Rethinking self-determination: colonial and relational geographies in Asia

ABSTRACT

This paper argues for a geographical analysis of self-determination by bringing literature on self-determination into dialogue with scholarship on postcolonial geographies and relational space. First, we draw from scholarship that conceptualises colonialism, including non-European colonialism, as playing out differently in different places. This shines a spotlight on a set of self-determination claims, which are resolutely anti-colonial but do not fit neatly into existing conceptions of saltwater and settler colonialism. Second, we discuss three communities who make such claims: the Nagas, the Tibetans, and the Karen. These communities have recently rearticulated the right to self-determination as a mechanism for progressing their causes amidst protracted conflicts and political stasis. In each case, we explore how self-determination is a relationally constituted claim, informed by interactions across various sites and scales. Paying attention to moments, events, and practices foregrounds the tensions that underpin how self-determination is claimed and realised, encompassing: who has the agency to speak on behalf of the ‘people’; the scale at which self-determination is articulated; and how territory is understood vis-à-vis self-determination. This demonstrates how a geographical approach can drive critical analyses of self-determination as a right that is being reworked on the ground, imbued with aspirational and regenerative politics.

KEYWORDS:

• self-determination
• postcolonial geographies
• relational space
• Karen
• Nagas
• Tibetans

1. INTRODUCTION

A peoples’ right to self-determination – the right to freely choose their political status and to freely pursue their own form of economic, cultural and social development – is a principle of international law enshrined in Chapter 1 of the UN Charter. Yet this deceptively straightforward right is ridden with contradictions. Long seen as a dated principle which pertained to the mid-twentieth century formation of postcolonial states, self-determination has seen a recent resurgence of interest. In the past two decades, self-determination has been publicly claimed through discourses tied to colonialism in diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, self-determination has been tactically (mis)used by states to bolster contemporary colonial claims (Massad, 2018). ‘Self-determination’ was, for example, cited by the Russian Federation in their recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk as sovereign states, which formed the pretext for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (Szpak, 2022). On the other hand, self-determination has been increasingly mobilised by movements resisting colonialism, particularly those led by groups that self-identify as Indigenous. In 2007, the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) shifted the orientation of self-determination claims and rights from a twentieth century focus on ‘saltwater’ colonial contexts (Cunningham, 2014; Trinidad, 2018) to ‘settler’ colonial contexts.

Saltwater colonialism refers to when an ocean separates a colonised people and their territory from the coloniser. This criterion was the basis of successful self-determination claims in the decades after the Second World War, through which some groups eventually achieved international recognition as a nation-state (Getachew, 2019; Roepstorff, 2013). Saltwater colonialism rests on the exploitation and subjugation of the colonised ‘Other’ by an extraneous authority. By contrast, settler colonisation is not defined by domination-at-a-distance. Rather, it is premised on settlers and their descendants inhabiting the land they occupy, and in so doing, removing or assimilating its original inhabitants (Veracini, 2015). Settler colonialism therefore produces Indigeneity as a political category, as the concept of Indigeneity differentiates between the societal order established by colonisers, and the societal order that existed prior to colonisation (Veracini, 2015, p. 58).

This paper engages with the relationship between self-determination and colonialism, but does so in a novel way that shines a spotlight on a third set of resurgent claims to self-determination. We argue that the focus in international law and in scholarly literature on saltwater and settler colonial contexts misses a range of self-determination claims that do not fit neatly into either of these colonial or territorial settings. For, besides colonial-expansionist and Indigenous-rights claims to self-determination, many communities in situations of protracted conflicts and political stasis are (re)turning to the right to self-determination as a rhetorical and practical mechanism for progressing their causes. These (re)articulations of self-determination bring to the fore both the tensions and contradictions that underpin this right, and the hopeful and aspirational politics often attached to it.

In using these cases as a vantage point for understanding self-determination, our aims are threefold. First, we widen the conceptual scope of self-determination to reflect more complex colonial geographies. In doing so, we argue for bringing literature on postcolonial geographies into dialogue with the concept of self-determination. Second, we explore a relational approach to self-determination. Drawing on relational geographies, we discuss self-determination as a claim that actors negotiate according to their situated and ongoing relations with local, national, and international actors, and vis-à-vis their histories, contemporary struggles, and future-oriented hopes. Third, we emphasise the importance of understanding self-determination as articulated in moments, events and practices, rather than measuring self-determination claims against lofty international definitions. This approach allows for a plural scholarly conception of self-determination; true to the heterogeneity of the postcolonial world and attuned to how claimants are variously reinterpreting the term.

Our three case studies are the Karen, Nagas and Tibetans. Struggling for self-determination in the contexts of repressive state policies in Myanmar, India and China respectively, these cases are all examples of unresolved decades-long conflicts. All three groups claimed self-determination in the international arena in the twentieth century and have recently sought to rework these claims. These cases have arguably been overlooked in scholarly debates because they do not cohere neatly with how international agreements and fora conceptualise self-determination. In these Asian contexts – as elsewhere in the postcolonial world – self-determination has a fraught history. While many Asian states gained independence after the Second World War on the basis of self-determination, such anticolonial claims to self-determination also subjugated non-state nations to state governments that did not represent their interests. Groups excluded from independence movements in the colonial era, and from newly formed post-colonial governments, continue to struggle for the right to self-determination. Yet in Asia, the word ‘Indigenous’ is highly contested, as state governments co-opt the term (or its equivalents in other languages) to justify the exclusion of certain groups (Baird, 2016). Nonetheless, some communities in the region have embraced an Indigenous identity and centred it in their articulations of self-determination (Karlsson, 2003). Other communities, however, have eschewed the notion of Indigeneity altogether. In Asia, the tangled history of Indigeneity and colonialism – internal and external – means that Karen, Naga and Tibetan claims to self-determination lie outside conventional definitions of saltwater and settler colonialism.

Each case shows how geographical concepts offer productive insights into understanding the tensions that underpins claims to self-determination. In the Karen case we focus on tensions between territorial integrity and the territorial fragmentation resulting from protracted conflict; in the Naga case we discuss tensions between understandings of Naga self-determination across scales; and in the Tibet case, our focus is on tensions between in situ and diasporic actors. These reflections draw on inductive research conducted separately with Karen, Naga and Tibetan communities, through which we allowed our participants’ worldviews to guide our research. Indeed, this approach paved the way for this article: although none of us focused on self-determination at the outset of our research, we noticed that our interlocutors used self-determination as a prism for articulating their claims. Furthermore, our methods foregrounded our participants’ own definitions and practices of self-determination, rather than self-determination as it has been articulated in international fora or legal documents. This article reflects on findings from various research projects over the span of years, for which we obtained the necessary institutional ethical approval. Informed consent has been obtained from all research participants quoted in this article, whose names have been anonymised.

