Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 by Umut Özsu is a significant addition to the body of literature that interrogates, maps, explains, and theorizes the historical role of international legal praxis in colonialism, decolonization, coloniality, and resistance thereto. Completing Humanity, provides a sophisticated, historical, socio-legal, critical, and detailed account of the geopolitical contestations, dramas, goals, successes, and failures that framed and marked key aspects of international lawmaking during the period under study. That epoch is characterized by Özsu, an associate professor of law and legal studies at Carleton University, at the height (during the twentieth century) of the concerted and intense struggle by the vast majority of the world's states and their peoples—mainly of the so-called Third World and primarily in alliance with the then Socialist bloc—to decolonize international law texts, customs, and praxis. The book focuses on outlining, historicizing, critiquing, and assessing the international legal texts, customs, and praxis that the decolonization process “made both possible and necessary” (p. 35). It also attempts to map “what is living and dead”Footnote ¹ in the international law of decolonization. As Özsu states, Completing Humanity is a study of the modifications made to international legal theory and doctrine over time with the goal of producing an appreciably more decolonial international law. Much to Özsu's credit, the book is very well-researched, conceptualized, organized, and crafted. In this Review, I identify several of the key themes that Özsu explores, critique a few of the book's arguments, and offer brief comments on the method Özsu employs.

Substantively, Completing Humanity analyzes a myriad of theses, ideas, arguments, and claims, the most important of which I discuss below. First, throughout the tome, Özsu paints a relatively detailed picture of an intense, courageous, and partially successful set of struggles against the dominant Western powers to (re)make international law texts, customs, and praxis into much less colonial artifacts (e.g., through the forging and establishment of the anti-colonial norm contained in UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV); the introduction of the principle of the common heritage of humankind to space law, the law of the sea, etc.; and the push for a New International Economic Order). These were diplomatic and juristic battles that were mostly waged by recently decolonized Third World states, often in alliance with older Third World states and the then Socialist bloc. At times, this group of Third World states also enjoyed the support of a handful of less powerful Western countries. One such country was Ireland, which had undergone its own experience of subjugation and dispossession at the hands of England (p. 125).

In analyzing this Third World-led struggle, Özsu's careful historical study shines much light on how very contingent international law texts, customs, and praxis in fact are. He demonstrates, in great detail, the ways in which the character of this struggle highlights and exemplifies a key and relatively well-known (but too often ignored) insight from realism and critical legal theories that international law is fundamentally non-immanent and basically “made-up.” The processes of “making up” the new norms, such as those relating to the law of the sea, if and when secessionist movements could invoke the right to self-determination, and peremptory norms of general international law (jus cogens), that are discussed in Completing Humanity were, in many cases, also processes of unmaking the pre-existing international legal framework—albeit only in part. Thus, against the prevalent tendency to reify international law, Özsu's account of the struggle to create an international law of decolonization also underscores why the discipline must make much greater effort to de-reify international legal texts, customs, and praxis. In telling this story, Completing Humanity exemplifies and contributes to one of the signal overarching contributions to international legal discourse previously made in the work of scholars such as Oji Umozurike and Antony Anghie.Footnote ²

A second, and related, theme that runs through Completing Humanity concerns the nature and extent of impact of the struggle to ensure meaningful Third World participation in the (re)construction of international legal texts, customs, and praxis. Özsu's careful documentation and acute analysis in this regard demonstrates, and highlights to the reader, the persistence over the longue durée of the Third World's struggles to win meaningful participation in the (re)construction of an international law that was forcibly imposed on them by Western powers. It also sheds light on the (ongoing) efforts of these subaltern states to augment the quantum, quality, and impact of such participation—as a way of advancing global diversity, equity, and inclusion in international law texts, customs, and praxis. Whether it was through their battles to outlaw colonialism through an ordinarily non-binding resolution of the UN General Assembly that has now been confirmed by the International Court of Justice to have passed into customary international law with unusual speed (pp. 36–71),Footnote ³ or as a result of their leadership in creating the concepts of jus cogens (pp. 72–103) and the common heritage of (hu)mankind (pp. 156–98), these Third World states (and their moral allies) left a marked impact on international law. Their limited but significant success at (re)constructing international law during this era was bolstered by the measure of meaningful participation most of them had begun to enjoy only a few years earlier at the UN (albeit mostly in the General Assembly). This point was, and remains, important because of their historical exclusion from meaningful participation in the construction of the very international law that was deployed to subjugate, dispossess, and rule over them (p. 21).

