Against Self-Determination

The essay investigates the relationship between self-determination, anti-colonial nationalism, and settler-colonialism. It offers a genealogy of the changes, transformations, and reversals in its contested meanings, including the debate among socialists, and the Wilsonian intervention. The essay registers the important changes in the term's significance ushered in by decolonizing Asian and African countries in the 1950s and 1960s and the later imperial reversal. It further examines the term's deployment in settler-colonial contexts from the Americas to Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa, with emphasis on Palestine and Zionist settler colonialism, to the UN issuance of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People in 2007.