The idea of self-determination is one of the most significant in modern international politics and law. Most scholars have associated self-determination with the movements for decolonization, but as decolonization drew to its near completion in the 1980s, self-determination movements and claims continued to proliferate. Indigenous peoples, East European dissidents, “unrepresented peoples,” opponents of US intervention in Central America, anti-Apartheid activists, the Soviet successor states, international lawyers, and many others carried forward the work of circulating novel and expansive self-determination claims. Their efforts were deeply connected to the recognition that economic globalization was changing the meaning of sovereignty, which demanded new understandings of self-determination.
Brad Simpson is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968. His new book is The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000.