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Bradley R. Simpson, "The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Sami Siddiqui
Welcome to New Books and South Asian Studies. I'm one of your co hosts, Sami Siddiqui. Today I'm speaking to Professor Bradley R. Simpson about his new book, the First Self Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Dr. Simpson is Associate professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut. So welcome to New Books in South Asian Studies. Professor Simpson, I was wondering if we could begin with you telling us about the genesis of this project, as well as how this relates to your previous work on US Indonesian relations during the Cold War.
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Well, first let me start off by thanking You, Sami, for your interest in the book and for taking the time to interview me. So this book has a rather long genesis. I first started thinking about self determination as a human rights and solidarity activist in the 1990s when I was working on then Indonesian occupied East Timor. And I was struck by the contradiction between the universal recognition that the people of East Timor, now Timor Leste, had the right to self determination as a former Portuguese colony whose decolonization process was aborted by Indonesia's 1975 invasion and subsequent occupation. And as an activist, I was struck by the degree to which U.S. officials and many others acknowledged that the people of East Timor have the right to self determination, while at the same time sort of concluding rather cynically that East Timor was too small, too backwards to merit self government and that its future was best, its most prosperous future was to be had by being a part of Indonesia. And when I became a historian and started writing my dissertation, I was likewise struck by the degree to which other parts of the world, and in particular other parts of Southeast Asia, like West Papua, the former Netherlands, West New guinea, which was part of the Netherlands East Indies and then was briefly part of the briefly sort of had a period of continued Dutch colonial rule before Indonesia finally was able to annex it in the 1960s. I was struck by the degree to which there were many other places, like East Timor, like West Papua, that had a right to self determination in international law, but that were denied that right by the great powers, by neighbors who wanted to annex or incorporate them, and that there was a broader global history here that was worth exploring. My first book came out at about the same time as Eris Manela's book the Wilsonian Moment, which offered a sort of snapshot moment in time history of self determination and its vernacularization. That I thought was an important but flawed book and that received some criticism at the time, in part because of the ways that Manila offered what seemed to some scholars like a diffusionist account of self determination as an idea that began in the west and spread to the west and that was primarily about a certain vision, a certain radical vision of. Of anti colonialism and decolonization. And I felt through my reading and research that there was a broader global story to be told and that this broader story was more about the shifting meanings of self determination in international politics, rather than viewing it as an idea that is first deployed during the First World War and then carries some fixed meaning. I was struck by the degree to which, over the course of the 20th century, that the scope and meaning of self Determination was always being contested and that it was always being contested in particular ways, both from above and from below that I thought could be explained as part of the global history of ideas as well as the history of international law and the history of decolonization in the Cold War, which I have written quite a bit about in the context of my research on Indonesia and East Timor.
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Sami Siddiqui
I was wondering if you could talk about the relationship between self determination and decolonization. It seems to me that one of the central arguments of your book is that while one cannot understand the history of self determination without recognizing its relationship to decolonization, it's a very important relationship. But self determination claims and discourses overspill the boundaries of decolonization and anti colonial nationalism. Have I got this right? And yeah, I'm just curious what you think about that.
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah, I think that you do have it right. And one way to get into this question is to think about the way that most historians and scholars have approached self determination, which is as a sort of proxy for decolonization. And both temporally and sort of intellectually and legally. Of course, there is a lot of overlap between the emergence of self determination as a way of talking about anti colonial nationalism and certain sovereignty and human rights claims, and the ways that self determination as a sort of vague appropriable discourse was picked up on and used by lots and lots of people and movements in various parts of the world to describe their own visions of sovereignty and human rights. And even just looking at the so called Wilsonian moment, we know for example, about the anti colonial uprisings in places like Egypt and China and South Korea and India. But there were also self determination movements throughout southern and central Europe as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires collapsed. And we see the emergence of lots of new states which were often defined along ethnic lines with lots of contested nationalisms that were trying to territorialize their sovereignty and human rights claims, even though they didn't necessarily talk about these things in terms of human rights. And the literature on the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empire works like Natasha Wheatley's the Death of States. I forget the name of the book, but the Life and Death of States, which is a really influential book for me to read, helped me to understand that even as anti colonial nationalists and others are seeking to vernacularize self determination as a way of talking about anti colonial nationalism, that it is also becoming an idea that holds tremendous power for lots of other peoples in different parts of the world who are beginning to think about the meaning of identity, about what constitutes a people or a nation, about how sovereignty is related to territory and about how claim making in international politics could sort of solidify the practices and attempts to make sovereignty real that were taking place not just in diplomatic circles and in international institutions, but in the daily practice of ordinary people, either working individually or through movements and organizations that were seeking to deploy self determination as a way of claim making about their sovereignty and about the kind of futures that they imagine for themselves. So I believe that decolonization and self determination overlap, but I believe also very strongly, and I think that the historical record bears this out quite clearly, that self determination is never just a proxy for decolonization, that there are peoples in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, most importantly for my purposes, indigenous peoples, who have a very uneasy relationship both with the colonial state and with the postcolonial state in terms of their own sovereignty and rights claims. And that if we confine our understanding of self determination just to the era of decolonization, I feel like we miss a lot of the story and also we miss a lot of the diversity and pluralism of self determination claims and movements. By focusing, I think too excessively or narrowly on one particular region, we miss the contributions that peoples and movements in other parts of the world made to this global history of the idea of self determination. And, and I think it's remarkable that at the very moment when a lot of scholars have argued that self determination starts to wither on the vine as a political project in the mid-1970s, as European decolonization comes to a close, that the number and range of self determination claims actually proliferates in ways that I think demonstrate the utility of viewing self determination in a really global frame and seeing it as idea with a global history and not just an anti colonial history.
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Sami Siddiqui
This is great. And, and, and the listeners will get a taste of that when we get into some of the specific chapters. So could you tell us about. Again, you've already touched on the historiography a little bit, but I was wondering if you could talk about the historiography that you're sort of engaging with and what your book's contributions are to that historiography.