The first author conducted ethnographic research in Karen State between 2018 and 2020, which involved participant observation with civil society groups actively seeking to reimagine self-determination. The second author draws upon interviews with Naga human rights activists and members of civil society organisations conducted between 2020 and 2022, textual analysis of these organisations’ print and digital media outputs, and analysis of a video-stream of the 2018 ‘Naga Day’ celebrations. Finally, the third author draws on participant observation and interviews conducted with members of the exiled Tibetan community in India between 2005 and 2013, and interviews with exiled Tibetan diplomats between 2015 and 2020. By bringing these cases into conversation, we demonstrate both the commonalities between them, but also that self-determination is differentially negotiated amidst a tangle of power relations at various scales.

In what follows, we discuss the geographical imaginations underpinning how self-determination is conventionally framed with reference to either saltwater or settler colonisation. Thereafter, we lay out a geographical approach to self-determination which is attuned to the complex spatialities of colonialism and which accounts for the ways in which groups pursue self-determination on the ground. The fourth section discusses Asian self-determination claims, before offering snapshots of our three case studies, each of which demonstrates how a geographical approach can help understand the tensions that underlie claims to self-determination. We close by reiterating the analytical potential of a relational approach to self-determination and its significance for harnessing this right’s hopeful, aspirational, and regenerative potential.

2. SELF-DETERMINATION IN INTERNATIONAL LAW: SALTWATER AND SETTLER COLONISATION

The contemporary notion of self-determination can be traced to the Enlightenment, when Western political philosophers saw consent as necessary for legitimate rule (Cunningham, 2014; on the term’s intellectual history, see Abulof, 2016; Massad, 2018). Centuries later, the League of Nations formalised the principle of self-determination as applied to a people. Self-determination was then enshrined as a right under international law with its inclusion in Chapter 1 of the UN Charter. The right then featured in UN General Assembly Resolution 637 (VII), recognising that every member state should respect the right to self-determination, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and People (GA Res. 1514(XV), 1960), and the Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations (GA Res. 2625(XXV), 1970).

Whilst resolutions and declarations are not legally binding – their implementation depends on the discretion of states – they established the discursive context for self-determination, and in this case the scope and content of this principle were crystallised in the period of decolonisation. Summers’ (2014) shows that the Friendly Relations Declaration was the result of a compromise between the divergent opinions of states, which had varying intentions relating to the pace and progression of decolonisation. The legal standing of the right to self-determination was bolstered by its inclusion in Article 1 of two core human rights treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESC). The recognition of self-determination in these international covenants effectively turned it into a general principle of international law.¹

Although the text of the covenants makes it clear that the right is not limited to colonies – Common Article 1 of the ICCPR and ICESC are separate from a third specifically directed to non-self-governing and trust territories – the fact that the right lacks a clear and robust definition, and state fears of secession, has meant that self-determination continued to be interpreted through the lens of decolonisation. As such, until the adoption of the UNDRIP in 2007, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) effectively recognised the right to self-determination only in instances of ‘saltwater colonisation’: situations in which the people seeking self-determination lived in a distinct overseas territory, separated from their respective colonial powers by an ocean (Roepstorff, 2013).

This section traces the two primary ways that self-determination has been framed within the UN system and articulated in modern international law: in contexts of saltwater colonialism and settler colonialism. In each case, the right to self-determination has been applied to distinct ‘peoples’ – those colonised by European powers, and Indigenous communities. By focusing on how self-determination is understood in the international arena, we are not directly engaging with debates around how self-determination can and should be interpreted. This task has been taken up by political theorists, scholars and Indigenous activists, who have, for example, re-interpreted self-determination as non-domination (e.g., Kuokkanen, 2019), and illustrated how self-determination has never been a stable signifier (Massad, 2018). Rather, we focus on the geographical imaginations that underpin the right of self-determination.

The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of a ‘saltwater’ conception of self-determination. As colonisers accepted that decolonisation was inevitable, they latched onto self-determination as a way to uphold an international order founded on sovereign statehood and stable territorial boundaries. Although the UNGA referred to ‘peoples’, territory was equally – if not more – critical to exercising the right to self-determination, to the extent that ‘the principle of “self-determination of peoples” might be more accurately described as the “self-determination of selected territories”’ (Hendrix, 2001, p. 149). This is because self-determination worked in tandem with two other international legal concepts: territorial integrity and uti possidetis (de Waal & Nouwen, 2021; Hendrix, 2001).

Territorial integrity meant that only whole saltwater colonies were granted self-determination; colonisers could not accord independence to specific groups within a colony or to geographically non-contiguous groups (Zacher, 2001). Uti possidetis (‘as you possessed’) meant that internal boundaries applied by colonisers would remain intact, and so would become international borders upon a colony’s independence (de Waal & Nouwen, 2021). Therefore, while drivers of anticolonial independence movements sought to challenge the colonial world order through self-determination claims, they found themselves forced to accept colonial concepts of ‘peoples’, territories, and borders (Getachew, 2019). Hence, the saltwater doctrine of self-determination – as promoted by both former colonisers and newly independent states – framed disadvantaged minorities within newly formed states as ineligible for the right to self-determination. The trumping of territorial integrity over self-determination is clearly illustrated in Article 27 of the ICCPR, which limits the right of minorities to self-determination to the cultural sphere, thereby excluding a legal right to secede. Early attempts to extend the right to self-determination beyond existing colonies found little traction in the international arena. In 1953, the UNGA rejected Belgium’s suggestion that self-determination could apply to minorities and Indigenous peoples within existing states so as to avoid energising secessionist movements (Castellino, 1999; Trinidad, 2018).

The tide turned in the 1980s, when the UN’s Working Group of Indigenous Peoples began debating the applicability of self-determination to Indigenous groups in settler colonial contexts. The Working Group began drafting the UNDRIP which, after a lengthy and contested process (see Burger, 2019), was adopted by the UNGA in 2007. Self-determination is a centrepiece of the UNDRIP, but – as with saltwater self-determination – the UNDRIP does not frame it as an unqualified right, as Article 46 states that the declaration should not impinge on the ‘territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent states’ (UNGA, 2007). To be sure, UNDRIP is monumental: for the first time, international law required states to recognise the rights of a segment of its population (Cambou, 2019). However, this compromise also reflects longstanding anxieties over the extent to which self-determination might lead to secession. Moreover, according to Merlan (2009), the right to self-determination under UNDRIP was framed primarily according to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in liberal democracies (Simpson, 2014). This matters, because treating this context as though it is universal can occlude issues that face Indigenous peoples elsewhere. For instance, in Western settler colonies, the matter of who is Indigenous – and hence can claim self-determination under UNDRIP – is relatively uncontested. However, in Asia, many state governments declare that there are no Indigenous people, or that all its populations are indigenous.

