In order to prevent a nuclear war in South Asia and to prevent heinous HR violations in Kashmir, the UNSC needs to revive the universalising spirit of the right to self-determination inculcated in the UNSC resolutions of 1948 and 1949. By any legal standards, India is an occupying Power in Jammu & Kashmir and through its unilateral revocation of article 370 on August 5, has attempted to unlawfully annex this territory without the will of the people of Jammu & Kashmir. This illegal, immoral and inhuman Indian conduct has caused harrowing effects and implications for the future of international law regime– thereby posing greater challenge to the international community and yet if no intervening measures are taken against the Modi’s move of August 5 to illegally annex the Vale of Kashmir, there arises no doubt that the whole architecture of a law-based international order upon which the future of international community depends, will be under stigma. The Indian Parliament passed a resolution recommending that the President use his powers under Article 370(3) to abrogate the entire substance of Article 370. This resolution passed the lower chamber of Parliament on 6 August 2019 which was followed by Presidential Order C.O. 273 which applied the entire Indian Constitution (without any modifications or exceptions to Jammu & Kashmir). At the same time, the Indian Parliament passed the Jammu & Kashmir Reorganization Bill which abolished the erstwhile State of Jammu & Kashmir and divided the region into two Union territories–Ladakh and Jammu & Kashmir. And yet New Delhi thinks that the Indian Parliament could act as a substitute for the dissolved Legislative Assembly of Jammu & Kashmir. Nevertheless, the said moves are seen as blatant violations of international law since they resist Kashmiris’ right to self-determination-guaranteed to them under the UN’s Conventions and Treaties. Justifiably, Kashmiris are entitled to earn sovereignty. The principle of self-determination stipulates the right of every nation to be a sovereign territorial state. It virtually affords to each population the right to choose which state it wishes to belong to, normally and generally via plebiscite. This is commonly used to justify the aspirations of minority ethnic groups. The principle equally grants the right to reject sovereignty and join a larger multi-ethnic state. Chronologically, the principle of self-determination has evolved since Woods Wilson’s day from political rhetoric into a legal right expressed in treaties and customary international law. Veritably, the first article of the Charter of the United Nations states that: “The Purposes of the United Nations are… [t]o develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace. In addition, the foundational treaties of the modern human rights system, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both have the same text in their first articles: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right, they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. The concept of earned sovereignty, as a basic shield for the confliction resolution, objectively entails the conditional and progressive devolution of sovereign powers or authority from a state to a sub-state entity under international monitoring But undeniably, the theory of self-determination, as justifying the secession of a people –from its existing mother state in situations– where the people are oppressed or where the mother state’s government does not legitimately represent the people’s interests( as rightly happens in the case of Kashmir), has remained a constant feature throughout the 20th century development of international law. Moreover, two United Nations’ declarations– have addressed the issue of self-determination-the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and the 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration. Both declarations, however, envisioned self-determination leading to secession as a matter of last resort only within the decolonization paradigm. In 1995, in the East Timor case, the ICJ not only endorsed that self-determination is one of the essential principles of contemporary international law, but also reiterated thatit is an ergaomnes obligation. The cases of East Timor and Kosovo rightly endorse the binary concept of self-determination: Peoples who do not fall into the category of colonized or oppressed groups may virtually exercise their right to self-determination through internal means via free association and autonomy (as is the case of the Quebec independence in 1995 in Canada). Peoples who are oppressed or colonized, however, have the right to external self-determination, which they may exercise through secession from their mother state. As for the Kashmir case in point, from the beginning of the Kashmir conflict, the involved parties argued that the appropriate solution was to exercise the right to self-determination via a plebiscite, a direct vote whereby the government gives the people the right to accept or refuse a particular proposal. The defacto parties claimed that a plebiscite would illustrate the will of the people. But the international community’s attitude toward the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination has been to ignore it and retain the status quo. But this attitude must be changed as the danger of the situation has escalated since India and Pakistan became nuclear powers. And yet neither of the parties, India and Pakistan so far rules out the use of nuclear power, and Pakistan does not yet deny the possibility of a first strike. Consequently, the Kashmir dispute remains a core issue on the foreign and security policy agendas of both Islamabad and New-Delhi, causing a great calumny in terms of blood and treasure on them. Certainly, a realistic paradigm is inevitably needed for a conflict resolution of the Kashmir dispute which has been a festering wound for the Kashmiri people for more than six decades and which is indeed a major impediment to peace in the South Asian region. And arguably, the concept of earned sovereignty, as a basic shield for the confliction resolution, objectively entails the conditional and progressive devolution of sovereign powers or authority from a state to a sub-state entity under international monitoring. As a relatively new approach to conflict resolution, earned sovereignty has been generally referred to by many names: intermediate sovereignty, phased recognition, provisional statehood, and conditional independence. The legal structures– that were established by the UN to seek resolutions to the conflicts in South Africa, East Timor, Northern Ireland and Southern Sudan via earned sovereignty and plebiscites respectively– serve as the primary basis of forming a conflict resolution. While the doctrine of earned sovereignty in international law is a conflict resolution process that creates an opportunity for the parties to agree on basic requirements that the emerging entity must meet during an intermediate phase in order to attain or discuss final status, many international law legal experts in the UN or elsewhere may argue in favour of ”earned sovereignty”– as the best possible legal methodology for finalising an agreement on the future of Kashmir. Concluded The writer is an independent ‘IR’ researcher and international law analyst based in Pakistan