Like any sophisticated history, Completing Humanity provides a nuanced account of continuity and change. The book maps, analyzes, and advances our understanding of colonial continuities that have marked and marred international legal texts, customs, and praxis for centuries.Footnote ⁴ The book is partly a study in the continuity to this day of both formal colonialism and the broader praxis of coloniality (pp. 33–35, 245). Here, coloniality is understood as “colonial vestiges,” i.e., the ways in which colonialism sustains itself even to this day despite the so-called freedoms gained by previously colonized or oppressed peoples. A related way of understanding this term is to think of it as engaging the colonial matrices of power that have grounded the exploitation of the world and its resources over the last several centuries up to this day, ensuing from formal European colonialism of the Third World and continuing to exert significant and undue influence over Third World peoples even in our own time. Özsu makes it clear that, despite the advances that have been made in both international law texts and praxis and in the material world, the available evidence demonstrates that formal “colonialism has not come to an end—and that it certainly cannot be reduced to the formal processes of decolonization coordinated by states and international organizations” (pp. 2, 28). This claim is clearly correct. For seventeen non-self-governing territories are still recognized by the UN (p. 2), and several other semi-autonomous polities are classified by some as unrecognized non-self-governing territories (p. 2, n. 4). It can, however, be questioned, whether Özsu's inclusion of Hong Kong and Macau among the ranks of the latter group is appropriate (id.).

At the same time, Completing Humanity pays elaborate and due attention to the significant discontinuities that have resulted from the decolonization struggle. For example, eighty states gained their independence in a single generation after World War II; fewer than two million people now (as opposed to what would be billions today) live in the seventeen remaining recognized non-self-governing territories; formal colonialization stands mostly delegitimized (with notable exceptions); and international legal texts, customs, and praxis today have been appreciably influenced by the significant input of the partly successful effort to decolonize them. In this last regard, the impact referred to is illustrated in part by the successful introduction of the doctrine of jus cogens in the law of treaties; the influence exerted by the concept of the common heritage of (hu)mankind in the law of the sea, space law, and other sub-fields; the pride of place given to the right to self-determination in the two UN human rights covenants; the increasing mainstreaming of the right to development; and the adoption, passage into customary international law, and implementation in general of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.

Özsu properly emphasizes a point that many miss, namely that despite their intense struggle to (re)make international law during the period under study, Third World states did not reject the concept of international law in itself, only significant aspects of its substantive content (pp. 14–15). Özsu also shows that the ideas and praxis of key Third World states and international lawyers were framed and shaped by a similar tension (id.). In Özsu's words, these states and international lawyers frequently found themselves supporting mechanisms of global interdependence that (seemingly) complicated their adherence to state sovereignty (p. 14), constantly navigated the tension between sovereignty and international solidarity (id.), and in some cases even aligned with Western writers such as Wolfgang Friedman who advocated for “a new common law of [hu]mankind” to replace the older “international law of coexistence” (p. 15). For example, R.P. Anand agreed with Friedman's advocacy (id.). In sum, as Özsu puts it, “[d]ecolonized states, and those who wrote about their demands and represented their interests . . . were seldom interested in repudiating [international law]” in its entirety (p. 242). This claim exemplifies existing insights in the literature, especially in the writings of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars, regarding the Third World's ambivalence toward international law.Footnote ⁵ However, there is a sense in which the general ambivalence of law itself could be said to structure, or at least lend itself to, this ambivalence of Third World states and international lawyers.Footnote ⁶

Furthermore, Completing Humanity foregrounds a number of specific legal and political controversies, including debates over self-determination, the New International Economic Order, and the right to development. The book's discussion of self-determination alerts us to and explains the teleological politics that shaped the content and orientation of the successful effort led by Third World states to (re)construct the core of the right to self-determination in international law as we now know it. Third World states/jurists mobilized the concept from a somewhat different European context and deftly repurposed it toward the achievement of their goals of advancing the decolonization and liberation of their peoples from Global North control and exploitation. In doing so, they drew upon arguments worked out within the tradition of socialist internationalism (p. 57). They deployed this concept because it tended to resonate with their historical experience and yearnings. They did not, however, embrace the most expansive understanding of the right to self-determination—at least not during the period under study. As Özsu's careful parsing of the historical record reminds us, those who led, or acted on behalf of, these states also worked to—as much as possible—limit the scope of the right to self-determination to the decolonization context. They were largely, but not totally, successful in this regard. For instance, the Declaration on Friendly Relations was drafted in a way that ensured that secessionist movements could also invoke the right to self-determination, albeit only in exceptional circumstances. Interestingly, the width of this normative aperture continues to be hotly contested even today.Footnote ⁷ Still, Özsu is correct to point out and critique the attempt by Third World states to blunt the applicability of the right to self-determination to the struggles of sub-state groups.