In sum, the manner in which self-determination is debated in the international arena is qualified and spatially delimited. Two main forms of self-determination have gained traction in the UNGA, based on saltwater and settler colonialism. While the former applies to contiguous territories separated from their colonisers by an ocean, the latter is largely framed according to the experiences of Indigenous groups in liberal democratic settler states. Both framings are thus delimited by particular geographical imaginations. Not only are the geographical limitations of these approaches rarely acknowledged, but various actors claim self-determination and Indigeneity in contexts that do not fit comfortably into these categories. Most notable, in the context of this article, is the role of minorities in former saltwater colonies (e.g., India, Myanmar) or countries that have never experienced European settlement (e.g., China). These groups articulate claims with multiple reference points – encompassing the UNDRIP, but also their experiences of state violence, authoritarianism, military rule and displacement – and confront various conundrums in the process. Understanding the self-determination claims of the Naga, Karen and Tibetans requires a more expansive conception of colonial power relations, which the next section examines.

3. COLONIAL AND RELATIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF SELF-DETERMINATION

The interdisciplinary literature on self-determination is dominated by legal research, with scholars examining how self-determination is interpreted in international and human rights law (e.g., Burger, 2019; Cambou, 2019; Koivurova, 2008). The rest of the literature largely mirrors a split between saltwater and settler colonialism. Before the 2000s, literature on self-determination was published primarily in international relations and peace studies journals, with work speculating on the outcome of territorial disputes. Thereafter, reflecting interest in UNDRIP, there has been an increase in literature on self-determination focused on how Indigenous claims challenge the concept of sovereignty in journals focused on human rights, ethnicity and political theory.

Two tendencies in the existing scholarship on self-determination limit scholars’ ability to explore the concept’s scope and potential. First, existing literature on self-determination tends to overlook the implied spatiality in ‘saltwater’ and ‘settler’ framings of self-determination. This oversight has contributed to a lack of scholarly attention to other self-determination claims outside of these spatial contexts. Below, we propose that a geographical approach attuned to the complexity of colonial realities can provide tools for understanding the varied ways in which claimant groups pursue self-determination. Second, scholars tend to either adopt an international or a vernacular approach to self-determination. On one hand, scholars have studied the extent to which self-determination claims are heard in international fora (e.g., Koivurova, 2008; Pitty, 2001). On the other, researchers have focused on how specific Indigenous groups enact self-determination through everyday practices and lived ontologies (e.g., Daigle, 2016). This paper charts a path between these approaches; bringing the local and international – and various scales in-between – into focus.

An example of scholarship that takes a similar approach is a recent themed section of Nations and Nationalism (2021) about self-determination in the Horn of Africa. In their introduction, De Waal and Nouwen reflect on how the meaning of self-determination is ‘as changeable and contestable’ as the political circumstances in which it is struggled for (2021, p. 58). This is clear in the subsequent articles, which examine how self-determination claims are diverse even in a single subcontinent; for example in Somalia (Chonka & Healy, 2021), South Sudan (de Waal, 2021) and Ethiopia (Berhe & Gebresilassie, 2021). Like these authors, we argue that self-determination – while central to the formation of many postcolonial states – remains unresolved; it drives contemporary conflicts but also efforts to resolve them (see also Regassa, 2021). Yet, we contend that self-determination is not entirely particularistic; how self-determination is interpreted in specific localities often draws from the term’s status in international law. Self-determination claims involve translating between the ‘local’ and ‘international’ and back again. They are invariably the product of relations.

Two bodies of work in geography offer insights into how self-determination is claimed, practiced and articulated. First, work in postcolonial and anticolonial geographies offers a spatially nuanced understanding of colonial power relations. This literature encompasses efforts to interrogate the discipline’s complicity in imperialism (e.g., Driver, 2001), geographical imaginations and representations of postcolonial space (e.g., Gregory, 2004), the historical geographies of colonisation (e.g., Legg, 2007), as well as the spatial formations of present-day settler colonisation (e.g., de Leeuw, 2016). In thinking more expansively about self-determination, we draw from geographical scholarship that makes the case for plural colonialisms, post-colonialisms and anti-colonialisms – that is, how colonialism plays out differently in different places (Sharp, 2009). Key to this is an assertion that non-European colonialisms need to be taken seriously. As Kurdish writer Ismet Sheriff Vanly puts it, ‘within the artificial frontiers inherited from imperialism, many Third World states practise a “poor people’s colonialism.” It is directed against often sizeable minorities, and is both more ferocious and more harmful than the classical type.’ (1993, p. 189). These understandings of colonial power relations are broader and more spatially dynamic than international actors’ framings of saltwater and settler colonialism.

We also respond to Clayton’s (2011) contention that, ‘in its early incarnations, postcolonial geography risked privileging the abject spaces of colonialism – its plantations, invasions and slums’ – at the expense of resistance and hope (Jazeel & Legg, 2019, p. 3). By attending to the sites, scales and networks of self-determination, we draw attention to subaltern geographies of aspiration; alive in movements that challenge colonial domination. Yet, we do not understate domination and repression either: each case shows how self-determination movements are beset by tensions between efforts to generate alternative futures, and efforts to suppress them.

Second, we draw on work on relational geographies, particularly that which applies relationality to analyses of anticolonial struggles. There is a broad body of work that eschews space as a static container of activity and instead conceptualises space dynamically and relationally (Geografiska Annaler 2004). We engage with Massey’s (1994, 2005) theorisations of relational space, rather than more restrictive formulations of, for example, a territory-places-scales-networks framework (Jessop et al., 2008). Drawing on Massey’s (1994) insistence that space gathers together multiple, open-ended and interconnected relations to produce unexpected trajectories and outcomes, scholars have shown how anticolonial struggles were shaped by translocal circulations of people, knowledge and resources (e.g., Davies, 2020; Featherstone, 2021). This scholarship shows how anticolonial movements pursued alternatives to colonial spatial relations at scales both above and below the nation-state. Goswami, for instance, argues that anticolonial scholars in the interwar period envisaged futures that were ‘explicitly anti-imperial yet neither reducible nor opposed to nationalism’ (2012, pp. 1461–2). It was only later, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the nation-state succeeded empire as the normative unit of the world order, that self-determination in saltwater contexts was assumed to lead to the formation of new, postcolonial states (Getachew, 2019).

