Those within postcolonial states that made alternative political or economic claims were disregarded or actively suppressed, their histories marginalized from dominant narratives of national liberation. Sometimes such histories involved ‘small peoples’ considered marginal to global politics, or they undermined the nationalist legitimacy of important postcolonial states such as Ghana, India, or Indonesia, or both. This panel showcases some of these contested histories, in Upland Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Oceania. It offers a set of counternarratives of postwar global decolonization that recast great power politics: Lydia Walker’s paper considers the issue of the state-in-waiting or ‘minority’ nationalism of Nagaland in Northeast India, and how its nationalist claim attempted to ride the ‘wind of change’ on the African continent towards national independence. Nana Osei-Opare’s paper destabilizes popular understandings of Ghana’s nation-building project, and its relationship to national liberation, by integrating it into Marxist-socialist world-building. Emma Kluge’s paper highlights the importance of Oceania as a theatre of decolonization, and the role of West Papuan claimants in revitalizing Afro-Asian connections in a post-Bandung world, as well as the limitations built into that political infrastructure.

Altogether, these papers complicate dominant narratives of postwar decolonization that primarily focus on struggles against empire that led to independent statehood. Such understandings have perpetuated a partial understanding of this global historical process, one that occludes postcolonial state expansionist projects and asymmetrical global political and economic relationships.