Clarifying the Norm, Questioning the Structure: A Review Of Tom Spark’s Self-Determination in the International Legal System

Tom Sparks is the Director of Just Access and is an international lawyer and legal consultant based in Heidelberg, Germany. He holds a PhD in international law from Durham University. His areas of research interest include international legal theory, self-determination, and range into the relationship between international law and political legitimacy. Sparks has published on sovereignty, decolonisation, and the development of international legal norms, and is thus a leading young scholar in public international law.

Tom Sparks’s Self-Determination in the International Legal System: Whose Claim, to What Right? (Hart Publishing, 2023) offers a careful doctrinal examination of the contemporary law of self-determination, seeking to bring conceptual clarity to a field often marked by ambiguity and contestation. Sparks develops a fourfold typology of polity-based, colonial, secessionary, and remedial self-determination in a domain of study that is all too often character biased by confusion and political contestation. This typological structure is the main achievement of the book. Sparks draws from the jurisprudence of the ICJ’s advisory opinions, judgements, state practice and also the debates of the United Nations. He examines the historical development of self-determination and its current manifestation in international law. Sparks’ book is a useful resource for readers who want a clear understanding of the legal landscape. It is an optimistic and empowering work that clarifies historical and judicial ambiguities and lays robust groundwork for future scholars and courts to engage thoughtfully and fully harness the emancipatory potential of self-determination, making a significant and enduring positive impact on both theory and practice.

Clarifying the Law, Bracketing the Politics

Sparks’s project is explicitly oriented toward doctrinal clarification. By systematising self-determination into distinct legal forms and tracing their development through judicial reasoning and state practice, he offers a stabilised account of the norm as it currently stands. This methodological commitment brings much-needed coherence to a fragmented field. At the same time, it shapes the boundaries of the inquiry. Approaching self-determination primarily as a matter of legal classification foregrounds its internal doctrinal logic, while leaving comparatively less space to interrogate the historical and political conditions under which those categories emerged. Critical scholarship has long suggested that self-determination cannot be understood apart from its colonial formation and the structural inequalities that continue to influence its application. From this perspective, the doctrine appears not only as a juridical construct but as a mechanism that both enabled decolonisation and stabilised the postcolonial international order.

Sparks’s analysis, by contrast, prioritises doctrinal clarification and judicial reasoning. This focus brings welcome coherence to a fragmented field, but it also tends to foreground the internal logic of legal categories over the political and historical conditions that produced them. As a result, self-determination appears primarily as a problem of classification, rather than as an ongoing site of struggle embedded in uneven global power relations. The issue, therefore, is not the absence of a particular critical framework, but that the book’s methodological commitment to systematisation leaves comparatively less room to interrogate how colonial legacies and geopolitical hierarchies continue to shape which claims to self-determination gain traction and which remain marginalised.

In clarifying what self-determination is, Sparks devotes comparatively less attention to interrogating what self-determination has done within the postcolonial international order. He narrates decolonisation as a legal development, but does not fully interrogate its structural ambivalence. By prioritising doctrinal coherence, Sparks presents self-determination as a stabilised legal norm, but does not fully interrogate its role in consolidating the postcolonial international order it emerged from. In the chapter on decolonisation, where the historical stakes of self-determination are most visible, the emphasis on doctrinal consolidation given the aim of the book is expected. A more sustained examination of how the doctrine both disrupted empire and reproduced its structural legacies within the postcolonial international system would have added further nuance to the analysis.

The historical sections of the book are especially representative of this tension. Sparks follows the history of self-determination from its pre-modern origins through the decolonisation period following World War II to its formalisation in the UN Charter and other resolutions. Although Sparks provides a very thorough history of legal developments, this story is very much a state and Eurocentric one. TWAIL scholars would argue that the adoption of self-determination through international law during the decolonisation period was highly contradictory, enabling the achievement of independence for many colonies while also formalising colonial borders and protecting the economic and strategic interests of former colonial powers. Sparks’ treatment of decolonisation as a distinct historical period prioritises doctrinal consolidation, leaving comparatively less space to explore how neo-colonial frameworks continue to circumscribe the sovereignty of newly independent states. Thus, for example, the Western Sahara and Palestinian cases are considered almost exclusively as legal puzzles, rather than as living illustrations of how international law continues to be entangled with the power relations of imperialism.

For instance, the typology’s elevation of polity-based self-determination as the most consolidated form of the norm reflects the internal functioning of established states. Yet many such states are themselves products of colonial boundary-making. Conversely, remedial secession is presented as tightly constrained and exceptional, but the structural conditions that make its thresholds nearly insurmountable remain underexplored. The distribution of doctrinal stability across categories mirrors, perhaps unintentionally, the distribution of authority in the contemporary international order.