This scholarship chimes with our discussion of self-determination in three respects. First, it portrays anticolonial struggles as hopeful, aspirational and future-oriented. Anticolonial struggles – like the self-determination movements we examine – did not seek merely to dismantle ongoing relations of domination, but also to remake power relations in their wake. Next, this scholarship detaches anticolonial struggles from all-too-familiar units of political analysis – primarily the nation-state. Each case shows how self-determination movements envisage new socio-spatial relations and rethink these in the courses of their struggles, tacking continually between the real and the possible. We join scholars, among them Jazeel and Legg, in efforts to ‘emphasize the stretched, relational, and “transnational” geographies of subaltern lives’ (2019, p. 21). Lastly, as with the international exchanges that shaped anticolonial struggles, contemporary self-determination movements continue to be shaped by international engagements, especially the transnational Indigenous movement. In this sense, self-determination can be seen as a positioning that ‘draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning’ and ‘emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle’ (Li, 2000, p. 151).

4. SELF-DETERMINATION IN ASIA: THREE CONTEMPORARY CASE STUDIES

To illustrate the relational and postcolonial geographies of self-determination, we draw on our research with Karen, Naga and Tibetan communities, who have persisted with and reinvented their claims to self-determination despite enduring conflict and repression. We bring together these cases for two reasons. First, Asia is overlooked in scholarly debates on self-determination. Anticolonial self-determination tends to be theorised from Africa (e.g., de Waal & Nouwen, 2021), whilst Indigenous self-determination is usually approached from the vantage point of white settler states (e.g., Kuokkanen, 2019). Taking relational space seriously entails attending to how self-determination is not only made at these ‘hotspots’ but takes on different meanings at sites where local and global forces intersect, and what it means for this concept to be transported elsewhere.

Second, there are important similarities between the Naga, Tibet and Karen cases. These are all situations of protracted conflict where groups have articulated their struggles in terms of ‘self-determination’, albeit in different registers. More recently, however, young people in all three contexts have been at the forefront of efforts to (re)turn to and (re)define this right to overcome political stasis and stalled negotiations. We are curious about the dissonances between claimants’ notions of self-determination, and ‘international’ notions of self-determination. However, this is not a comparative study. Rather, we use these cases as a snapshot for what a geographical approach to self-determination, which rests on a relational conception of space, might bring into focus.

Turning to the substance of these cases, Karen, Naga and Tibetan communities were not recognised as having legitimate claims to self-determination in twentieth century saltwater contexts. Pan-Karen and pan-Naga identities crystallised during British colonisation in India (thereafter also British Burma); these groups subsequently formed ethnopolitical organisations which, in the lead-up to Indian and Burmese independence, unsuccessfully petitioned the British government for a separate state. To simplify a complex history (see Garbagni & Walton, 2020; Walker, 2019), one might argue that the Karen and Naga were victims of territorial integrity and uti possidetis; the geographical concepts working in tandem with saltwater definitions of self-determination. This relegated the Karen and Naga to borderland minorities, energised their ethnonational struggles against the state, and set in motion decades of armed conflict. Meanwhile, Tibetans and scholars claim that Tibet was a de facto sovereign state between 1913 – upon the fall of the Qing Dynasty – and its annexation by the People’s Republic of China in 1951. Unlike India or Burma/Myanmar, the UN has never recognised Tibet as a ‘colonial country’ or a ‘country under colonialism’. Under Chinese rule, it has also been impossible for Tibetans in Tibet to publicly articulate demands for self-determination. Nonetheless, the Tibetan diaspora has continued to lobby for the Tibetan cause, often using the language of self-determination in international fora.

Shifts in the meaning of self-determination in international law have had implications for all three communities. While UNDRIP’s adoption in 2007 was heralded as a landmark for Indigenous peoples, this was a mixed blessing for Karen, Naga and Tibetan communities. As we have shown, not only was UNDRIP framed predominantly according to the experiences of those in liberal democratic settler colonies (Merlan, 2009), but colonising states in Asia interpreted this right in their favour. When China, India and Myanmar voted in favour of UNDRIP, they did so because they interpreted UNDRIP as applying solely to European states (Baird, 2019). Nonetheless, the growing recognition of Indigeneity in settler contexts has created new opportunities for Karen, Naga and Tibetan communities to garner visibility in the international arena, while raising new questions about the foundations of their self-determination claims. In the decades since each group first articulated a desire for self-determination, much has changed: their homelands have been fragmented by military campaigns, and some of their leaders and peoples have fled into exile. These tensions are at the heart of each of the cases we discuss.

4.1. A territory for self-determination: the Karen and the Salween Peace Park

My vision is to see the Karen people having full Indigenous rights … We are as important as Myanmar. It is our own country. It is a motherland, like it is for Myanmar … And another thing: we would also like to see the Karen have their own political power, meaning self-determination …  We [also] think that the solution of the civil war is to establish federalism … When we set up a federal union, we will have self-determination also. (Interview with Saw Lin Aung, 11 November 2018)

Veteran Karen activist Saw Lin Aung (a pseudonym) had a reputation in Myanmar government-controlled areas of Karen State² for being ‘hard headed’ and ‘too political,’ although he was easy-going and friendly in person. In 2018, he was delivering political education among Karen people, who Saw Lin Aung felt were unclear about what they were fighting for, despite having been at war for years. He explained his message: to him, the Karen people’s ultimate goal is best described in terms of self-determination, that self-determination was inseparable from federalism and Indigenous rights, and that it was achievable only by arms. By stringing together these words – self-determination, federalism and Indigeneity – Saw Lin Aung reflected the prevailing zeitgeist among Karen activists. But his reputation for being an intransigent hardliner bespoke the tensions underlying the pursuit of self-determination at the time. The tension this discussion will highlight pertains to territory. Decades of conflict had fragmented Karen State, southeast Myanmar, into Myanmar government-controlled areas, Karen National Union (KNU)-controlled areas, and mixed-controlled areas. This complicated the pursuit of self-determination, as Karens in different parts of Karen State had different experiences of the conflict and the KNU.

For over seven decades, the KNU has fought successive Myanmar governments for self-determination. Formed in the aftermath of the Second World War out of existing Karen organisations, the KNU originally interpreted self-determination as many other colonised groups did at the time. The organisation’s core principles, still in use today, reflect this. They were first articulated by the first KNU president, Saw Ba U Gyi, weeks before his assassination in 1950:

There shall be no surrender.

The recognition of the Karen State must be completed.

We shall retain our own arms.

We shall decide our political destiny.

The KNU’s insistence on autonomy (‘we shall decide our own political destiny’), recognition and territory (‘the recognition of the Karen State must be completed’) resonated with contemporaneous notions of self-determination in saltwater contexts; although as Jolliffe (2016, p. 2) clarifies, the KNU has almost always favoured autonomy within a federal system over secession.

