This paper considers the extent to which the Sahrawi and Palestinian national movements, in their legal personifications as the Frente Polisario and PLO, respectively, had agency over changes to their internal orientation and external projection; and to what extent these changes, conversely, were compelled by shifts in the legal, political and cultural judgments bearing upon their self-determination claims. The paper builds upon a series of essays by Professor Nathaniel Berman which explore how the world community has framed and regulated questions of nationalism since the Concert of Europe frayed in the late nineteenth century. Berman’s work demonstrates that the international legal order has created, repudiated, and revived classifications of group identity and has repeatedly realigned its preferences among these classifications. These ruptures demarcate the eras in the international law of nationalism, which Berman defines as “a historically contingent array of doctrinal and policy options for deployment by a contingent embodiment of international authority on nationalist conflicts whose protagonists are designated by a contingent set of legal categories”. His account transcends the duality of Continental legal positivism and American legal pragmatism, “de-dogmatizing” both traditions so as to observe the law’s “historical, psychoanalytic and cultural dimensions”. Adopting Berman’s framework and his commitment to deconstruction rather than prescriptions, this paper considers how these realignments in the world community’s conceptualization and regulation of group identity and national aspirations have impacted the Sahrawis and the Palestinians in their pursuit of self-determination. It explores the cultural judgments inscribed on both peoples before decolonization, when they emerged as protagonists in this legal constellation. It examines how the Polisario and PLO framed their group identity and national aspirations (or had them overdetermined) during the decolonization era. And it considers how they sought to adopt to the late- and post-Cold War eras, during which the normative force of anti-colonialism was eclipsed by a renewed preference for geopolitical stability and renewed cultural judgments on group suitability for responsible self-rule. I conclude that while the Polisario and the PLO maintained certain ideological commitments beyond their utility, the impact of these missteps is generally overstated. Different choices at various inflection points in the recent history of the Sahrawi and Palestinian national struggles are unlikely to have yielded different outcomes. When viewed in the context of the epochal changes in the international law of nationalism during this period, I argue, the array of choices available to these groups appear narrower and less consequential.