ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1960, anti-colonialists moved beyond the particulars of Trusts and NSGTs and introduced a debate on the general problematic of colonialism, initiating a set of conversations that would end with the passage of the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and thus, the onset of legal decolonization. In conventional understanding, this shift signaled a transition from the exclusions of the colonial era to a progressively more democratic era (Cassese 1995; Theodoropoulos 1988). If international law until now had been based on the systematic denial of the subjectivity of various “others” (see Chapter 1), as one scholar put it, now, both individuals as well as liberation movements could claim subjectivity in some limited sense. This transformation was especially signified by the decision of the international community, after 1960, to attribute a heightened status to a select group of principles considered more fundamental than other general principles of international law: those of jus cogens. Theoretically, these meant that now, no state was to deviate from the right of self-determination, or of the values of peace
and human rights-even if this was at the expense of competing national interests (Cassese 1995). 1
But did the 1960 Declaration really signal democratic progress in the sense indicated above? How did it relate to colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community-particularly the racial, cultural and sexual dimensions of these constructions? If, as I argued in Chapter 3, anti-colonialists disrupted the hierarchies of colonialist kinship politics especially with an appeal to the moral and to brotherhood, how did this discourse relate to the final “resolution” of the colonial problematic? Furthermore, what difference did it make that this resistance politics was conditioned on entering the nation-state system-that it could only be articulated by (representatives of) states (see Chapter 4)? And perhaps most important of all, how did the fact that most anti-colonialists actually accepted some of the central premises of the colonialist narrative-specifically, colonialist understandings of progress, modernity and development (see Chapter 5)—figure into all of this? In other words, what sort of a shift did the 1960 document really signify? And for whom?