In the 1970s, the KNU shifted its focus towards de facto self-determination; presenting Karen State as an autonomous territory, lacking only external recognition. By then, a coup in Myanmar had installed a dictatorship, which crushed lingering hopes that Karen State might join a Burmese federation. The Myanmar military had also pushed the KNU out of lower Burma – where there was a mixed Karen and Bamar population – and towards the Thai border, where the population was largely Karen. The KNU regrouped in present-day Karen State, where it established its current organisational structure. This comprises seven districts, subdivided into townships, then village tracts. Leaders at each level administer KNU areas, together with 14 departments administering specific areas of governance, including education, foreign affairs, forestry, justice and health.

However, in the 1990s, the Myanmar military stepped up its attacks, destroying most KNU bases along the Thai border and displacing tens of thousands across the Thai border. Previous KNU strongholds in southern and central Karen State became Myanmar government- and mixed-controlled areas (Brenner, 2019). Although ceasefires signed between the KNU and the Myanmar government in 2012 and 2015 reduced (but did not eliminate) armed clashes, they did not fix boundaries between Myanmar government and KNU areas, nor lead to a substantive peace settlement. By then, 800,000 people were governed by the KNU to some extent, although only 100,000 people were estimated to be under exclusive KNU rule (Jolliffe, 2016, p. 1). The former population could, for instance, be paying KNU taxes, holding KNU land titles, or receiving education from the KNU, while also being subject to administrative systems implemented by the Myanmar government or other armed actors.

Most people living under exclusive KNU control at the time were in Mutraw, northern Karen State; an area that had never been ruled by a Burmese government. During the ceasefire period (2012–2021), Mutraw became a focal point for rejuvenating and reinventing Karen self-determination in alignment with ascendant efforts to extend the right to self-determination to Indigenous peoples. The Karen had claimed Indigenous status before: the KNU made a statement to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1987 (Dunford, 2019). However, the ceasefire period allowed the KNU to enact Indigenous self-determination in a more overt and subtly different fashion through the Salween Peace Park. With the blessing of the KNU leadership, the Peace Park was launched in late 2018. Spanning 5,485 km², it positions Karen self-determination as aligned with worldwide efforts to conserve Indigenous lands.

The Salween Peace Park consolidated existing efforts at Indigenous governance in Mutraw, centred around the Sgaw Karen concept of Kaw (literally ‘country’). Each Kaw is associated with specific customs, governance systems, and cosmological beliefs that regulate socioecological relations (Paul et al., 2021). The Peace Park, which consists of 248 Kaw as well as KNU-designated community forests, wildlife sanctuaries, and reserved forests, is an effort by the KNU, civil society, and elected village tract representatives to position Kaw revitalisation as a means towards self-determination. The Salween Peace Park’s message is that the KNU and Mutraw’s civilians have been governing their own lands for decades; they do not need recognition from the Burmese government or in international fora to do so. Prefiguration is also key to the Salween Peace Park. Federalism had long been bandied about as a solution to Myanmar’s numerous ethnonational struggles. But in the eyes of the KNU and Karen civilians, the ceasefire period proved that federalism could not be built from the top-down, as the Myanmar military and government refused to meaningfully discuss the matter during peace negotiations (Thawnghmung & Htoo, 2022). Through the Peace Park, the KNU sought to build federalism from the bottom-up instead, and to frame self-determination as a driver of peace, not conflict. The words of a Karen activist and Peace Park advocate show how the initiative brings territory, peace, and self-determination together: ‘peace is not only no more fighting,’ Naw Poe Mu said in an interview, ‘it is also self-determination … our own territory, our own governance’ (a pseudonym, 2 March 2019). It has thus been framed as a positive model for other ethnic groups in Myanmar, and a building block for an autonomous entity within a future, peaceful federation. Although the KNU has struggled for Karen self-determination since 1949, the Peace Park explicitly conjoined this struggle with the revitalisation of Indigenous socio-ecological relations. It thus marked a shift in how activists, civilians, and the KNU were conceiving of self-determination.

Nonetheless, returning to Saw Lin Aung’s words, the Peace Park also alludes to some tensions that underlie self-determination. During the ceasefire period, the approximately 800,000 people under the dual rule of the KNU and the Myanmar government lived under different circumstances. Whereas the Peace Park is premised on the unabashed proclamation of Karen Indigenous identity, those in Myanmar government- and mixed-controlled areas have not been free to publicly practice their ethnic identities (Karen Human Rights Group, 2020). Customary institutions have also been more significantly eroded by the Myanmar government’s encroachment into these areas. Furthermore, as Thawnghmung and Htoo (2022, p. 13) point out, ethnicity-based territories may be unrealistic in parts of Myanmar that are increasingly heterogeneous and where there are minorities within minorities. Those who saw Saw Lin Aung as ‘hard headed’ or ‘too political’ often referred to their own experiences growing up among other groups who did not identify as Indigenous. The Karen struggle is thus testament to the challenges of seeking and reinventing self-determination in a context where territories and peoples have been fragmented by war.

Nonetheless, the 2021 coup in Myanmar could be a new conjuncture in the Karen struggle for self-determination, through which these tensions may be resolved. The coup triggered a countrywide war, which effectively annulled the KNU ceasefires. The KNU stepped up their military activities in solidarity with a countrywide movement to oust the junta, which claims to respect ethnic groups’ ‘self-determination’ (Loong, 2021, 28–29). Young Karen people from Myanmar government and mixed-controlled areas have sought refuge with or taken up arms with the KNU. Amidst this crisis, the nature of federalism – and the place of Indigeneity and self-determination therein – has been debated vigorously between Myanmar’s various ethnic groups, including the Bamar majority. These debates within the ongoing resistance movement are proof that self-determination claims are relational; a positioning that takes shape in engagements with the global Indigenous movements and countrywide debates about federalism.

4.2. Between the local and the global: Naga claims to self-determination across scale

On 10 January 2018, thousands of Nagas from Northeast India and Myanmar gathered in Kohima, the state capital of Nagaland, to celebrate the inaugural ‘Naga Day’. Envisaged by its organisers (the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, ‘FNR’) as a means of fostering unity amongst Naga groups separated by political and social boundaries, the event saw the performance of Naga songs, dances, speeches and poems. The event was also streamed on YouTube, reflecting the organisers’ desire to forge solidarities amongst Naga communities across the world, and to produce a version of self-determination legible to domestic and international audiences.

Amidst the celebrations, attendees endorsed the Naga Day Declaration, a vision statement setting out participants’ desire for a ‘shared future’ as ‘a peoples and a nation without borders’ (Forum for Naga Reconciliation, 2018, p. 20). The declaration pledged to ‘uphold the Naga Hills Memorandum to the Simon Commission,’ the Naga’s first collective expression of nationhood, issued 89 years earlier by Naga leaders to departing British officials (Forum for Naga Reconciliation, 2018, p. 20). The Memorandum called for the Nagas to be left ‘alone to determine [them]selves as in ancient times’ (Nuh & Lasuh, 2016, p. 117), whilst the contemporary Naga Day declaration, besides calling upon Naga individuals and religious, political and civil society bodies to engage in a shared journey of reconciliation, demanded that the governments of India and Myanmar respect the Naga people’s right ‘to freely determine [the Naga people’s] political status’ (Forum for Naga Reconciliation, 2018, p. 21).

