Friday, December 30, 2022

Bak McKenna: Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law

Miriam Bak McKenna
(Roskilde Univ. - Institute of Social Science and Business) has published Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill | Nijhoff 2022). Here's the abstract:
The book adopts a new approach to self-determination’s international legal history, tracing the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different juridical, political, and economic iterations to create the conditions for global transformation. The value of the book’s approach lies not only in a more nuanced understanding of self-determination’s legal history, but in excavating the multiple ways in which actors, particularly those from the Global South, have challenged the existing normative and legal structures which rendered them unequal under the European system of international law. Rethinking this process touches on issues that are relevant not only to debates about the enduring legacy of imperialism in our present, but also to contemporary discussions of the position self-determination has come to occupy in international law.