As Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization marks its 35th anniversary, we are launching a new series of “Reimagining Self-Determination” papers to help sharpen the debate around self-determination in today’s geopolitical landscape, where power is shifting, multilateralism is under strain, and the costs of exclusion are rising.
This series is designed to be practical and forward-looking: it will connect legal and political principles with the lived realities of unrepresented peoples, highlight what is changing (and what is not), and identify credible pathways for peaceful, democratic, and sustainable futures.
The first publication in the series is the conference report, Madeira 2025: Reimagining Self-Determination for a Changing World, drawing on the Madeira gathering held from 9–11 May 2025. It captures the core ideas, lessons, and recommendations shared by UNPO’s founders, grassroots movements, academics, and officials from international organizations, and it highlights actionable pathways for unrepresented peoples to exercise agency, protect their cultures, and shape their futures amid today’s complex global challenges. Further papers will follow, building a coherent, solutions-oriented contribution to how self-determination can be understood and advanced in the years ahead.
Madeira 2025: Reimagining Self-Determination for a Changing World
The first report of the series captures the core ideas, lessons, and recommendations discussed during the 2025 Conference on Re-imagine Self-Determination.
The report explores how, during the Conference discussions, participants agreed that although self‑determination is enshrined in international law, it remains the least developed fundamental right in practice. As a result, unrepresented nations are particularly vulnerable to rising authoritarianism, democratic erosion, climate emergencies, and digital surveillance. The conference underscored that today’s polycrisis has made the pursuit of self-determination as urgent now as it was when UNPO was founded in 1991.
Participants reaffirmed that self‑determination is not limited to secession. It encompasses the full range of political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental arrangements through which peoples exercise agency. In a world where decolonisation remains incomplete – and where new forms of colonialism are emerging, from resource extraction and territorial ambitions to digital surveillance – the denial of the right of self-determination continues to underpin wide-ranging human rights abuses. Genuine self‑determination therefore requires “epistemic emancipation”, reclaiming authority over territories, knowledge, narratives, and governance systems.
The report further highlights that protecting lands, waters, and ways of life is inseparable from self-determination. Environmental degradation and cultural suppression were framed not as incidental side effects of exclusion, but as deliberate mechanisms of domination. Community-led environmental stewardship and recognition of traditional knowledge emerged as essential strategies to address the climate crisis and rising conflicts, alongside digital sovereignty, leveraging storytelling, documentation, and technology to counter disinformation and build transnational solidarity.
With traditional multilateral spaces increasingly constrained by state interests, movements must pursue adaptive polylateral strategies. This includes forming flexible, issue-specific coalitions that transcend rigid state-centric frameworks, while leveraging thematic agendas in diplomatic spheres or engaging in human rights mechanisms, such as the special rapporteurs, despite the current crisis affecting the UN.
However, the report also stresses that self-determination draws its strength from depth and organization, rather than diplomatic arenas alone. Intergenerational collaboration, youth leadership, cultural resistance, and strategic solidarity, layered, issue-driven, and reciprocal, are essential to sustaining movements over time. In this line, participants emphasized the power of disciplined nonviolent movements, robust internal organization, and prepared legal-diplomatic strategies to seize opportunities amid systemic upheaval.
Ultimately, self-determination should be reclaimed as a dynamic, transformative right that links peace, justice, and resilience, offering a vital framework for building inclusive, sustainable societies where diverse peoples can determine their own futures with dignity and agency.
Reflections gathered in the report suggest that re-imagining self-determination requires:
- Conceptual clarity – understanding self-determination as a right encompassing political, economic, social, cultural and environmental dimensions and refusing its reduction to a purely secessionist question, while also acknowledging that, in some contexts, reconfiguration of borders may be necessary to remedy structural injustice.
- Historical consciousness – situating contemporary claims of self-determination within longer trajectories of colonialism, internal and new forms of domination, and incomplete decolonisation.
- Practical innovation – developing non-violent, organised, and flexible strategies that align legal claims, narrative power, intergenerational collaboration and grassroots mobilisation.
- Ecological and cultural grounding – placing environmental stewardship and cultural survival at the heart of self-determination.
- Institutional engagement and re-imagination – engaging with and transforming multilateral and polylateral arenas to secure meaningful participation and strategic solidarity for unrepresented peoples.
- Strategic solidarity – weaving alliances that are principled, reciprocal, and attentive to the risks and opportunities of recognition in a multipolar world.
In a time of systemic upheaval, self-determination cannot be a static doctrine. It must be understood as a dynamic, relational, and plural practice, continuously negotiated and reinvented by communities striving to secure dignity, freedom, and responsibility for present and future generations. Far from being a threat to stability, self-determination, reimagined and reclaimed, offers one of the few remaining normative and practical tools capable of linking peace, justice, and resilience in an increasingly fragile world.