Naga groups have a long history of engaging with the right to self-determination. Four years after the transfer from British to Indian rule, in 1951, the Naga National Council (NNC) organised a plebiscite in which 99% of Nagas are said to have voted for Naga statehood (Kikon, 2005). After the plebiscite was derided as illegitimate by Indian government officials, Naga leaders took their case to the UN. Here, they met a disinterested international audience, who in upholding the principles of territorial integrity and uti possidetis, considered the Nagas ineligible for self-determination (Walker, 2019). Since then, Naga activists and their supporters have variously employed discourses of minority, human and Indigenous rights to make their self-determination claim internationally legible. They have, however, been forestalled by the Indian government’s persistent claims that the so-called ‘Naga issue’ is of purely domestic concern (Manchanda & Bose, 2011).

In 2015, a Framework Agreement signed between the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) (NSCN-IM) and the Indian government proposed a system of shared-sovereignty between the two parties. There has been little progress in implementing the agreement, however, with negotiations stalling over the NSCN-IM’s demands for a separate Naga flag and constitution. Decades of militarisation at the hands of state and insurgent forces, the implementation of divide-and rule strategies by the Indian government, and histories of internecine violence, have increasingly fractured Naga society along factional and tribal lines. These tensions have been exacerbated by lingering uncertainty over the legitimacy of the NSCN-IM as the Nagas’ principal negotiating partner with India.

After decades of stalled negotiations, Naga Day and the associated Declaration represent an attempt by civil society activists to re-scale claims to self-determination away from the formal spaces of the UN and talks with Indian officials. Recent years have seen debates around the meanings of Naga self-determination, as civil society activists have reclaimed this right to articulate their political aspirations locally and internationally. These debates have increasingly occurred online, with Naga activists embracing social media as a space to circulate information, maintain community connections, and reimagine Naga (inter)national imaginaries. Underpinning these debates has been an effort to move away from understandings of self-determination as an outcome – historically equated by Naga nationalists with Naga independence – towards recognising self-determination as a process-right, through which the Naga’s geopolitical future is decided on and enacted by communities on the ground. Indeed, the use of the 1929 Simon Commission Memorandum to provide historical legitimacy to the Naga Day Declaration speaks to activists’ aspirations to return to an earlier stage of the Naga struggle, before the Naga’s geopolitical future had been foreclosed by calls for statehood. These articulations, however, raise important questions regarding the scale at which self-determination is defined and articulated. How should we understand the relationship between these putatively ‘local’ claims to and expressions of self-determination, and those made by Naga groups in international fora?

For Kudecho (a pseudonym), an FNR member, ‘bottom-up’ articulations of self-determination derive from the conviction that efforts to claim self-determination internationally are meaningless unless accompanied by opportunities for Naga communities to discuss and express their political, social, and economic aspirations. He explained:

If self-determination is only being discussed at the political level, say NSCN, if the people are not involved at the individual … community or village level, then it is empty, right? … It has form, but without substance. Self-determination must have form, but it must also have substance. And right now it may have form at the level of the United Nations, but it doesn’t have substance. (Interview, 17 September 2021)

Naga Day thus attempted to give ‘substance’ to these ‘top-down’ claims to self-determination by re-centring geopolitical agency away from political elites and toward spaces inhabited by Naga communities. The creation of such spaces is necessary in the Naga context where militarisation has meant that formal democratic mechanisms consistently fail to deliver peace and justice (Kikon, 2005).

In bringing together Nagas from across India and Myanmar, and demonstrating attendees’ shared desire to live as ‘ONE PEOPLE’, Naga Day also challenged claims made by Indian politicians that the Nagas are too divided to reach a settlement. It is thus unsurprising that the FNR articulated reconciliation as a prerequisite for self-determination. Indeed, the FNR understood Naga Day as a means of rebuilding the relationships between Naga factions and communities by ‘formulating a flexible, inclusive and common Naga identity’ (Forum for Naga Reconciliation, 2018, p. 39). As Naga scholar Akum Longchari observed in a speech delivered on Naga Day:

When a nation is reconciled it is the people who will determine the destiny of the land. But, so long as a nation remains divided, the lands will continue to determine the destiny of the people. (Longchari in FNR, 2018, p. 66)

Furthermore, in making a claim for the Nagas as ‘a peoples and a nation without borders’, the FNR used Naga Day to articulate an understanding of Naga self-determination commensurate with Article 36 of the UNDRIP. This provision grants Indigenous Peoples the (qualified) right to maintain relationships across international borders and is increasingly invoked by Naga activists to call for the unification of Naga-inhabited areas both within India and across India and Myanmar. Importantly, however, the FNR’s position on this matter is one of strategic ambiguity. By refusing to state explicitly whether ‘Nagas Without Borders’ entails the full territorial integration of Naga inhabited areas or the establishment of a pan-Naga supra-state or cultural body, the FNR side-stepped concerns that Naga Indigenous self-determination must result in territorial fragmentation, whilst avoiding the charge that their proposals do not go far enough in ensuring Naga sovereignty. In this way, the FNR embraced an open temporality in which Naga people decide on their own future.

In summary, Naga Day represents the FNR’s attempt to produce a version of self-determination which is simultaneously oriented towards global and domestic audiences, and constituted by local and international norms and circumstances. On one hand, Naga Day sought to demonstrate the Naga’s collective eligibility to the right to self-determination and give ‘substance’ to claims expressed at the UN or in negotiations with India. This represents a self-conscious effort by Naga civil society activists to embrace an alternative grammar in articulating their political aspirations. On the other hand, through facilitating a bottom-up process of reconciliation, Naga Day speaks to an attempt to use expressions of self-determination to pursue local political, social, and cultural agendas. This case therefore points to the need for a multi-scalar analysis of self-determination, which recognises how articulations of this right are forged and reconciled between spatial scales.

4.3. Self-determination claims across diaspora and displacement: the case of Tibet

At first glance Tibetans appear to have a straightforward case for claiming self-determination. As a people, Tibetans’ right to self-determination has been internationally recognised by the UNGA (GA Res. 1723 (XVI) 1961; GA Res. 279 (XX) 1965) although this right has been resolutely denied by the People’s Republic of China. However, there has been a long-standing tension underpinning Tibetan claims to and articulations of self-determination. With the Tibetan political and religious leadership having been exiled to India in 1959, and the Tibetan diaspora now numbering around 130,000 and spread across most continents, there is a dislocation between those with the political freedom to articulate claims to self-determination, and those living in the Chinese-occupied Tibetan homeland. As such, the Tibetan case raises questions: who has the legitimacy to represent a ‘people’ and to set the terms for claiming their right to self-determination? How do understandings and practices of self-determination circulate over large socio-spatial distances?

