It is a commonplace that international lawyers differ on whether the right of self-determination of peoples in international law includes a right of secession, and if so, in what circumstances. In the 1998 Reference re Secession of Quebec, which put the question squarely to the Supreme Court of Canada, the Canadian government, the Quebec amicus curiae, and intervenors including the Nunavik Inuit, the Ad Hoc Committee of Canadian Women on the Constitution, and the provincial government of Saskatchewan could all find support for their positions among international lawyers. Indeed, the number of new states and self-determination movements to emerge from the end of the Cold War has only broadened the range of views on self-determination, some spying a new norm in these developments and others distinguishing them in various ways.

But beyond the fact of disagreement, the cross-section of opinions on secession in the Quebec reference brings home a feature of the international law discourse on self-determination that many international lawyers may register, but few engage: its unhelpful generality. The accounts of self-determination that compete in the literature are so neatly logical and linear as to either miss or generalize away much of what is involved in the actual interpretation of self-determination. One of the few to criticize this body of literature, Nathaniel Berman dismisses its broad dichotomies as inadequate to the complex production of meaning in a concrete case.