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah. So this is a book that attempts to make historical and historiographical arguments, but is deeply indebted to the work of political scientists, of international legal historians and international legal scholars of lots of folks working on sort of various national histories, especially histories of decolonization and histories of state making and state unmaking. I'm also deeply indebted to an emerging literature on transnational movements which has been written by mostly younger scholars such as Cindy Ewing and Emma Kluge and Lydia Walker. Lots of really terrific work which is raising all sorts of interesting questions about how citizenship was defined and decolonization movements, how we should think about substate self determination movements in places like West Papua or among the Naga in India and elsewhere, and how we can see social movements and transnational activism in particular as important vehicles for the circulation of self determination claims. Something I think is sort of absent from an earlier generation of historiography which largely treated self determination as a sort of top down diplomatic discourse, which is occasionally picked up in key moments such as the aftermath of the First World War, by sort of masses of people, but without necessarily viewing self determination as an idea that could be mobilized for other purposes. So to give one very, very brief example, throughout this period, toiling away in archives in places like the International Institute for Social History and Amsterdam, or or records in various archives in the Netherlands and New York and elsewhere, there are lots of sub national movements, lots of secessionist movements that engaged in the familiar repertoire of nationalist claim making. They would produce pamphlets laying out the claim of the Shan people of Burma, or the Naga or the Canary Islands or West or the Moluccas in Indonesia, or to self determination, rooting their claims in a sort of imagined past, a coherent national and linguistic or religious or ethnic identity. And they make very specific references to the UN Charter, to ideas about self determination then in circulation, as a way of trying to legitimize their claims. And I think that these are not the sorts of people that we often encounter in sort of older diplomatic histories that reference or make arguments about self determination. And so I've been deeply influenced by this newer scholarship, by a huge range of scholars, especially not just from the US but really from all over the world. I am trying to make an argument about self determination's history that I hope will be legible to scholars working in international law and political science, while grounding my archival research and grounding my narrative and sort of the historians that I have been most engaged with, and aside from Eros Manella, there are lots of historians who've written about particular places and the ways that self determination claims and movements emerge in particular places. But there really aren't global narratives of the sort that I tried to write in this book. One example is by Jorg Fischer, who's a German historian who wrote a sort of international or intellectual history of self determination, which tries to do some of the things that I do in this book, but is not as Archivally grounded. The most recent and important book, I think, for many of your listeners will be Adam Getachew's World Making After Empire, which offered a very powerful theoretical framework for thinking about the ways in which particular anti colonial intellectuals and activists sort of framed self determination as a world making project. And I deeply admire Getachu's work. I think it's a really important contribution. But I think that the framework that, that she offers is of limited utility for thinking about certain other parts of the world, especially the Pacific world. And so lots of other movements and peoples, such as indigenous peoples, for whom the framework of sort of intercolonial world making simply doesn't fit in the ways that it might for the sort of Afro Caribbean and sort of Anglophone intellectuals that she so powerfully narrates in her book. So I'm seeking to sort of acknowledge and incorporate this historiography while attempting to move beyond it in ways that allow me to make a case for viewing self determination as an idea that has a truly global history and that must be viewed not just at a number of different scales, but from a number of different registers that says it's a story that must be told simultaneously in a local and a global frame, and that we have to look for and narrate the ways that peoples in various sort of national settings understood self determination in relation to their own colonial histories, to their own contemporary politics, and try and find the places and the ways in which those local ideas about self determination sort of join up with global discourses. And this requires narrating and analyzing self determination both from the top down and from the bottom up, and finding those places in international society where the two meet and where they engage in contestation and in conflict over the scope and meaning of self determination as an idea.
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Sami Siddiqui
Right. And that was really convincing, especially when we get to the later chapters, when you look at small states and then movements like SNCC and gay rights movements, et cetera, and how you connect these stories with the broader Afro Asian, Latin American discourses about self determination. So before we get into some of the specific chapters, I was wondering if you wouldn't mind telling the listeners how you break down the evolution of self determination into five distinct historical phases.
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah, so one of the arguments I try and make is that self determination has that sort of temporal history, and that the meaning of self determination at any given moment, or the debates about the meaning of self determination at different moments in time are shaped by the changes taking place in international politics and in particular in the global political economy. And so if we confine our understanding of self determination just to the period of decolonization or just to the post World War I moment, which I think no one does anymore, we miss some of the ways that self determination has been transformed, both from the bottom up agency of social movements and sort of claimants, but also through the shifts in the world economy, shifts in the international political system that provided new venues for making self determination claims that changed or transformed the international context in which economic sovereignty claims, for example, were deployed by postcolonial states. And so I argue that self determination has sort of recognizable periods through which its meaning has changed, and that we can sort of chart those in ways that sometimes overlap, but I think are relatively distinct. The first of those periods is a sort of Pre World War I period when self determination really was an intellectual idea on the European left and among European continental philosophers. And there are a number of European intellectual historians who have tried to engage and offer genealogies of self determination in ways that are important but, but not necessarily central to the project that I'm engaging in. A second phase is what we might think of as the Wilsonian moment and its aftermath, in which self determination emerges as a sort of global vernacular for talking about sovereignty and rights and not just decolonization. And as Manela and others have shown, I think that after the failures of the so called Wilsonian moment to domesticate self determination claims, that it expands and gets picked up by a huge range of movements, not just anti colonial movements, but also pan religious movements, pan racial movements like Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement association, as well as by broader sort of transnational anti colonial movements like the League Against Imperialism. A third phase I would argue is sort of inaugurated during the Second World War, which is sort of where my narrative picks up when self determination once again becomes a way of thinking about the meaning of the Second World War and its aftermath and becomes institutionalized in the machinery of the United nations in ways that transform the institutional setting and context in which self determination claims can be sort of deployed and argued about. I think one of the things that historians who write about human rights and lots of other ideas that take root in particular institutional settings is that self determination as a sovereignty and rights claim needs to be grounded. It needs to be grounded in particular institutional context where people can make claims that then other people are forced to respond to. And some of the work by people like Susan Peterson, whose book the Guardians, I think does an extraordinary job of showing how the petition making process for League of Nations mandate territories provides A setting in which claimants can sort of make complaints and make claims against the colonial powers, even though the League of Nations doesn't have the political or institutional capacity to respond to them, but merely by providing a site for which people can mobilize to make claims towards this enables and empowers anti colonial movements to believe that their actions can actually have an impact and that they do have agency. And after World War II, with the creation of the UN Trusteeship Council, later the Decolonization Committee, and a variety of settings to which the Human Rights Commission, a variety of settings to which anti colonial and substate movements can make claims that the claim making process becomes part of the repertoire of anti colonial and nationalist movements, part of the mobilization process by which they attempt to generate political power and agency in their own national and subnational settings. This period lasts, I think, through the 1970s or so, when the era of European decolonization more or less comes to a close. With really important exceptions in Palestine and places like Western Sahara, the Pacific World and places like Timor Leste. And that between 1975 and roughly the end of the Cold War, we see a sort of post colonial discourse about self determination, which in some ways, which in some ways departs from the narratives we have about what self determination is doing in international politics. And here I try and move the story into places that connect with the global story about which some of your readers may not consider to be part of the global history of self determination. In particular, the domestication of self determination claims by social movements in the global North. You know, places like the United States and Europe and Australia, Britain and many other places. The appropriation of self determination or the reappropriation of self determination by indigenous peoples around the world. A movement which really picks up steam just as the movement for European and Asian decolonization is coming to a close. And then of course, the movements for. For democracy and self determination in the Soviet Union. This is again a sort of period where I think there's a global history to be told that in some ways is diffuse. Indigenous peoples are not making the same kinds of claims as Baltic peoples, who are not making the same kinds of claims necessarily as pacific peoples, but they're nevertheless part of the same story. And then I finish by. By making the case that there is a post Cold War history of self determination that also deserves to be folded into this global story. And that the continued resonance of self determination long after the period of European decolonization comes to a close, sort of testifies to its power as an idea and its way of animating sovereignty and rights claims even among peoples for whom the intellectual sort of progenitors of ideas about self determination would have never conceived to be part of that global story.
