UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I interpret the right to self-determination from the vantage point of political peoples entangled with states they are not part of—namely, colonized, indigenous, and exiled peoples. These peoples, given their commitment to maintaining a political community of their own while traversing the boundaries of existing states, encounter normative and political challenges yet to be captured by political theorists. In response to this absence, I foreground the conceptual and normative discussions of self-determination with the political realities confronting entangled peoples across the Americas and Asia-Pacific, with a focus on Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Puerto Ricans, and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Taiwan. Analyzing their situational similarities and geopolitical differences, I develop a taxonomy of institutional and associative entanglements that captures the varied relations within and across self-determining peoples. At its core, entanglement stems from the power of one people to determine the institutions that govern another people, and in so doing re-constitute the relationships within and between the two peoples. Entanglement renders the constitution of a people ontologically indeterminate, engendering differentiated relations within each people and transnational relations that cut across the boundaries of peoples. Entanglement is not necessarily problematic. However, when this constitutive power is disproportionately distributed such that one people has an uncontrolled capacity to re-constitute another people against the latter’s will, entanglement takes on a dominating form. Grounded by this understanding of entanglement, I advocate a relational approach to self-determination as non-domination. A plausible framework of self-determination must attend not only to the relationships between people as collectives but also to the relationships of individuals that are internally differentiated and transnationally extended. I conclude that while this framework does not necessitate us to abandon statist forms of organization, it should compel us to rethink concepts such as territorial sovereignty on entangled terms.