For over a century, international lawyers have debated the right of a group to choose its sovereignty. The emergence of new states and self-determination movements after the Cold War has only intensified the disagreement over the status of a right to secede. I have sought in this book to shift the discussion from the articulation of the norm to the inevitable activity of interpretation. Whereas self-determination is routinely analysed as recognizing diversity through statehood, self-government and other forms of political organization, I have argued that the practice of its interpretation also involves and illuminates a more general problem of diversity raised by the exclusion of many of the groups that self-determination most affects from the making and the perspective of the norm.

Distinguishing different types of exclusion and the relationships between them has revealed the deep structures, biases and stakes in the scholarship and decisions on self-determination. This framework of analysis has also revealed – perhaps more surprisingly – that the leading cases have grappled with these embedded inequalities. Through new readings of the cases, challenges by Islamic communities, colonies, ethnic nations, indigenous peoples, women and others to the culture or gender biases of international law have emerged as integral to the interpretation of self-determination historically, as have attempts by judges and other institutional interpreters to meet these challenges.