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Sami Siddiqui
So we pick off as you said, your book really takes off during World War II. So in chapter one, entitled the Global Purchase of Self Determination focuses on the differing interpretations and political uses of the Atlantic charter declaration of 1941. Could you talk about the significance of the Atlantic Charter in your story and how it was viewed differently by the us, the Soviet Union, European imperial powers, as well as anti colonial nationalists from Asia, Africa and Latin America?
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah, so it's a great question. So one of the arguments I make in the book is that this period during World War II, which which we can use the Atlantic Charter as sort of a fulcrum, really helps to shape some of the main hopes and fears for self determination among both its fiercest advocates as well as its fiercest critics, and that we should view this as a crucial moment in which self determination becomes vernacularized as a way of talking about Allied war aims as well as the expectations of the hundreds of millions of people around the globe, especially in colonial settings whose lives were touched by the war, and that many of the debates about self determination that persist through the rest of the 20th century really take shape in the Second World War, and that the Atlantic Charter serves as a proxy for some of the key hopes and fears about what self determination's scope and meaning ought to be. One of the arguments I make in the book is that although a lot of people focus on the Atlantic Charter as this sort of pivotal moment, and there are historians like Elizabeth Borgwart, whose book New Deal for the World really uses the Atlantic Charter as a sort of stepping off point for thinking about social and economic rights claims in the United States and around the world during the Second World War. I argue that the Atlantic Charter serves as a stepping off point for thinking about self determination, but in a sort of unorthodox way, because self determination appears nowhere in the Atlantic Charter. It appears nowhere in the diplomatic papers and in the planning documents on both the US and the British side that went into this famous meeting off the coast of Newfoundland in August of 1941, about which historians have spilled so much ink. Nevertheless, ideas about self determination were already in global circulation well before Roosevelt and Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland. And I opened the chapter by talking about Caribbean activists and others who were already demanding that the Allied powers guarantee self determination for colonial peoples at the end of the war. Because of that. Because self determination was already becoming vernacularized as a way of thinking about Allied war aims when Churchill and Roosevelt sort of issued their famous declaration that self determination or self government should be returned to all of those peoples from whom it was taken. That colonized peoples, many of whom could still bitterly remember the betrayals of the First World War, just immediately seized upon this vague language and says, yes, this is self determination that they're talking about, just as Wilson and others talked about it during the First World War. And we are going to use it as a measuring stick for the legitimacy and seriousness of Allied war claims. Very quickly, both U.S. and British officials recognized that they had sort of opened up a Pandora's box and they had to tread a very narrow tightrope. On the one hand, they needed to appeal to the various wartime powers and to the various peoples whose loyalty and political support they sought by offering the prospect of a return to self government at the end of the war, especially the peoples of Western and Southern Europe who are then occupied by the Nazis. At the same time, they didn't want to give any comfort to anti colonial activists. And so Churchill immediately says, and British officials immediately say that when we said Self government in the Atlantic Charter, we did not mean the colonial world. We just meant the people occupied by the Nazis and secondarily by the Japanese. But the genie was already out of the bottle. And US Officials likewise were conflicted as to the degree to which they should attempt to define the Atlantic Charter in ways that went beyond the extremely narrow conception that the Churchill Roosevelt initially had for for this declaration. And we see a sort of ongoing process by which Allied officials attempt to contain self determination within these really narrow bounds. And where, on the other hand, anti colonial nationalists and anti colonial movements and their supporters in human rights and civil rights and a whole range of other movements are offering dramatically expansive conceptions of self determination that recognize that self determination is a capacious idea that can mean many different things, but whose meaning can only be expanded through the agency of peoples and movements themselves, pushing against the rather narrow conception of the great powers. And so, to give one of many examples, the African National Congress did a study group, one of hundreds of study groups taking place all over the world, in which anti colonial movements tried to digest the meaning of the Atlantic Charter for their own purposes. They concluded that the Atlantic Charter was meant to guarantee the right to self determination for African peoples, and not just colonized peoples, but also those suffering from racial discrimination and disfranchisement. And here we can already see one of the ways in which self determination is escaping the bounds of decolonization. Because South Africa is an independent country. And in South Africa we can see that self determination debates take very different form, where the main fault lines are between sort of white minority rule and sort of mass democracy in a way that's very different from anti colonial struggles taking place in other parts of the world. A second argument that I make in the book is that this period also reveals that there is a persistent set of hopes and fears about self determination that are grounded, I argue, in the perceived lessons of the First World War and the reconstruction of southern and eastern Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. One of those fears is that.
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Sami Siddiqui
Self.