Communities dispersed from a common origin face two challenges: the construction of collective identities, and maintaining connections between homeland and diaspora populations. These challenges are acute in the case of stateless diasporas for whom the ‘home state’ is under foreign occupation (Mavroudi, 2010). For Tibetans, connections between homeland and diaspora have waxed and waned. After the initial arrival of Tibetan refugees in India in the early 1960s, contact between Tibetans inside and outside Tibet was severely curtailed due to China’s political isolation. This changed in the early 1980s when Tibetans in Tibet were granted permission to go on pilgrimage and visit relatives in South Asia, but this relative freedom of movement ended abruptly in 2008 when China closed its borders for Tibetans after protests across the plateau. With tangible involvement in the homeland very limited for Tibetans in the diaspora, the fostering of solidarity between homeland and diaspora populations took on heightened importance. However, given the difficulties of communication with ‘back home’ and the decades in exile, significant physical and cultural divisions have arisen between Tibetan exiles and Tibetans in Tibet (Yeh, 2007). These divisions are reflected in how claims to self-determination have been articulated by Tibetans inside and outside Tibet.

Given the extreme restrictions on freedom of expression in the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Tibetan prefectures of Chinese provinces, Tibetans struggle to articulate claims to self-determination in any meaningful way. This is not to say that there has been an absence of political dissent, with sporadic armed resistance to Chinese rule from the mid-1950s until mid-1970s, and clergy-led nonviolent protests from the late 1980s (McGranahan, 2010). With Beijing increasingly policing public space in Tibet, the latter has seen a shift from street protests to self-immolations, with 160 cases since 2009. As Sloane argues, ‘self-immolation is not just one more manifestation of political dissent in response to the denial of this right to self-determination; increasingly, it is the only available form of dissent possible in the police state in which Tibetans live’ (2014, p. 57). Whilst rarely as extreme as such cases of violent self-sacrifice, political protest has also been important to how Tibetans in the diaspora have articulated claims to self-determination, in particular bringing Tibet to the attention of foreign governments and international organisations. However, having re-established the Tibetan government in exile, the diaspora has also sought more formal means to exercise their right to self-determination. Indeed, debate led by the leadership over the future political status of Tibet has proved to be a central point of contention within the diaspora. This debate exemplifies the challenges of transnationalising claims to self-determination.

After sending four fact-finding expeditions to Tibet and envoys to two rounds of exploratory talks with the Chinese leadership in Beijing, in June 1988 the Dalai Lama announced his ‘Framework for Sino-Tibetan Negotiations’, whereby he formally renounced his government’s previous demands for independence and launched his ‘Middle Way approach’. Premised on the Buddhist principle of seeking a path of moderation and conciliation rather than confrontation, the ‘Middle Way approach’ called for the establishment of a ‘self-governing democratic political entity … in association with the People’s Republic of China’ comprising all Tibetan-inhabited areas and whose government would have ‘the right to decide on all affairs relating to Tibet and Tibetans’ (Dalai Lama, 1988). This framework was rejected by the Chinese leadership in 1990 and Sino-Tibetan talks ground to a halt in 2010. Whilst the termination of formal dialogue with Beijing has not shifted the exiled Tibetan leadership’s position – the Middle Way remains the exile government’s official policy on the future of Tibet – many Tibetans in the diaspora have been frustrated with the lack of political progress and call instead for a return to demanding ‘rangzen’ or full Tibetan independence (Norbu, 2000). The right to self-determination underpins both this fractious diaspora-based debate, and the fundamental challenge of speaking for kin in a distant homeland.

The Middle Way versus rangzen divide can be mapped onto understandings of self-determination being a binary internal versus external right (internal being a right to self-governance within a sovereign state and external being the right to secession), but this is problematically premised on an assumption that self-determination is an outcome, not the process through which different political futures are decided upon. In other words, by prescribing options, the diaspora has foreclosed the right (not currently realisable) for Tibetans in Tibet to determine their own future. Yet, given both the intractable issue of referendums as a mechanism for realising self-determination, and the challenge of mediating the socio-spatial distance between homeland and exile, enabling this right is almost impossible. Put simply, a referendum on the future political status of Tibetans cannot be held inside Tibet, and a referendum held in exile is problematically unrepresentative as only a small percentage of the entire population of Tibetans would be able to vote.

However, Tibetans inside Tibet have forged a novel way of articulating a claim to self-determination. In 2008, Tibetans in India received communications from Eastern Tibet that set out some cultural practices to be observed on Wednesdays. These were to be known as ‘Lhakar’ in reference to the Dalai Lama’s day of birth. More details emerged in June 2010 when a ‘Lhakar Pledge’ was posted on a Tibetan blog. This set out ways that Tibetans can assert their identity once a week: ‘I am Tibetan, from today I will wear only Tibetan traditional dress, chuba, every Wednesday … I will speak only Tibetan every Wednesday … I will stop eating meat … every Wednesday’ (High Peaks Pure Earth, 4 July 2011). The pledge was reposted on exile-based blogs before the original was taken down by Chinese authorities (High Peaks Pure Earth, 4 July 2011). A range of motivations behind the promotion of Lhakar have been articulated, including economic marginalisation of Tibetans in Tibet, political repression and the suppression of Tibetan language and cultural and religious practices (McConnell, 2015). If ‘cultural preservation lies at the foundation of almost every struggle for self-determination’ (Herzer, 2004, p. 430), then Lhakar can be understood as both a cultural expression and vernacular practice of the right to self-determination. Lhakar has also forged new transnational links between exile and the homeland.

Demonstrating the crucial role of the internet as a tool for stateless diasporas seeking to forge national identities and generate new ideas of self-determination (e.g., Aouragh, 2012; Brinkerhoff, 2009), examples of Lhakar activities were widely circulated online, encouraging members of the diaspora to adopt these practices in their own communities. This ranged from Tibetan teenagers in Switzerland making a point of speaking in broken Tibetan with their relatives in Nepal to Tibetan school children in northern India swapping school uniforms for traditional Tibetan chubas on Wednesdays. As a Tibetan activist in Europe put it:

Lhakar, this really is an interesting phenomenon, and I think a source of hope. Psychologically it is really important for Tibetans inside and outside – even those young Tibetans in the west … it’s a grassroots movement, belonging to the people. It is about solidarity building. (Interview, 30 March 2013)

This grassroots cultural movement is striking because it was initiated by Tibetans in Tibet and subsequently taken up by Tibetans in the diaspora. As an innovative expression of self-determination ‘authored’ by Tibetans in the homeland and that has circulated transnationally, its emergence reveals the relational webs that underpin self-determination, and the challenges and opportunities of articulating this claim transnationally.³ In actively promoting Tibetan cultural and economic practices, this is a small example of hopeful, aspirational and regenerative politics in a wider political context that remains intractable. Whether these practices allow self-determination to be reframed as multidimensional and inclusive, thereby leaving the possible political configurations of a future Tibet more open, remains to be seen.

