ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the following question: why should ethnonational minorities be a subject of international relations when this field is concerned, in the main, with states and not groups or individuals within a state’s domestic jurisdiction? The reason for international interest is that in the contemporary practice of self-determination, there is often little fit between international boundaries and ethnonational identities. Self-determination is a highly indeterminate concept in the international system. Continued demands for ethnonational self-determination on the part of minorities became a source of international rivalry and discontent within the interwar state system. Historically, the existence of minorities in an international system that purports to be based upon a norm of self-determination has evoked three international responses. These are: an individual human rights regime; the physical elimination of ethnonational minorities either by adjusting peoples to match borders or borders to match peoples; and regime of ethnonational minority rights that falls short of sovereign statehood.
