This event, organised by the Diplomatic/International History Working Group, features a presentation by Alanna O’Malley (Leiden University) and Siobhan Smith (EUI Researcher).
Following the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the United Nations General Assembly established the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation (Committee of 24 or C-24). The C-24 would examine the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (NSGT) to which the 1960 Declaration is applicable, meet representatives from NSGTs and dispatch visiting missions. The drive for the 1960 Declaration had been marked by solidarity between actors from South America, Africa, and South-East Asia, during which nationalist leaders and international advocates consolidated their different visions of world order and conceptions of sovereignty into a cohesive campaign at the UN. Once it was passed, the C-24, tasked with its applicability and implementation, became a site for discussion on the variegated visions which had been put aside during the campaign.
In this event, Alanna O’Malley (Leiden University) will examine how, through the C-24, disaggregated experiences of sovereignty were translated into different practices of managing self-determination. Implicit in these developments was a critique of the status quo, which has historically been cast as a binary North-South struggle. However, these debates had significant implications for territories remaining under colonial rule, for internal conflicts around self-determination, as well as the vast matrix of post-colonial relations. This paper will analyse how, between actors of the Global South, new political dynamics, power struggles, and ultimately hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion evolved. Siobhan Smith (EUI) will present on the case of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), as the Special Committee became the first formal UN space in which Southern Rhodesian anti-colonial petitioners had a voice. They deployed the NSGT label to challenge British and settler narratives and affirm the Zimbabwean ‘self’ in self-determination. Her paper emphasises the role of the C-24 beyond the UN headquarters, at the nexus of international and local politics of decolonisation.
Please register to get a seat or to receive the ZOOM link.