In his review of Hardt and Negri's Empire by Bashir Abu-Manneh interprets their conception of Empire as follows:
"The United States does not accept what senior British diplomat Robert Cooper today calls postmodern or cooperative imperialism: “a framework in which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal.”28 This project, which includes the International Criminal Court and other institutions for mutual state interference, sounds very much like Hardt and Negri’s juridical Empire."