The UN Charter law governing self-defense is inadequate to address emerging modalities of armed violence caused by non-State actors located in the territory of non-consenting third States. This paper offers an alternative grounded in the state of necessity as a circumstance excluding wrongfulness as per the law of State responsibility. The contention is that in integrating the rationale behind necessity as an excuse for non-performance of obligations and the conditions and processes under article 51 of the UN Charter, the law allows for an exercise of extraterritorial self-defense against non-State actors which safeguards the territorial State’s sovereignty and the need for a legal alternative of defense for the defending State without toeing the line of aggression.

Most analyses of the persistent objector doctrine seem to omit the impact that its application has on the general requirement of consent as a cornerstone of the international legal order, and as an unavoidable requisite in the formation of rules of customary international law. The present work holds that the persistent objector rule not only undermines the consensual nature of obligations in international law, but also generates issues of normative authority, dubious attribution of meaning to silence, temporal determination, and with self-determination and equality. It concludes that the doctrine, furthermore, lacks practice and opinio juris, meaning that its validity and existence in the realm of customary international law is highly questionable.