Dr Kilibarda has succeeded, with uncommon brilliance, in producing another treatise on age-old questions of recognition and statehood, yet a one that strikes us as so different, original, fine, and innovative. What makes it so powerful is the tight counterpoint, set in a dense and flawless analytical style, through which it lays out its key messages. Recasting statehood as a multitude of legal relations sometimes arising from recognition and sometimes from objective norms of international law, the work acknowledges the relativism in which the act remains embedded, reflecting the spirit of the international legal order as a whole. A new mixed theory of great subtlety and legal power thus emerges before the eyes of the reader.