Legal form of self-determination in international law

The paper aims to address the right of peoples to self-determination through one of the perspectives of critical legal thinking, namely the concept of the legal form. The theory of the legal form remains one of the most productive paradigms within Marxist approaches to the law. A hundred years since it was proposed in 2024 by Evgeny Pashukanis, it can be creatively developed to grasp paradoxes of self-determination. China Miéville’s influential proposal opens some avenues, but they require further deepening. As the paper demonstrates, three dimensions encompassed within the tradition of the legal form can be applied to self-determination. First, the understanding of the legal subject as imposed through procedures of interpellation. The right to self-determination contains, as its foreground, a set of ideologemes aimed at offering a people’s identity. Communities which ‘recognise’ their ‘selves’ in this interpellation can become legal subjects of self-determination. At the same time, national identity is welded with imagery of sovereignty and statal expression. Second, the concept of the legal form allows of grasping the process of exchange of recognition which develops through the right of self-determination. This process is based on internal inequality, as peoples are structurally divided between statal and non-statal ones. The right to self-determination, although posited as mediating between these two, effectively freezes its non-statal subjects before the gate to the community of states. Third, the right to self-determination demonstrates a high level of singularity in international law. Singularity is expounded as what perturbs the relations between the universal and the particular, the rule and its cases. Especially after the era of decolonisation instances in which self-determination is invoked do not form a graspable chain of cases. Instead, singularity of this right appears in its suspended applicability and practical non-enforceability.