The notion of ‘self-determination’ is enshrined in the founding documents of international law and most state constitutions as a means of legitimating the current state and supranational order. However, its precise definition and parameters are the subject of debate—both when understood from within the logic of the state system and from outside it. This thesis situates the “classic” notion of self-determination within its particular historical position inside the international system, highlighting its deep tension with the norm of state sovereignty, before turning to critical political theory to unearth a definition of self-determination wherein its particular relationship to the state system and the total notion of sovereignty is relaxed. This conception of self-determination is, for the purposes of this thesis, termed ‘rhizomatic,’ and applied to four case studies to demonstrate how it might be used to understand the possibilities created by recent political movements. The primary argument of this thesis is that, when understood inside the state system as a present or future ‘active’ right, acts of determination reduce to the normative determinism of historically contingent relations of force because they are either resolved on the terms of existing actors within the constituted system or by the effectiveness of force they can exert to deny the system’s function based on its previous rules. However, when understood beyond the closed logic of the state system, self-determination can be taken to mean manifestations of boundless constitutive power and collective imagination that unleash new vectors of possibility for human political relations.
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