Home

Self-determination of peoples is one of the key normative principles in contemporary politics. Yet its meaning and implications are notoriously difficult to pin down. The research project Self-Determination of Peoples in Historical Perspective rests on the thesis that uncovering the concept’s historical origins will help to illuminate these uncertainties and the ways in which they are exploited in international politics. Experimenting with the approach of ‘serial contextualism’, the project seeks to offer a novel transnational intellectual history of self-determination from the Enlightenment to the end of the Cold War (including its links to related terms such as popular sovereignty, principle of nationality, self-government). The project’s main focus is on continental European political and international thought, while it also explores some of its global transformations. One of the hypotheses of the project is that there is a forgotten (but still usable) tradition of federalist thinking about self-determination originating in the Enlightenment. The project is funded by the Estonian Research Council and hosted by the University of Tartu.