ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the governance of non-sovereign territories is becoming ever more complex and, in certain respects, difficult to comprehend. The United Nations (UN) Special Committee on Decolonization has been in existence since the 1960s and has served as an important vehicle via which many formerly colonized territories pursued their independence. Sovereignty and independence have traditionally been viewed as binary opposites, and non-sovereign territories – with their non-sovereignty, in this conception, intrinsically seen as absolute – could essentially choose one or the other. Scholars have increasingly turned their attention to attempting to understand why completing the decolonization process via full independence was not on the priority list for many territories. Some have made the transition to independence – and, in the case of some of the Dutch Caribbean territories, returned to a closer relationship with the metropole – but many have retained linkages of varying degrees of intensity with European capitals, and, increasingly, Brussels itself.