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Determination became a license for the creation of small and unviable states in southern and Eastern Europe, and that this was something that had to be avoided. The record of the period is really rife with lots of purported lesson learning of the failures of the Versailles settlement for the creation of new states, which critics argue paved the way for the rise of Nazism, the creation of small, unviable ethnostates which were jealous of their sovereignty, engaging in economic nationalism, seeking autarky and other forms of self sufficiency that were incompatible with the needs of a new international system. Critics of self determination in the 1940s made exactly the same arguments that we were. We were potentially on the verge of another bout of state making which would repeat many of the failures of the interwar period. And because of that, many of these critics argued that self determination had to be contained because if it was allowed to proliferate and be sort of appropriated by a range of peoples for whom it was never intended, that this might cause the unraveling of, of the international system and simply lead to another sort of destructive bout of wars. And so, as the United nations discussions get underway in 1944 and 1945, there is a lot of really important discussion taking place, mostly in the capitals of the great powers, where diplomats and states people are attempting to narrow the meaning of self determination so that they can confine and sort of channel it, so that it becomes a force for domesticating nationalist and anti colonial claims rather than sort of liberating them to expansive conceptions that many critics thought would lead to catastrophe.
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Sami Siddiqui
Yeah. And this idea of expansive versus narrowing of what self determination means is something that you see in almost every chapter and we don't have time to get into it. But you also talk about US Empire bases and the discourses around that and how that limits sovereignty as well in this chapter.
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah. One of the things I. One of the arguments I make, which for me grew more powerful the more I wrote the book, was that the US decision to take on hundreds of military bases at the end of the second World War is really a revolutionary moment in the history of the 20th century. Because American officials, alongside their British and French French counterparts, believed that there were some places that could never achieve self determination because they were too small, too backwards, too primitive, or too strategically important for self government. And so British and US and American officials, they all agreed that whatever their conflicts over how decolonization might unfold, that the Caribbean and Pacific islands should never become independent from the most part, that they should always be reserved as semi sovereign or non self governing territories that could be used for resource extraction, for nuclear testing, for base building, for settler colonialism, and other activities that sort of mock the idea that the goal of the UN sponsored decolonization process was the universalization of of the nation state. I push back very strongly against this idea and argue that the goal of the creation of the UN and the goal of the decolonization process from the perspective of the great powers was the creation of an international system of layered sovereignty in which some places would achieve independence and others would be trapped in perpetual semi sovereignty in various sort of political statuses that would guarantee that they would never achieve meaningful independence. And that this is a situation that persists well into the 21st century, as we can see from the associated territories, the United States and Britain and France and the other former colonial powers in the Caribbean and in the Pacific.
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Sami Siddiqui
Yeah, and there's echoes with Wilsonianism in that sense as well, with his idea of sort of scale to civilization and who is ready for it or not. So in chapter two, defining self Determination, you talk about self determination being on life support after the end of second World War and you've already mentioned why that was the case earlier. You argue that, and I quote, the reinvention of self determination after 1945 was a product of both top down international politics in the United nations and other spaces of global governance and bottom up claims by anti colonial and substate and non state movements. End quote. Could you expand on what you mean by this and what the UN debates about sovereignty claims in Samoa and Indonesia in particular indicate to you about this period?
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Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah, so we know the story about these. Other scholars have told the story about how self determination becomes institutionalized in the UN machinery. And there's a familiar narrative which is sort of a legal, diplomatic narrative about UN representatives and diplomats passing resolutions in the late 1940s and early 1950s proclaiming self determination of human right and attempting to define its scope and meaning. And this is an important element of the story and it reflects the emergence of the United nations as an important site for claim making and for defining in international law what self determination means. Because through the early 1950s, even though self determination had become a global vernacular for talking about human rights and sovereignty, it had no precise legal definition. And in fact it's vagueness, I argue, as a real virtue for those who wanted to make claims in its name because it could be expanded or contracted to mean almost anything. And so much of the debate in the early years after the formation of the United nations was focused on trying to pin down exactly what self determination meant and for whom. Did it apply to non self governing territories alone? To former League of Nations mandate territories? Did it apply to colonized peoples? Did it apply to the whole of a colony transitioning into independence or to sort of sub national or substate movements that might be making claims that conflicted with the independence claims of nationalist movements? Did it expand to include economic or social or cultural rights? All of these debates were taking place at the United Nations And I think that they are important on their own face because they demonstrate one that self determination was an enormously contested concept and that debates over its scope and meaning exposed lots of important fault lines in international politics which transcended both the movements for decolonization and the Cold War itself. So the debates about who had the right to self determination and what its scope and meaning should be were not necessarily or even primarily along north, south or east west lines. I argue that the most important debates, the most important cleavages were between large states and small states, or large heterogeneous states and smaller, more ethnically homogenous states and territories, because the larger states were the ones who feared expansive self determination claims that might expose the unhappiness of regional or ethnic or local movements with the sort of often centralized political solutions that many colonial territories transitioned into independence with. And so places like Samoa and Indonesia, I think, illuminate some of the early meaning of debates about self determination for whom it should apply and for whom it didn't apply. In the case of Samoa, which was a territory that had a long history of anti colonial and nationalist claim making, as Susan Peterson writes about so beautifully in the Guardians, critics of expansive self determination claims argued that Samoa was one of those places that should never enjoy full independence, even though it had one of the longest running and most sophisticated nationalist movements in the Pacific world. A deep and intellectually rich tradition of thinking about sovereignty and rights claims. And these early debates about whether or not Samoa was a non self governing territory, a former mandate territory that had the rights of self determination, forced the United nations to begin defining not just what self determination means, but when a territory would be able to demonstrate that it achieved enough of the sort of markers of self government that it could then transition towards independence. And so the United nations created a committee of factors which use sort of developmentalist and racialized and civilizational criteria to argue in ways that prefigure later debates about modernization theory, when territories like Samoa could demonstrate that they'd achieved a level of civilization consistent with self government. Samoans, of course, had their own conceptions of this that long predated European colonial rule. And their ideas about sovereignty and rights claims conflicted in really important ways with the narrow vision of UN diplomats and sort of European and American statesmen. Indonesia, on the other hand, demonstrates that even among the first generation of anti colonial movements, that self determination was a concept with as much danger as promise. So Indonesian nationalist leaders such as Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, the first prime minister of Indonesia, or the first vice President of Indonesia. They recognized and argued that Indonesia deserved independence and self determination on the basis of the Atlantic Charter and the global solidarity movement that arose in the 1940s to support Indonesia's independence claims grounded their solidarity in sort of expansive understanding of self determination. And one of the arguments I make is that self