way they are stated in international law and are fixed in the Constitution. Sovereignty has always been a controversial topic in international law. The most prominent attempts to rethink sovereignty in recent times have arisen out of the policies of the conceptualization of self-defense and its attempts to promote democracy worldwide. This review explores the debates as to these initiatives and the larger theoretical issues they raise about the relationship between international law and sovereignty. International law has long struggled with the problem of how sovereign states that make international law can also be bound by it. Self-defense raises this problem in a particularly acute form because it is one of the fundamental rights of sovereignty and because it can be seen to precede the law itself. The review also explores the various ways in which the relationship between democracy and international law has been examined in the recent literature. Many of the analyses of sovereignty rely, either implicitly or explicitly, on distinctions between different types of states –democratic versus non-democratic or, more broadly, respon- sible versus irresponsible states. The broad argument of this review is that the contemporary geopolitical and legal policies attempt to create an international legal system that resembles in many ways a return to the imperial international law of the nineteenth century.