Postcolonial Views on the Problem of Universality in the Right to National Self-Determination

This paper examines postcolonial political discourse around self-determination in the late 1940s as a way to explore the fragmentary nature of decolonization. Responding to recent calls to pay attention to ruptures in Indian internationalism, this paper will consider how Asian political and legal thinkers scrutinized questions of self-determination and other group rights while their postcolonial nation-states deployed the rhetoric of anti-imperial solidarity regionally and internationally. Such debates revealed tensions in the project to develop a right to national self-determination at the United Nations and undermined notions of universality later proclaimed in international documents such as the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. What was the meaning of solidarity and the contours of its postcolonial practices in the making of such solidarity rights? How did political thinkers reconcile the expansion of solidarity rights with the ongoing violent repression of minorities? This paper locates self-determination as a site of contested politics within decolonization, by which Asian postcolonial political leaders, intellectuals, and jurists supported the centrality of self-determination in international law but evinced an uneasiness with its application in their own nations or in other territories