Self-Determination Beyond Liberal Legalism - by Anna Irene Baka (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book reinterprets the right of peoples to self-determination through Aristotelian philosophy, phenomenology, and corrective justice, proposing a renewed legal framework grounded in lived experience, responsibility, and moral engagement that challenges both mainstream and critical approaches.

Book Synopsis

Anna Irene Baka challenges dominant liberal and legalist paradigms in international law by reinterpreting the right of peoples to self-determination through the lenses of Aristotelian philosophy, phenomenology, social psychology, and corrective justice.
Focusing on high-profile postcolonial conflicts in Kosovo, Cyprus, and Palestine, Baka argues that abstract international and constitutional legal doctrines on self-determination fail to account for the lived realities of collective deprivation and historical trauma. Baka offers a compelling critique not only of mainstream theories of self-determination, but also of the shortcomings of critical movements such as Critical Legal Studies. In their place, she advances a renewed ethical and conceptual framework for international law-one grounded in responsibility, rational judgment, and moral engagement. This interdisciplinary method brings fresh insight into questions of collective identity, legitimacy, and the moral accountability of law itself. Ultimately suggesting that meaningful responses to historical injustice require international jurists to cultivate intellectual independence and legal virtue, this is a timely and essential contribution for scholars and practitioners of international law, human rights, legal philosophy, and global justice.

Review Quotes

"At the heart of this work of intellectual courage lies the concept of objective deprivation, a phenomenological understanding of collective loss that reveals how historical trauma and collective identity shape the right to self-determination and why corrective justice must guide international law. For jurists, scholars, and anyone concerned with justice, identity, and the future of global governance, Baka's work is both a roadmap for legal transformation and a philosophical call to action." --Temitope Omotola Odusanya, Robert Gordon University, UK

"Drawing from diverse sources, including Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, and supported by legal judgments in comparative and public international law constitutionalism, Anna Irene Baka offers a clearly written and insightful critique of liberalism. Her rich insights highlight the importance of a thirdness in the dualistic paradigm which has characterized legal and political liberalism. This thirdness opens into the place and time where social relations are experienced." --William E. Conklin, University of Windsor, CAN

About the Author

Anna Irene Baka is a legal philosopher and human rights lawyer with more than fifteen years of experience in international law, European Union governance, and comparative legal theory.