5. RETHINKING SELF-DETERMINATION

It is a timely moment to be refocusing attention on self-determination following a recent upsurge of interest in this right within UN fora. In 2021, the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous People (EMRIP) authored a report on self-determination initiatives undertaken by Indigenous Peoples and states following the adoption of UNDRIP. Sustainable Development Goal 16, on the promotion of peaceful and inclusive societies, has reinvigorated a conversation within UN spaces around the relationship between self-determination and political participation. This international attention reflects the fact that civil society groups around the world are increasingly (re)turning to this right as a means of resolving situations of protracted conflict and political stasis.

At this pivotal moment, relational and postcolonial geographies shed light on already-existing claims to self-determination, even when they do not fall neatly into existing scholarly and international legal definitions of the term. This approach attends to the specificities of such claims as they are articulated on the ground, whilst situating them within the multi-scalar power relations that constrain and enable their expression. Paying attention to moments, events, and practices foregrounds the tensions that underpin aspects of how self-determination is claimed and realised, encompassing: who has the agency to speak on behalf of the ‘people’; the scale at which self-determination is articulated; and how territory is understood vis-à-vis self-determination. We thus demonstrate the value of examining self-determination as a contradictory practice, beset by various spatial dilemmas and a diverse and plural array of political imaginaries, rather than as an abstract and prescriptive legal claim.

Specifically, we have made three arguments. First, we advocate for widening the conceptual scope of self-determination to reflect more complex colonial geographies. ‘Saltwater’ and ‘settler’ colonial framings of self-determination are spatial categories: both are underpinned by distinctive geographical imaginations. In adopting a wider view of both self-determination and the nature of colonial power relations, our approach highlights hitherto overlooked claims to self-determination by communities who fall outside of these spatial contexts. Our case studies show how in Asia – and elsewhere in the postcolonial world – communities who were not granted statehood on the grounds of saltwater colonialism, and who are not claiming Indigeneity in the context of white settler states, are (re)turning to the concept of self-determination to progress their causes. In so doing, they have sought to overcome protracted political impasses. Even so, these self-determination claims remain staunchly anti-colonial, even if the colonialism in question refers to the dominance of a postcolonial state over specific populations. Claimants resist colonial occupation with aspirations to remake space anew: they reorganise socio-ecological relations in territories fragmented by war (in the Karen case); enact expansive definitions of self-determination unencumbered by international borders (in the Naga case); and forge new connections between homeland and diaspora populations (in the Tibetan case).

Second, we argue that self-determination claims are relationally constituted; informed by claimants’ interactions across various sites and scales, even as they are claimed with reference to a homeland. The self-determination claims enacted by the Karen, Nagas and Tibetans are neither fully vernacular nor fully international. Instead, they strategically orient claimants in relation to local constituents (e.g., embattled civilians, states), international actors (e.g., UN bodies, transnational social movements), and others (e.g., diasporas). Importantly, these relations are dynamic. The Karens, Nagas and Tibetans all claimed self-determination in international fora in the twentieth century, but have since rejuvenated their claims through specific territorial, political and cultural practices. These practices renew each community’s claims to self-determination while reinventing self-determination itself. As we have illustrated via the Tibetan and the Naga cases, the internet is increasingly important in maintaining these webs of relationality, as a site of identity construction; a means of connecting diasporic and homeland communities; and a space through which articulations of self-determination are forged and circulated. Nonetheless, in foregrounding a particular tension inherent to self-determination as it pertains to each of our case studies, it is not our intention to imply that this is the most expedient framing to understand them. We could have applied alternative geographical concepts to the cases described above, for example by considering the role of diasporic actors in Naga and Karen claims, or exploring contestations between Tibetan activists and Chinese officials over the territory of ‘Greater Tibet’. Even so, we illustrate how a geographical approach, which rests on a relational conception of space, is vital to unpacking these nuances and contradictions, and to reinvigorating critical interest in self-determination as a right that is being reworked on the ground.

Third, again drawing on Massey’s (1994, 2005) understandings of relational space, we argue for understanding self-determination as articulated in plural and open-ended ways. The case studies illustrate not only the diversity of actors involved in articulating self-determination, but also how self-determination manifests in different contexts. Broadly speaking, while the Karen case presents an alternative political structure, Naga Day is an example of cultural revitalisation that has been articulated via the lexicon of self-determination. Lhakhar shares this cultural underpinning, but can also be understood as a form of political resistance that cross-cuts diaspora and homeland populations. In studying each of these claims to self-determination on their own terms, whilst also recognising the way in which each is situated within multi-scalar power relations, we see self-determination as a mediating’ concept that bridges claimants’ aspirations and the structures of the interstate system.

Moreover, teasing apart the political, social and cultural facets of self-determination is vital to harnessing its generative potential. Each of the three cases is imbued with hopes and aspirations for more egalitarian and peaceful relations, and alternatives to colonial domination: Naga Day shows how self-determination informs community reconciliation; the Salween Peace Park illustrates how self-determination is tied to efforts to build federalism from the bottom-up; Lhakar provides a creative means for transnational Tibetan communities to express claims to self-determination. Interpreted as a process (rather than outcome) based right, we contend that self-determination can also be understood as a right to geopolitical agency – a means through which minority, Indigenous, and otherwise politically marginalised communities can determine how they live now and into the future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are indebted to our research participants for generously sharing their thoughts and time with us. We also thank the Political Worlds research cluster at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, for discussing a draft of this paper. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The legal scope of self-determination has also been elaborated in a series of ICJ decisions related to specific cases, for example South-West Africa case (1971) ICJ 16, Western Sahara, Advisory Opinion (1975) ICJ Rep 12, and East Timor (Portugal/Australia) (1995) ICJ Rep 90.

2 This article uses ‘Karen State’ for the areas claimed by the KNU in southeast Myanmar. This area is much larger than Myanmar government-designated Kayin State, and known to the KNU as ‘Kawthoolei’.

3 Whilst Simpson (2014) discusses self-determination claims that span a national border – in the case of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawks – in the Tibetan case the diaspora is claiming the right from outside the homeland.