Similarly, in discussing cases such as Chagos or Kosovo, the analysis centres on doctrinal ambiguity and judicial reasoning. What remains less developed is the geopolitical environment within which these doctrines operate, the role of great powers, strategic interests, and selective enforcement. The law appears internally coherent, yet its operation within political reality receives comparatively limited attention. The issue, then, is not that the book fails to be critical in a theoretical sense. It is that its ambition to offer a stabilised account of “what the law is” tends to abstract the law from the political struggles and asymmetries that shaped it.

Critical scholarship, including TWAIL, has long emphasised that sovereignty and self-determination emerged within imperial governance structures. For instance, Antony Anghie, in his seminal work Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law, traces how colonialism was not merely an external context for international law but its constitutive engine. He points out that doctrines like sovereignty and the “standard of civilization” were primarily developed by the colonial powers in an effort to manage the non-europeans. Similarly, Makau Mutua critiques the current human rights discourse stating that it often frames Global South states and peoples as victims needing salvation by the Global North. Meanwhile, Balakrishnan Rajagopal emphasises Third World peoples’ agency, showing how grassroots resistance movements challenge and reshape international law from below, as seen in decolonization struggles and Indigenous movements across the third world.

Reading alongside these interventions, Sparks’s account appears primarily concerned with clarifying doctrinal forms rather than examining how those forms were historically constituted through imperial governance and political struggle. These perspectives do not undermine his typology; rather, they illuminate structural dimensions of self-determination that remain comparatively underdeveloped in a framework oriented toward systematisation. His analysis of the already existing discourse is largely state centric and doctrinal. This leads to him tracing and analysing the evolution of self-determination, without questioning the very power relations that underpin it. By failing to incorporate TWAIL perspectives, Sparks misses an opportunity to ask deeper, critical questions that go beyond legal categorization. For instance, who is and should be the deciding authority in determining which self-determination claims are to be deemed legitimate or why are struggles in the Global South often constrained by restrictive interpretations, while powerful states face few limits when redrawing boundaries or intervening in the sovereignty of others? Furthermore, Sparks does not address how economic and political structures shaped by colonialism continue to influence contemporary legal outcomes, leaving unexamined the deeper inequities that determine whose voices are heard and whose claims are sidelined in the international legal system.

The inclusion of TWAIL would have added depth to Sparks’ typology by situating self-determination within a historical and structural framework. For instance, Anghie’s writings would have clarified the reasons for the limited scope of colonial self-determination: it was circumscribed to maintain colonial borders. The writings of Rajagopal would have assisted in analysing how popular movements, rather than states or courts, have been the actual engines of liberation. The critical writings of Mutua would have disclosed that Sparks’ remedial self-determination is based on outsiders’ standards for what constitutes “sufficient suffering” to warrant secession, just as the colonial era was paternalistic. The fact that Sparks does not include these perspectives is all the more surprising in that his book is dated 2023. This is a time when TWAIL has emerged as the voice of international legal scholarship. This silence does not merely limit the book’s theoretical depth; it reflects a broader marginalisation of critical voices that seek to challenge the inequities embedded in international law itself.

Given the maturity of critical debates on sovereignty and decolonisation, a more sustained engagement with these structural questions might have further deepened the book’s otherwise careful doctrinal account. The limited engagement with structural critiques leaves certain political dimensions of self-determination underexplored. For instance, by engaging with Antony Anghie’s work on sovereignty, Sparks could have further discussed how colonialism has influenced the very categories of self-determination. Similarly, Makau Mutua’s critique of the human rights narrative could have helped Spark expand on remedial self-determination and elucidate it as a last resort. An engagement with the third-world realities of these issues would entail a better understanding of the remedial form, accessible only in extreme circumstances, as defined by external actors.

Conclusion

Self-Determination in the International Legal System is a significant doctrinal contribution. Sparks provides clarity where confusion has long prevailed, and his typology will serve as a valuable reference point for scholars and practitioners alike. Engaging the book on its own terms reveals the strength of its methodological commitment: coherence, structure, and conceptual precision.

At the same time, that very commitment delineates the boundaries of the project. By prioritising systematisation, the analysis risks presenting self-determination as a stabilised and internally rational norm, rather than as a doctrine forged through political struggle and embedded in an unequal global order. The concern is not the absence of a particular critical vocabulary, but the relative absence of sustained engagement with how self-determination has functioned both to contest and to consolidate structures of power.

A dialogue between Sparks’s typological clarity and more explicitly structural critiques, including those developed within TWAIL, would not undermine the book’s contribution. Rather, it would extend it. Such an engagement could illuminate not only what self-determination is in law, but what it has done in shaping the postcolonial international system. In a field so deeply intertwined with the history and present of decolonisation, that additional layer of interrogation would enrich an already careful and important study.