Document Type
Book Review
Publication Title
American Journal of International Law
Publication Date
4-25-2025
Keywords
global decolonization, international law, human rights, economic development
Disciplines
International Law | Law
Abstract
How should we, international lawyers, especially with an interest in history, apprehend the experience of, and the horizon of expectation that opened up with, the dissolution of European empires in the decades following the end of World War II? We know that during these decades a Eurocentric international order marked by alien rule and the denial of statehood to large swathes of the world's population was nominally transformed into one marked by sovereign equality. Triumphalist accounts of progress would yoke this transformation to the realization of other good things such as human rights, and economic development.But more commonly today, we think of decolonization as hard work: a struggle against the imperial notions of internationalism that threatened to shape the post-war order. In a similar vein, we are today less likely to think of decolonization as the gradual realization of a Wilsonian self-determination principle. If self-determination became an international right in the 1960s, upon which colonized peoples might have hung their claims to independence, we know that this historical conjuncture between decolonization and the norm of self-determination, came on the back of earlier—often failed—attempts to re-interpret what the Wilsonian norm originally entailed, and of anti-colonial action that unfolded without reference to international law.
Recommended Citation
Sannoy Das,
States-in-Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization American Journal of International Law.
(2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1640