Another key component of the international law of decolonization that appropriately receives sustained attention is the Third World's struggle for the creation of a New International Economic Order, or NIEO (pp. 104–08). This proposal for change, characterized by Özsu as “essentially redistributionist,” was a response to the Third World's historic problems with the Bretton Woods institutions (p. 109). Özsu is very close to the mark in adopting Nils Gilman's creative moniker that depicts the NIEO neither as a success nor a failure, but rather as an “unfailure” (p. 107).Footnote ⁸ To Gilman, an “unfailure” is a movement that may have met its demise but which has continued to enjoy a sort of afterlife as an idiom for future generations to articulate their own hopes and dreams. Özsu himself declares that several components of the NIEO policy package managed to gain traction over the years that followed, partly in the form of new legal ideas, doctrines, and frameworks (id.), which could lead to the conclusion that the NIEO was more of a partial (albeit modest) success.

Completing Humanity is also notable for its critical historical analysis of the political economy of “the development of the right to development” in international law,Footnote ⁹ amidst the hegemony of market fundamentalism in both the economic and human rights spheres (p. 205). The right to development is, of course, an African (largely Senegalese) invention that has long resonated deeply across the Third World, and even beyond.Footnote ¹⁰ Özsu is to be commended for carefully mapping and analyzing the global politics that attended the negotiations that led to the adoption of several relevant instruments and documents during the era under study, both within and outside the UN. These texts include the Brandt Commission's main and follow-up reports (pp. 205–06), the Pearson Commission report (p. 218), and the UN Declaration on the Right to Development (UNDRTD) (p. 201). What is more, Özsu's discussion of the related basic needs versus human rights debate(s) (pp. 210–13) is as knowledgeable as his analysis of the great power politics and neoliberal fundamentalism that led to the Brandt and Pearson reports being swept aside and largely ignored (pp. 205–06, 218). For its own part, the UNDRTD met with more success than the afore-referenced reports. It has now spawned or influenced a number of other instruments and led to ongoing negotiations at the UN for the adoption of a treaty on the right to development (p. 202). Nevertheless, similarly contentious North/South politics has also attended, and slowed down, its fuller development at the UN.Footnote ¹¹ In this connection, Completing Humanity provides a solid discussion of the interconnections among neoliberalism, the UNDRTD's deep linkages to the NIEO, and UNDRTD's counter-hegemonic orientation, praxis, and potential.

Another important question discussed in Completing Humanity concerns why Third World states fought so hard for international law at all? Their intense push to decolonize international law could be read by some as informed by a certain idealism or naïveté (p. 241). It could be viewed as revealing a significant degree of faith in global power, and in the very international law that powerful Western states had long “made up,” primarily to serve their interests. It could be seen as displaying the Third World's faith in international law's capacity to become transformed into an ideally decolonial corpus and praxis. On the contrary, as Karin Mickelson has brilliantly explained, what these Third World states and jurists tended to exhibit was hope that international law could be transformed and not faith that the desired change would actually occur.Footnote ¹² They did not tend to think that they could simply “tell the ram: disarm” and it would simply comply.Footnote ¹³ They understood that global power would fight back. Yet, they knew they could not avoid the battle, for their very well-being depended on its outcome. What is more, as Özsu has correctly argued, they realized that international law “was [and remains] integral to decolonization's unfolding, informing the way it was framed, managed, and understood” (id.).

That this contested process of international law's unfolding is ongoing is reflected in the book's current topicality and resonance. The reader should notice that for a work of international legal history, the book's themes and contents resonate quite strongly in the contemporary. The book closely connects its audience to many current international legal debates, reminding scholars and practitioners alike of the remarkable continuity (amidst significant discontinuity) of international legal history. Not surprisingly given his training, Özsu himself is keenly aware of the Completing Humanity's trans-epochal resonance. For example, a number of pages in both the book's introduction and conclusion are devoted to demonstrating and highlighting this reality.