determination sort of circulates in many important ways through transnational solidarity and social movements. And so labor unions in Australia and in the United States, civil rights organizations in the U.S. and other parts of the world, when they talk about self determination, they carry within them a sort of layman's understanding of what these ideas mean. And for some it may have meant independence, political sovereignty and independence sort of more narrowly. For others it may have meant more expansive conceptions, sort of Aram Gerichu sort of world making as some conceived it. But this was a language that was circulated through solidarity and not just through debates at places like the United Nations. And at the very moment that Indonesia was relying upon the solidarity of peoples around the world who were supporting its claims to self determination, Indonesia's leaders were trying to contain self determination claims and movements within the Netherlands East Indies. And at the moment of decolonization, there were at least five recognizable secessionist or self determination movements, all of which claimed or all of which argued that the post colonial nation state would represent a failure of their own political and their political visions for what sovereignty and human rights should mean. And Indonesia in many ways is not unique. All of the first generation of intercolonial movements faced secessionist or sub national self determination claims and movements. India, the Philippines, sort of Ghana, Nigeria, everywhere you look. And I think this exposes a real dilemma both in the way that we narrate histories of decolonization and the ways we have to narrate or should narrate self determination as an idea coursing through international politics. We tend to focus a lot on debates about state making and sort of reify or at least read backwards for from the successes of those who win in sort of decolonization struggles. And we tend to reify their conceptions of national identity as the most important and legitimate because they won out. So Kwame Nkrumah, who for many important reasons I think is treated as one of the most important leaders of African decolonization, had a relatively narrow vision of self determination when it came to the claims being made by sub national movements within the Gold coast itself. And then Kruma, even though he was an incredibly important intellectual and incredibly important sort of theorist of post colonial self determination, also embodied and internalized many of the same fears that the colonial powers have, which is a self determination for small peoples and small territories, was a danger to be avoided rather than something that was legitimate in its own right. And so Nkrumah, as he tried to envision his federalist schemes, also made the case that smaller pupils in territories, self determination claims should be contained within relatively narrow bounds, because he also viewed expensive self determination claims as potentially leading to the fragmentation of post colonial Africa in ways that would allow its continued exploitation by the former European colonial powers.
- [47:51]
Sami Siddiqui
This is great. Thank you. And you've already touched on some of the things I was going to ask you regarding the next chapter regarding African decolonization. So instead of focusing on the Ghana side and the sort of perils and promise and the sort of how do you deal as a post colonial nation state with secessionist movements and self determination claims, I was wondering instead if you could talk about South Africa and how white South African apartheid government as well as ANC are sort of making their own different self determination claims. I guess.
- [48:19]
Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah. So some of my thinking about this was derived from the work of scholars like Cindy Ewing, who has written about mostly about South Asia and the former British colonial world, and the debates about constitutions and citizenship and federalist and non federalist schemes of post colonial self government that were being debated in the 1940s and 1950s. Fred Cooper, of course, talks about this a lot. There's a whole range of scholarship that many of your listeners who are familiar with the literature on African decolonization will recognize. The so called federal moment debates, and a lot of those debates. So we're concerned with the degree of centralization or decentralization within postcolonial states and the degrees to which the regional or local or ethnic or religious or racial claims of subnational movements and peoples could be addressed through federalist schemes or through constitutional provisions for citizenship that would guarantee members of ethnic or religious or regional minorities citizenship rights as a way of sort of acknowledging the legitimacy of their concerns about their political rights. And postcolonial states that are dominated by one regional or ethnic group in South Africa, and in the white minority regimes of Southern Africa more generally, we see a very different dilemma, which is whether or not the black majorities of those territories would be allowed to govern themselves. In some ways, these are debates about decolonization, as we see in Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia. But in the case of South Africa, which is already an independent state, very different debates are taking place. And these debates in some ways tell us something about the broader global history of self determination. So on the one hand, we have the reactionary vision of self determination offered by people such as Jan Smuts and the architects of apartheid, a phenomenon that Josiah Burnell has written about in his book on reactionary self determination in white minority Southern Africa. And these folks carry within them a sort of reactionary Wilsonian vision that also defines self determination largely in ethno nationalist terms, in ways that many of the early nationalist movements of the 20th century did. And we can look not just to Afrikaner nationalism, but also to the Zionist movement of the early 20th century that grounded Jewish identity as being incompatible with Palestinian, Christian and Arab self determination. Lots of these early 20th century nationalisms define self determination in ethno nationalist terms. And to that degree, Afrikaner nationalism was a reactionary self determination sort of movement. At the same time, they recognized the legitimacy and the moral valence and power of self determination as an idea in the post 1945 period. And so they attempted to appropriate it and argue that this was simply another variant of nationalist and sort of racial self determination movements that was equally legitimate with the vision offered by the African National Congress and by sort of black Africans in other parts of the continent. And to the degree that there were other groups within South Africa who opposed the African National Congress, they had some funny intellectual bedfellows. So some of the ethnic and regional groupings within South Africa, especially the Zulus, were likewise sympathetic to the vision of self determination offered by the Afrikaners because it legitimized their own claim making against the African National Congress, because they likewise viewed or feared political marginalization in an independent and democratic South Africa, which would have been dominated by the anc. The anc, for its part, offered what we might think of as a liberal vision of self determination, sort of also Wilsonian vision of self determination as liberal self government in which democracy would be the rule in which rights would be guaranteed in a constitution that afforded equal rights to all citizens, but within which minority rights could be guaranteed through constitutional protections. This was the vision that was offered by Gandhi and Nehru in India, which was rejected by Mohammad Jinnah and the sort of Muslim movements that advocated for an independent Muslim state in the form of Pakistan. And so we see lots of contradictions and tensions that one of the most important debates about the meaning of self determination took place along sort of older lines between liberal and reactionary visions of Wilsonian nationalism and representative self government in a sort of white minority dominated South Africa. And this is a very different kind of debate than what has taken place in other parts of decolonizing Africa. And the debates that are taking place in South Africa, I argue, tell us a lot about the persistence of debates about self determination even after European and UN sponsored decolonization sort of comes to a close in the mid-1970s. And the other thing I would say about this is that the anti apartheid movement around the world largely grounded their solidarity with black South Africans in the language of self determination, in a liberal language of representative self government, which arguably allowed them to smooth over their discomfort with the armed struggle components of of the anti apartheid movement. And to the degree that self determination was a sort of liberal discourse in much of the global north, it was a discourse about procedural democracy rather than a discourse about self determination as a language of struggle, which was the vision offered by many more radical anti colonial movements who were uncomfortable with seeing self determination as merely procedural democracy. This is a critique offered by Frantz Fanon and others who called self determination an agreement to decolonize on gentlemen's terms, rather than as a radical vision for breaking down and reconstructing the sort of mentalities and identities of postcolonial subjects in a way that could be most effectively achieved through armed struggle and through more radical forms of activism than simply demanding rights that would be rejected by colonial statesmen.
