Since the height of the post-Second World War (WWII) decolonisation wave, self-determination has emerged as a cardinal principle in international law. Today, the realisation of self-determination for all peoples is viewed as an unexceptionable goal and an imperative for the full enjoyment of all human rights. At the same time, scholars have identified the very concept of self-determination as particularly vague and ill-defined. While it is a cornerstone of international law, it is paradoxically also one of its most unsettled norms. 

This thesis argues that self-determination’s unsettled nature hampers peoples’ abilities to exercise or call out violations of it, even where there is an undisputed right. This becomes evident if one considers the peoples of the world’s remaining non-self-governing territories (NSGTs), defined by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as not yet decolonised, which make up the empirical focus of the thesis. NSGT peoples have an unalienable right to self-determination as part of their right to decolonisation. While the vast majority of colonies transferred to independent statehood in the post-WWII decades, NSGTs to this day remain in constitutional relationships with their respective administering (colonising) powers. Studies have found that movements and electoral support for full independence in NSGTs now tend to be limited. Metropolitan states have relatedly objected to the categorisation of their affiliated territories as colonies, seeking to portray the very retention of constitutional ties as a voluntary act – perhaps even an act of self-determination? The thesis argues that such a binary view is overly limited and risks obscuring self-determination violations that still occur within these relationships, as well as the limited opportunities for major constitutional change that have existed in practice.

International law on decolonisation stipulates a set of political status options that NSGT peoples may pursue. However, it is less clear regarding what self-determination entails and legitimises in relation to contemporary arrangements for metropolitan affiliation, for as long as they may persist. Using various types of qualitative and field data, including addresses by NSGT representatives to UN decolonisation committees, local news articles and interviews with key actors in two NSGTs and British Overseas Territories – the British Virgin Islands and Anguilla – this thesis inquires into these arrangements. It considers how they are experienced on the territory-level, how they shape local discourses and concepts of self-determination, and how they are in turn thought to promote or undermine it. By analysing this data in light of writings from law and political theory pertaining to Indigenous self-determination and decolonisation, the thesis develops an understanding of self-determination and its requirements within frameworks for metropolitan affiliation. Building on legal scholar James Anaya’s ideas about self-determination as having an ongoing and a constitutive aspect, it argues that this needs to be considered in regards to how the governing institutional order is structured and who hold power in both modifying and upholding it. Identifying shortcomings pertaining to both ongoing and constitutive self-determination in NSGT-metropole relationships, the thesis demonstrates the value of conceptualising this in a more elaborate way, aside from a choice for a permanent political status.