On 24 August at 10:00 Oliver Rowe will defend his doctoral dissertation “Self-determination in theory and practice: the reconfiguration of the 'Russian' Empire, 1914–1924” for obtaining the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in Political Science).
Supervisor:
Professor Eva Piirimäe, University of Tartu
Opponent:
Assistant Professor Lara Douds, Northumbria University (UK)
Summary
This dissertation analyses the concept of self-determination during the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, specifically between the years of 1914 and 1924. Utilising and developing a methodology from the history of political thought, the dissertation traces the usages and purposes of invocations of self-determination from various political agents. The main agents scrutinised in the dissertation are Russian liberal-reformists (the Constitutional Democrats), the Bolsheviks, the White Movement, the Allied and Associated Powers, and, to a lesser extent, the non-Russian national movements of, for example, Ukraine and Estonia.
The dissertation pays particular attention to the form of political interventions, both in terms of how political agents framed self-determination (was it a right, a principle, a slogan?), including its common adjacent adjectives such as ‘national’, and in terms of the genre of political interventions. These genres included political polemics, revolutionary declarations, declarations of independence, constitutions, and international treaties.
While the dissertation therefore contributes most to the literature on the history of political thought of self-determination, particularly as it pertains to the reconfiguration of the Russian Empire, those interested in the political theory of self-determination in general will find much of interest here within the empirical chapters of the dissertation. Who or what constitutes a valid self? What is it entitled to determine? How do these processes play out in political practice during a time of conflict and upheaval? This dissertation provides answers to these questions in the case of ‘Russia’ between 1914 and 1924.