- [55:30]
Sami Siddiqui
Yeah, this is great. And again, as hopefully listeners can tell, there's so much to get into with all these chapters that we can't cover at all. Speaking of which, I think we're going to skip the next chapter, which is really fascinating and important, one on economic sovereignty, which also expands the idea of what self determination means beyond just political sovereignty, even in the context of decolonization. And the chapter culminates with the NIEO declaration by the Group of 77 at the UN General Assembly. In Chapter 5, Self Determination of Small States, you argue, and I quote, small territories remain on the margins of the historiography of decolonization, Third Worldism and the new international economic order, but they had an outsized impact on the international debates over the meaning and limits of self determination. End quote. Could you talk about what challenges self determination claims by small states pose to the UN and global leaders relating to their viability as well as the stability of the international order more broadly?
- [56:28]
Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah, it's a great question. And I argue that debates about or fears about small state self determination are grounded and the perceived lessons of the aftermath of the First World War. And at the time and through the 1930s and early 1940s, critics of self determination argued that self determination in small territories and among small peoples posed particular threats to the stability of the international order. And some of these were grounded in the perceived histories of European state making and especially of industrial warfare in the early 20th century. That small states were militarily defenseless, they couldn't defend themselves against attack or annexation by their larger neighbors, that they didn't have sufficient industrial bases to become self sufficient economically, and that they were prone to economic nationalism and to attempts at autocracy or self sufficiency that could lead to a breakdown in international trade and the rise of sort of all sorts of unanticipated and unwanted consequences. And so a lot of these fears reemerged during the 1940s, when small territories and peoples in the Pacific and the Caribbean and elsewhere began making self determination claims. And I argue that although small territories were not central participants in debates about the meaning of self determination at the un, that fears about their potential self determination were at the very center of the efforts by the great powers and by large states more generally to contain self determination within relatively narrow bounds. And so there are moments in the history of the 20th century where I argue these fears about small state self deformations have come to the fore. And they tend to be moments of international rupture, either politically or economically. The end of the First World War, the end of the Second World War, the burst of state making in the early 1960s, sort of the collapse of the Bretton woods system in the 1970s, and the end of the Cold War in the 1980s and early 1990s. At each of those moments there was a proliferation of relatively small, in comparative terms, small states and territories. And at each of those moments, critics and commentators warned that this burst of small state self determination was going to lead to an unraveling of international order. And in the 1950s and early 1960s, these fears were especially prevalent, in part because they were taking place in non European settings, especially in the Pacific and in decolonizing Africa. And in part because they seem to be heralding a sort of transformation of the United nations itself away from a sort of institution firmly under the control of the colonial powers and especially the United States, to one which would be more democratic and create spaces for sovereignty and claim making by smaller peoples and territories. And so US and British and Australian and French and other colonial officials throughout this period warned about the dangers of small state self determination. And they created all sorts of study groups in the same way that they studied the meaning of the Atlantic Charter. There was a real fear among peoples of a huge range of ideological and political and geographic diversity, warning that Expansive self determination claims by small peoples and territories could lead to an unraveling of the international system. And it wasn't just European and American policymakers. It was people like Kwame Nkrumah, it was West Caribbean and West Indian nationalists who also argued that federalism was necessary to avoid the pitfalls of small state self determination. It was lots of intellectuals who were and international legal scholars who argued that small state self determination would simply repeat many of the dangers of the aftermath of the First World War. And so, although the colonial powers were arguing that small states and small territories and peoples shouldn't have the right to self determination and that they should enjoy a sort of sub sovereign status or a status of semi sovereignty that would give them some of the appearances of self government but prevent them from enjoying real independence in ways that might destabilize the international system. And this fear was so deeply ingrained that it actually led to proposals to reform the structure of the UN itself. And so in the early 1960s, the UN Secretary General at the time, U Thant, actually proposed a study that to come up with a new possible system of tiered membership within the United nations, within which Pacific island territories and other small or seemingly vulnerable territories would enjoy sort of second class citizenship, where they wouldn't have full independence or full voting rights within the UN but they'd be able to enjoy some of the perks of membership and the technical committees and be able to receive technical assistance and other forms of aid from United nations organizations. These proposals never went anywhere because they were viewed by much of the international community as sort of illegitimate and outrageous on their own terms. But they testified to the fears that self determination by small peoples and territories had for the international system. Great.
- [62:25]
Sami Siddiqui
Thank you so much. Now in chapter six, Self Determination Beyond Decolonization, which might be my favorite chapter, although we're all great, explore self determination claims by African American civil rights groups like sncc, indigenous groups in the United States and around the world, as well as women's and gay rights groups, which I found really interesting. Could you talk about this and how these examples demonstrate your argument about the vernacularization of self determination and the fact that the discourse of self determination is not reducible to postcolonial statehood or what I think you suggest is like a narrow understanding of decolonization because you can also have a capacious understanding similar to self determination.