However, while Completing Humanity provides a richly textured account of Third World efforts to decolonize international law doctrine and praxis, readers may question several elements in its analyses. For example, while the book offers an illuminating account of battles over the meaning of self-determination, its claim that the self-determination right was largely stripped of its revolutionary quality and shine as a result of these debates is questionable (p. 71). On the contrary, even as articulated at the time, that right was still quite revolutionary. In helping shape the decolonial results already discussed, it confirmed its (relatively) revolutionary credentials. One way to appreciate this point is to remember the rather unenthusiastic reactions of many powerful Global North states invested in maintaining the status quo to the Third World's proposal to include a right of colonized peoples to self-determination in the Declaration on Friendly Relations (p. 53). What is more, as stated in that Declaration and in its counterpart on the granting of independence to colonized peoples, the agreed norm on self-determination also included the right to wage armed struggle against a colonial power (pp. 48–49). This was a contextually radical move, one that remains so to this very day. It should also be pointed out that, at the very least, in the light of the provisions of Articles 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights;Footnote ¹⁴ the interpretation of that provision by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in the Katanga case;Footnote ¹⁵ and the judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in the Quebec Reference case;Footnote ¹⁶ all of which affirmed that the self-determination right accommodates its exercise by sub-state groups in exceptional cases, that right is enjoying an enlarged “afterlife” that ranges well beyond its decolonial core.

Some readers may also find fault with Özsu's claim that the NIEO was merely reformist and not revolutionary. In my view, this characterization is not well supported in the light of the intensity of global power's strong resistance to the NIEO, a phenomenon that was in fact mapped in detail in the book under review. It is telling that the matrices of global power rallied hard to crush an allegedly mildly reformist NIEO to the extent they did (p. 107). They did so because they realized that the world would have certainly looked very different had the NIEO succeeded optimally. As is widely known, the changes that would, as a result, have been made to the living international law on nationalization/expropriation, resource sovereignty/exploitation, etc., would have moved international law much further away from its tendencies to provide greater resources to global power than it does for Third World peoples.

Another point made in Completing Humanity with which some readers might take issue is the book's overly strong stress on the indeterminacy of the concepts of jus cogens and the common heritage of (hu)mankind. Özsu frequently refers to the “cloudy generality” of jus cogens (p. 72), or uses similar phrasing to characterize that concept. He also makes much of what he sees as the “excessively imprecise” character of the common heritage concept (p. 156). One essential aspect of Özsu's argument is that the alleged vagueness of these two concepts resulted from the necessity of making them compatible with the preferences of a “wide range of blocs, tendencies, and movements” at the UN (id.). Another aspect of his argument is that such “cloudiness” has been, or could be, channeled to over-politicize the discourses and practices relating to these two concepts (p. 164). And in his view, this reveals contradictions that he sees as central to the international law of decolonization (id.). At the same time, Özsu acknowledges that the corpus of international law has, as a whole, also been credibly accused of this same failing (p. 72).Footnote ¹⁷ The challenge here is that, while Özsu does, of course, pay significant attention to the intense South/North politics surrounding the adoption into international law of these two concepts (pp. 89–90), he devotes almost as much effort to leveling the critique of indeterminacy against them. For example, he refers to jus cogens as “dangerously under-specified” (p. 93), dwells on its alleged “amorphousness” (p. 97), and concludes that “jus cogens operated in something close to a discursive vacuum, capable of furthering a wide variety of different projects” (p. 92). Given that every single one of the eight states that voted against the inclusion of jus cogens in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties were powerful Western states (except perhaps for Turkey) (p. 94), a realization that lays bare the overly conservative great power politics that was involved, the reader may be excused for wondering whether the extent of attention paid to the indeterminacy of jus cogens detracts from the greater attention that the immense Third World juristic creativity on display could have received.

To be sure, Özsu does pay some attention to this feature of the life-stories of not only jus cogens, but also the common heritage of (hu)mankind. For example, he makes the unassailable point that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea “sanctified one of the most creative legal innovations of the decolonization era: the idea that the seabed and its subsoil beyond the limits of national jurisdiction is the ‘common heritage of [hu]mankind’” (p. 158). Özsu also agrees with the cerebral Georges Abi-Saab that the adoption of the jus cogens doctrine was the greatest triumph of the Third World at the Vienna Conference in which the Convention on the Law of Treaties was adopted (p. 95).

