Self Determination Revisited In The Era Of Decolonization

Leading scholars demonstrate how colonial subjects, national liberation movements, and empires mobilized human rights language to contest self-determination during decolonization.

There have been an increasing number of self-determination conflicts where sub-state groups challenge existing state authority. This book explains how self-determination can exercised beyond the decolonisation process and demonstrates that rather than a threat to international peace and stability, it has strong potential as a tool for conflict prevention and resolution.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

The right of self-determination of peoples holds out the promise of sovereign statehood for all peoples and a domination-free international order. But it also harbors the danger of state fragmentation that can threaten international stability if claims of self-determination lead to secessions. Covering both the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century independence movements in the Americas and the twentieth-century decolonization worldwide, this book examines the conceptual and political history of the right of self-determination of peoples. It addresses the political contexts in which the right and concept were formulated and the practices developed to restrain its potentially anarchic character, its inception in anti-colonialism, nationalism, and the labor movement, its instrumentalization at the end of the First World War in a formidable duel that Wilson lost to Lenin, its abuse by Hitler, the path after the Second World War to its recognition as a human right in 1966, and its continuing impact after decolonization.

"This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of human rights today. With an open-ended chronology and international perspective, the series seeks works attentive to the surprises and contingencies in the historical origins and legacies of human rights ideals and interventions. Books in the series will focus not only on the intellectual antecedents and foundations of human rights, but also on the incorporation of the concept by movements, nation-states, international governance, and transnational law"--

"Differing interpretations of the early history of the United Nations on the one hand conceive it as an instrument to promote colonial interests while on the other emphasizing its influence in providing self-determination for dependent territories. The authors in this book explore this dynamic in order to increase our understanding of both the achievements and the limits of international support for the independence of colonized peoples. This book will prove foundational for scholars and students of modern history, international history and postcolonial history"--

Secession in International Law argues that the effective development of criteria on secession is a necessity in today’s world, because secessionist struggles can be analyzed through the legal lens only if we have specific legal rules to apply. Without legal rules, secessionist struggles are dominated by politics and sui generis approaches, which validate secessionist attempts based on geo-politics and regional states’ self-interest, as opposed to the law. By using a truly comparative approach, Milena Sterio has developed a normative international law framework on secession, which focuses on several factors to assess the legitimacy of a separatist quest.

It is no secret that, since the end of decolonization, the principle of self-determination of peoples has been going through a veritable identity crisis. On the one hand, inconsistencies and double-standards are so commonplace in international practice as to justify the doubt that the law of self-determination is in fact power politics in disguise. On the other hand, a significant portion of the international community maintains that the principle has exhausted its historical function and applies only to a very limited number of hypotheses (e.g. Palestine or Western Sahara). Yet, self-determination of peoples and its jargon is still well entrenched in international legal life.Against this background, international lawyers are called upon to clarify how the customary principle on self-determination has changed in order to meet the challenges posed by the new global order. So far, however, the various attempts to overcome the colonial paradigm have not led to satisfactory results, being doomed to capitulate in the face of the fact that international practice in this field is either too poor or is inconsistent.The main reason for this difficulty lies in the penchant to conceive of the law of self-determination in a traditional, 'static' fashion, as a set of clear-cut rules whose content has to be distilled, ultimately, in the light of accumulated past decisions. I will argue, by contrast, that the principle at hand should be looked at in its 'dynamic' aspect, viz. as the ceaseless 'process' through which the international community provides an authoritative response to demands for self-determination. My working hypothesis, specifically, is that a valuable contribution to such an investigation may be offered by the policy-oriented jurisprudence developed by the so-called New Haven School of international law (NHS).