- [63:07]
Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah. One of the arguments that I make in the book is that we have to view self determination in both global and local terms sort of throughout the 20th century, and that in any national setting. There were a multiplicity of ideas about self determination that were deployed for varying purposes by a range of different social movements and groups. There are scholars who are writing about this in Yugoslavia and Hong Kong and a huge range of national settings. And I think that the United States is one example. Could also look to Australia, to Canada, to many of the settler colonial territories, and see similar debates going on in the United States in particular. There are a lot of scholars, such as Alyosha Goldstein and many others, who have noted the ways in which social movements in the US Sort of caught courage from and thought about their own rights claims in the context of movements for decolonization. And so there are ways in which the domestic self determination claims of social movements in the US Are connected to decolonization struggles in other parts of the world. But there are other ways in which they arise from the particular features of American politics. And the particular histories of American social and civil rights and political movements. And so I read a little bit in the chapter about the different ways that African Americans thought about black self determination, both in civil rights terms, but also by the 1970s, in slightly broader terms of community empowerment and community self government. Gay and lesbian rights organizations and movements and women's movements likewise sort of flexibly use self determination as a way of talking about bodily autonomy and sexual autonomy in ways that they associated with movements for decolonization, but also grounded very specifically in the particular demands of women and of sexual and other minorities for a decolonization of the body and a decolonization of the kinds of claims that states and oppressive institutions could make on the ways that individuals thought about their own sexuality and about their own rights claims. Most importantly, I argue, indigenous peoples were beginning to create a transnational indigenous self determination movement. That consciously drew on the movements for decolonization, but also grounded their own claims in what scholars have variously described as Fourth Worldism or other conceptions of sovereignty and rights that move beyond territorial state making, move beyond the movements for decolonization to make very particular claims for indigenous peoples that were often grounded in conceptions of land, sovereignty and culture and religion sort of flexibly used, that often conflicted with the ways that postcolonial movements and postcolonial states themselves thought about self determination. And I think that this is an important, an important moment in the history of self determination as a global idea. I argue that the pivot point is really the 1966 Human Rights Covenants, which try and define with some precision ethnic or civil and political rights in one covenant. And economic, social and cultural Rights in another covenant. And the movements for Indigenous self determination really spring and expand from and draw from the 1966 covenants. And at the same time, they are attempting to define Indigenous self determination in ways that go well beyond the narrow conception either of anti colonial movements themselves as well as the colonial powers within which many Indigenous peoples reside. And one of the arguments I make in the book is that on the one hand, anti colonial movements and human rights movements had no conception of Indigenous self determination. They largely ignored them in the ways that they mobilized throughout the 20th century. And so new institutions, new organizations, new movements had to emerge to accommodate and help to circulate the self determination claims of Indigenous peoples. Initially, some of these movements were located in the Global North. They were sort of sympathetic but limited movements such as Cultural Survival, the Anti Slavery Society Survival International and other organizations that sought to advocate on behalf of Indigenous peoples, but didn't give them the sort of agency to advocate on their own behalf. In the late 60s and early 70s, indigenous peoples themselves began to connect with each other and to begin making very specific Indigenous self determination claims within the UN machinery that eventually lead to the sort of UN Covenant on the rights of Indigenous peoples. And I argue that this is a sort of bottom up process in which Indigenous peoples and their transnational sort of allies and sort of advocates sort of insist on an expansive vision of self determination that fundamentally changes international law and fundamentally changes the laws of many states to force a recognition of the economic and cultural and political rights claims of Indigenous peoples in ways that were never anticipated by the first generation of theorists and advocates for self determination. And I think that this shows more powerfully than any other part of the book the ways that self determination's expansive meaning is derived from this constant pressure from a range of movements and peoples on the literal and figurative margins of international society who view anti colonial self determination as a shackle, as a sort of prison from which they have to escape in order to realize their own self determination claims, their own sovereignty and rights visions in ways that conflict often with the ways that postcolonial states understood the role that Indigenous people should play in post colonial settings.
- [69:57]
Sami Siddiqui
Absolutely. And it was, yeah, very convincing. I really enjoyed reading this chapter in particular. So in chapter seven, Self Determination in the Age of Globalization, you talk about the winding down of decolonization in the 1980s and then the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Could you tell the listeners what your argument is about the relationship between self determination and globalization in this era? And then there's this short quote that I thought was really nice, and I wondered if you might want to expand on it, in which you talk about, and I quote, vision of self determination fit for the age of neoliberalism, which I think encapsulates an important aspect of this chapter.
- [70:36]
Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Yeah, so. So there are scholars such as Adam Getachu, who argue that self determination sort of falls or begins to narrow in the 1970s as economic globalization takes off, as neoliberalism as a political project begins to gain force. There are lots of other scholars, Quinn Slobodian, Christy Thornton, many others, who view this moment as really pivotal. Fritz Bartel, in his book about the end of the Soviet Union, who view the rise of neoliberalism as an important constraint and an important sort of limiting influence on the sovereignty and rights claims that postcolonial states and peoples can make. And I largely agree with that analysis. I also argue that the end of the Cold War sort of demonstrates some of the ways in which neoliberalism was shaping the outer limits of what many people considered to be self determination, scope and meaning. So through the 1980s, for example, as the global debt crisis sort of takes shape, the IMF and other institutions of global economic governance are sort of cheering the degree to which debt crises are limiting the economic sovereignty claims being made by post colonial states. And they begin acknowledging, in really sort of inchoate, but I think, important ways, that self determination should look something like the ways that their Wilsonian forebears conceived of it in the early 20th century as a form of political sovereignty short of economic sovereignty. So political independence, but with limited economic sovereignty and full integration with the world economy. And this, I think, is in many ways the real Wilsonian vision of self determination that carries through the 20th century, especially in the minds of American and to a lesser degree, British and European policymakers, which is that self determination is a form of liberal self government shorn of economic sovereignty. So political independence and economic interdependence, and as the Soviet Union unravels, and as we see a last burst of independent state making at the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, European statesmen, states, people, the early sort of European Union, the Bush administration and others are very insistent that the creation of new states should take place in the context of economic interdependence and economic liberalism. And that self determination meant democratic self government plus free markets. And this is very much a vision of self determination fit for the age of neoliberalism, as they argue in the book. At the same time, there are still lots and lots of self determination movements and claims that are being deployed in some cases by movements that are still trying to resolve the contradictions of decolonization in Palestine, in East Timor, in Western Sahara, in the Pacific world. But there are lots of other movements that don't fit within this sort of vision of decolonization. And some of these organizations and movements start new institutions such as the UN Unrepresented People's Organization or UNPO, which was formed in the early 1990s. And, and the formation of UNPO I think represents a recognition that the institutions of decolonization that were created by the United nations in the 1940s are really inadequate to deal with the self determination claims and movements that persist through the 1990s and into the 20th century. And so in this moment we see not just among self determination movements in the global north and in places like Western Sahara, among indigenous movements, among Catalan and Kurdish and other nationalist movements across national borders. We also see a recognition within the United nations itself and within sort of institutions of the global north, powerful foundations like the Carnegie foundation, we see calls for a sort of re envisioning or a reinvention of self determination. And they argue in the book that at crucial moments like this in the 20th century, in moments where the international system seems to be sort of reforming in important ways, that critics of self determination see what's happening and they warn about the chaos or the instability that might result from expansive visions of self determination. And so in this moment, as in the 1970s, as in the 1940s, as in the 1920s, there are calls for the need to reimagine or reinvent self determination so it can accommodate the kinds of sovereignty and rights claims being deployed by peoples and movements who don't fit easily within the framework of UN sponsored decolonization. And this is an argument that I argue persists through the early part of the 21st century, in particular, as phenomenon such as climate change become an increasing focus of the UN and of international organizations and movements that recognize that decolonization is an inadequate legal and political framework for addressing the dangers of climate change for Pacific peoples, for indigenous peoples and others for whom the UN sponsored process of decolonization is simply an inadequate legal and institutional framework for addressing some of these challenges.
