The paper aims to re-examine crucial aporias of the right of peoples to self-determination in the light of its contemporary misuses in the parlance and practice of the so-called “populist” regimes. Th e right to self-determination, traditionally identified as rife with paradoxes and uncertainties, is since long at a crossroads. Aft er the ICJ’s advisory opinion in Kosovo it was revealed as ravaged by an internal abyss dissociating its content from its applicability. As a result, the meaning of self-determination in international law—on the one hand corroborated by ample opinio iuris but on the other hand not corresponding to the actual possibilities of its application—is more unstable than ever. Th is restores its pre-legal qualities and fuels the revival of self-determination imagery centred on the nation understood as ethnos in populist discourses.