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Abstract:While self-determination is a cardinal principle of international law, its meaning is often obscure. Yet international law clearly recognizes decolonization as a central application of the principle. Most ordinary people also agree that the liberation of colonial peoples was a moral triumph. This essay examines three philosophical theories of self-determination's value, and asks which one best captures the reasons why decolonization was morally required. The instrumentalist theory holds that decolonization was required because subject peoples were unjustly governed, the democratic view holds that decolonization was required because subject peoples lacked democratic representation, and the associative view holds that decolonization was required because subject peoples were unable to affirm the political institutions their colonial rulers imposed on them. I argue that the associative view is superior to competing accounts, because it better reflects individuals' "maker" interests in participating in shared political projects that they value. The essay further shows that if we accept the associative view, self-determination is not a sui generis value that applies to decolonization alone. Ultimately, our intuitions about decolonization can be justified only by invoking an interest on the part of persistently alienated groups in redrawing political boundaries. The same interest may justify self-determination in additional cases, such as autonomy for indigenous peoples, or greater independence for Scotland or Quebec.

Using the Ghanaian experience as a rich case study, Forjwuor rethinks what colonialism and decolonization mean and offers new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to engaging the questions of colonialism, political independence, political decolonization, justice, and freedom.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. The Decolonization Process -- 2. The Question of Palestine -- 3. Decolonization in Africa: Experiences in International Responsibility -- 4. The Iran-Iraq War and Its Bearing on the Future of International Order -- Afterword -- Appendix A: The United Nations System and the Future -- Appendix B: The Future of Peacekeeping -- Appendix C: Remarks at the Nobel Prize Banquet -- Notes -- The Distinguished Visiting Tom Slick Professorship of World Peace

This essay reconstructs an important but forgotten dream of twentieth-century political thought: universal suffrage as decolonization. The dream emerged from efforts by Black Atlantic radicals to conscript universal suffrage into wider movements for racial self-expression and cultural revolution. Its proponents believed a mass franchise could enunciate the voice of colonial peoples inside imperial institutions and transform the global order. Recuperating this insurrectionary conception of the ballot reveals how radicals plotted universal suffrage and decolonization as a single historical process. It also places decolonization's fate in a surprising light: it may have been the century's greatest act of disenfranchisement. As dependent territories became nation-states, they lost their voice in metropolitan assemblies whose affairs affected them long after independence.

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West. As this book shows, Africa's decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals - both African and non-African - have significant roles to play in that process.

"In this time of global instability and widespread violence, Albert Memmi--author of the highly influential and groundbreaking work The Colonizer and the Colonized--turns his attention to the present-day situation of formerly colonized peoples. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi expands his intellectual engagement with the subject and examines the manifold causes of the failure of decolonization efforts throughout the world. As outspoken and controversial as ever, Memmi initiates a much-needed discussion of the ex-colonized and refuses to idealize those who are too often painted as hapless victims. He shows how, in light of a radically changed world, it would be problematic--and even irresponsible--to continue to deploy concepts that were useful and valid during the period of anticolonial struggle. Decolonization and the Decolonized contributes to the most current debates on Islamophobia in France, the "new" anti-Semitism, and the unrelenting poverty gripping the African continent. Memmi, who is Jewish, was born and raised in Tunis, and focuses primarily on what he calls the Arab-Muslim condition, while also incorporating comparisons with South America, Asia, Black Africa, and the United States. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi has written that rare book--a manifesto informed by intellect and animated by passion--that will propel public analysis of the most urgent global issues to a new level."--JSTOR website (viewed April 13, 2017)

National prerogatives versus international supervision : Britain's evolving policy toward the campaign for equivalency of United Nations' handling of dependent territories, 1945-1963 / Mary Ann Heiss -- A challenge to the system : the South West African question and the United Nations Trusteeship Council / Jason Morgan -- The United Nations, the Italian decolonization and the 1949 Bevin-Sforza plan : a victory for neo-colonialism? / Francesco Tamburini -- The United Nations between 'old boys club' and a changing world order : the South African-Indian dispute at the United Nations, 1945-1955 / Angela Loschke -- 'A crisis of confidence' : the postcolonial moment and the diplomacy of decolonization at the United Nations, ca. 1961 / Caio Simões de Araújo -- Haiti, the United Nations, and decolonization in the Congo / Chantalle F. Verna -- The Trust Territory of Somaliland, 1950-1960 : trusteeship or colony? / Alessia Tortolini -- The United Nations and information gathering on Portuguese colonies, 1961-1962 / Aurora Almada e Santos -- The United Nations and West Papuan self-determination : lingering conceptions of 'civilization' in the decolonization process / Grace Cheng.

This paper proposes a new reading of Moroccan abstract painter Jilali Gharbaoui through the lens of decolonization. Gharbaoui fits uncomfortably into the narrative of modernism in Morocco. Unlike other painters, interested in direct connections between their shapes or abstractions and traditional visual culture or Islamic art as a postcolonial claim of local identity, Gharbaoui's work is more elusive. Many critics have framed his abstraction primarily through his schizophrenia, as Gharbaoui died from suicide in 1971; this continual recourse to biography over the actual art objects puts Gharbaoui definitively at the margins of narratives of modernism. Moreover, this analysis precludes close attention to the ways in which Gharbaoui, like other painters of his generation, was shaped by the discourses of decolonization and the role that art could play in the new nation. Within this paper, in contrast, staying close to the work itself allows the possibility to understand the active ways in which Gharbaoui was negotiating questions of what postcolonial modernism could be. He sought to position himself as an international artist that was continually trying to bypass traditional aesthetics as a statement about modernity, but equally saw himself as deeply marked by his homeland. Read in dialogue and confrontation with cosmopolitanism, Gharbaoui's oeuvre can be analyzed in terms of the multiple ways in which Gharbaoui tried to understand the materiality of the art itself, his relationship to the space of production, and the political stakes of abstraction.

Why do so many Africans believe they cannot break the "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back" cycle? Six decades after colonial flags were lowered and African countries gained formal independence, the continent struggles to free itself from the deep legacies of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy. Many intellectuals, politicians, feminists and other activists, eager to contribute to Africa's liberation, have frustratingly felt like they took the wrong path. Analyzed through the eyes of Afro-Feminism, this book revisits some of the fundamental preconditions needed for radical transformation. It challenges the traditional human rights paradigm and its concomitant idea of "gender equality," flagging instead, the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a serious alternative for reinvigorating African notions of social justice. If you are a student of Africa or in a space where you wish to recalibrate your compass and reboot your consciousness in the struggle for Africa's liberation, this book is for you.