Becoming Sovereigns: Imperialism, Self-Determination and Recognition in the 21st Century

In an international system where colonialism has enabled capitalism to expand through exploitation, the concept of sovereignty has had a crucial function in determining the geopolitical, juridical and ontological forms of the nation-state. Self-determination, a right achieved by people through struggle and at once made to delimit the scope of liberation, has hence developed in sovereignty’s shadow. There still exist pending cases in the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, including cases of decolonization such as Western Sahara’s, while others demonstrate the nature and distinct consequences of foreign domination, as in Palestine, and of settler-colonial legacies in indigenous realities in North and South America and beyond. With that in mind, this paper examines two adjacent discussions over 1) the persistence of struggles for self-determination; and 2) the dynamics of recognition. These and other ongoing struggles illustrate the apparent degradation of the right to self-determination, as it is conditioned and deferred even when conservatively conceived to create nation-states without disintegrating others. But beyond that, these struggles help historicize the contradictions in that right’s development and examine the issue of recognition. By engaging in ongoing discussions and proposing new inquiries within studies on the Global South, Critical Legal Studies and Marxist approaches to IR, the paper argues that exploitation underlies the terms of recognition as a political factor normalizing unequal relations around capitalist conceptions of sovereignty. It thus considers this principle’s exclusionary function and the creation of the precarious class of non-sovereigns, often defined as “contested”, “de-facto”, or “unrecognized states”. Notably, Palestine has been made an example, even though about 140 states, especially in the Global South, already recognized it until 2023, when others joined the list, for different reasons. This paper thus argues that those states’ recognition was cumulative, though not substantive, and that this contingency is characteristic of the inequality of this system. Their sovereignty was in fact unequal to that of other states in the center of the system. Yet, self-determination and recognition still have a crucial function for those resisting domination or struggling for emancipation, as people seek to change their own “national” and “international” conditions by becoming self-determined or sovereigns themselves. The challenge remains in pushing these rights and norms’ boundaries while strategizing liberation.