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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.

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)

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 haple

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 haple.

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.