It should also be noted, however, that despite Özsu's very high level of awareness of the relevance of his historical analysis to contemporary debates, and while he does discuss the matter very briefly in the book, Completing Humanity is not as rich as one might have expected in one respect. This is with regard to treating in enough depth the deep interconnections between the book's story of the struggle to decolonize international law during the 1960–1982 period and the discursive and material battles that are being waged along similar lines in our current era of global geopolitical transformation. The book would have been enriched by devoting more space than it does to teasing out and furthering the reader's understandings of these crucial interconnections. For sure, Özsu does invoke, in a short paragraph (p. 243), the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and of China especially. However, given the very high quality of Özsu's mind and work, the reader would have benefitted greatly from his grappling in more detail with the implications for his analyses of the likely onset in our time of another Cold War-like era, one in which the two strongest powers lock themselves in rivalry and competition. In this very likely future, it appears that leverage available to Third World states will be bolstered by the increasing augmentation in global affairs of their structural room for maneuver. This increase in their bargaining power is likely to result from the structural effects of China's great rise and increased assertiveness and growth in the concerted power of the BRICS. As a result, Third World states and peoples may yet again stand in a significantly stronger position than they have been since the end of the U.S./Soviet Cold War. What is more, as a result of the anticipated rise, to a significant extent, in the concerted economic power of these Third World states, they are also likely to become able to assert themselves significantly more forcefully than they have been able to since the great decline in their relative economic power (and thus political influence) that began in the 1990s. To offer but one illustration, whatever the real reasons behind that measure, the consensus is that Zimbabwe's independence in 1980 owed more to Nigeria's nationalization of British Petroleum and its then credible threat to proceed with more of such measures, than any appeals to international law or the conscience of Zimbabwe's British colonial power.Footnote ¹⁸

Despite the critical questions that might be properly asked of the book's robust substantive contribution, the reader should notice the effectiveness of Özsu's method to researching and preparing Completing Humanity. The broad approach he adopted was, for the most part, to analyze the work of international lawyers from the Third World, the Socialist Bloc, and the First World, as well as to study the relevant archival resources. In so doing, Özsu is sensitive to the fact that the three cohorts of international lawyers that he focuses on in the book are almost entirely male. He makes clear, however, that he is limited in this regard by the historical record itself. The close attention paid to scholarly works from all areas of the world; to ensuring as much ideological and gender diversity as possible in the pool of scholarly resources on which the analyses discussed in the book is based; and to the relevant archives, form part of the book's key methodological strengths. On a different note, the book's treatment of international legal history as a continuum and not as a series of one-time events, is another one of its strong suites. It should also be noted that as the book is primarily a work of international legal history, there is little that can be said in objection to the author's utilization of these tested historical methods. Nevertheless, a reader might wonder if its insights could have been enriched and enhanced by the expansion of its methods to include some purposive interviews.

Interestingly, elements of Özsu's methodological approach could be characterized as drawing from (or at least akin to) TWAIL “techniques and sensibilities.”Footnote ¹⁹ For example, Özsu's tendency to center Third World (colonial) history and take the work of the international legal scholars who write from that tradition much more seriously than is usually the case, is palpable. This is a key TWAIL technique/sensibility. Özsu does not, however, make this link to TWAIL methodology explicit enough. For sure, Özsu does cite and rely on TWAIL scholars, but not in any central way. For example, he refers to them largely in one footnote (p. 26, n. 82) and in the book's bibliography. And although the book's connections to TWAIL might be appreciable to the well-trained eye, they are nevertheless almost entirely left implicit. This is a little surprising, especially given the nature of the book's overarching thematic focus and approach.

Despite its gaps, the credible questions that some readers may have about a few of its arguments, and one or two queries about its methodology, Completing Humanity makes an original and immense contribution to international law. Although it historicizes and analyzes themes that have been treated in other work, it offers a painstakingly detailed and careful account of how the Third World (and its moral allies) sought to unmake and remake important portions of the corpus of international law texts and praxis imposed on it by the West. It is also a fascinating and compelling read. For all these reasons, Completing Humanity ought to adorn every international lawyer's bookshelf—physical or virtual.