Volume 31, Issue 2 (2019) Special Issue: ICO

The articles in this issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy have their origins in presentations at a Chatham House conference titled “Rethinking Self-Determination,” February 2019, hosted by the International Communities Organization and the journal.

Among the many aspects of self-determination they address: the elasticity of the concept as a human right in the context of “peoples” (Freeman); individual rights versus collective self-determination (Summers); Biafra as an early case of internal self-determination—the territorial integrity of the state and the right of secession when “the right of a people to participate in the decision-making processes of a country is breached” (Brucker); European integration versus self-determination (Ushkovska); language as an instrument of self-determination for Indigenous peoples (Higgins and Maguire); issues relating to equal rights for Indigenous women (Redolfi et al.); communicative justice and reconciliation in Canada (Neeson); the application of self-determination theory to forcibly displaced peoples’ adaptation process (Turan); self-determination for forcibly displaced children and in states that have not ratified the UN Convention on Refugees and the UN Conventions on Statelessness (Herring), and interpreting “peoples” to refer to the global population and climate change as a human right (Donlan).