- [76:34]
Sami Siddiqui
Great. Thank you so much. So before we end the conversation on this really great book, I'm curious what you think about the present and future of self determination.
- [76:46]
Professor Bradley R. Simpson
I think this is an incredibly important question and we can look to two places to think about this. One is Palestine of course, and one of the arguments I make in the book, and I don't sufficiently address the Palestinian liberation struggle, although I reference it at various moments. But unresolved self determination claims and movements really serve as a sort of mirror for the international community to grapple with the limits and meaning of self determination in places where people are unable to achieve it. And more than any other movement in the 20th century, the Palestinian people have had their rights to self determination simultaneously acknowledged and refused by the international community. First, with the creation of Israel in 1948 and the creation of a massive refugee population, some of it diasporic, that made self determination claims which were acknowledged to be legitimate by the international community, but they were continually frustrated, not just by the Israeli government, but by its sort of Western patrons, most especially the United States, beginning in the 1960s and 70s. And the persistence of the Palestinian liberation struggle as an important symbol of the failures of UN sponsored decolonization, I think, show both the power of self determination as an animating ideal in international politics, and also the recognition of its limits when the great powers and regional powers such as Israel decide that they can simply deny it to peoples who have every legal right to self determination. And Palestine serves as a vehicle for examining the changing meaning of self determination throughout the 20th century, not just in the 1970s, when debates about the meaning of terrorism emerge in the United nations. And Palestine becomes a proxy for arguing whether or not armed struggle and even terrorism were legitimate as a way of achieving self determination. But through the Israeli genocide in Gaza, we see a persistent refusal to acknowledge the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to self determination in practice, even as the United nations continues to recognize it in relatively meaningless UN resolutions that are passed with great regularity through the General Assembly. The other place that we can look to right now is Greenland, which is a sort of self governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, which Donald Trump is demanding that the US annex and control at the prospect of potential military invasion, which seems truly crazy. But there are ways in which the US demand, or the Trump administration's demand for Greenland sort of illuminates the changing nature of self determination in international law. So Greenlanders and Inuit peoples in Greenland began making self determination claims as indigenous peoples in the 1970s and 80s, along with other European indigenous peoples, the Sami of Norway and others who are beginning to connect themselves to both Arctic and circumpolar indigenous movements, as well as the broader indigenous movement for self determination in Latin America, in Australia, in the United States and elsewhere. And so there's both an indigenous self determination sort of move in history story to be told in Greenland, as well as a story about reactionary self determination claims and movements. The Trump administration, though it came to office in 2016, sort of championing reactionary self determination movements in the form of Brexit, in the form of other movements that purported to reclaim economic sovereignty from the forces of globalism and globalization. Now, the Trump administration is simply denying one of the foundations of modern international law, which is that peoples have the right to self determination. And this is the first right from which all of the rights are derived. The Trump administration simply rejects that small peoples and territories have the right to self determination. And Greenland, in some ways we can see in parallel to places like West Papua and Western Sahara, which were colonized by post colonial states in the 1960s and 70s, and that these are geographically vast territories with relatively small populations, but they are seen as sort of small peoples in international politics, despite having vast geographic territories and lots of resources that are looked with great jealousy and avarice by the colonial powers. And so there are ways in which the Trump administration's demands for an annexation of Greenland tell a familiar story about the denial or the rejection of self determination by small states and peoples by the colonial powers. But there are other ways in which we can see the demands that the rights claims and the sovereignty of Greenlanders themselves are part of a post colonial history of self determination that is being waged in the global north as well as in the places that we most normally associate it with, which is decolonizing Africa and the Middle east and south and Southeast Asia.
- [82:45]
Sami Siddiqui
This is great. That was really helpful in thinking about our depressing times. So thank you so much for that. So thank you so much. I've taken so much of your time, but before I let you go, I was just wondering if you could tell us what you're working on now, now that the book is out.
- [83:01]
Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Well, I'm hoping to edit Cambridge History of Self Determination, which would provide to many of the scholars that I've relied upon to write about a wider range of self determination claims and movements that I was able to accommodate in the book. And I am still working on Indonesia, writing a sort of longer term history of the politics of human rights and decolonization during this Uharto period. But another colleague of mine and I have decided to write a global history of the East Timor solidarity movement from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Fascinating, because East Timor in many ways tells, you know, many of the same stories that I try and tell in the book, which I've already written about in some earlier articles and chapters, but I now feel equipped to write a global history of the Timor solidarity movement in ways that I don't feel like I could properly give justice to in some of my earlier writings about East Timor from 2004 to 2008 when I spun out a series of articles and book chapters on sort of the US spawn or the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor and the emergence of a global solidarity movement that was grounded in self determination claims being made by the Timorese. There's now much richer literature on all of these things than existed 20 years ago and I'm hoping to take advantage of what I've learned from writing the First Rite to try and tell a global story about the East Timor solidarity movement and about the global self determination movement that the East Timorese themselves waged over the course of their quarter century occupation by Indonesia.
- [84:48]
Sami Siddiqui
Sounds fascinating. All these projects. Sounds great. Thank you so much for yeah doing this interview with us.
- [84:54]
Professor Bradley R. Simpson
Great. Thank you very much.