How should we, international lawyers, especially with an interest in history, apprehend the experience of, and the horizon of expectation that opened up with, the dissolution of European empires in the decades following the end of World War II? We know that during these decades a Eurocentric international order marked by alien rule and the denial of statehood to large swathes of the world's population was nominally transformed into one marked by sovereign equality. Triumphalist accounts of progress would yoke this transformation to the realization of other good things such as human rights, and economic development.Footnote ¹ But more commonly today, we think of decolonization as hard work: a struggle against the imperial notions of internationalism that threatened to shape the post-war order.Footnote ² In a similar vein, we are today less likely to think of decolonization as the gradual realization of a Wilsonian self-determination principle. If self-determination became an international right in the 1960s, upon which colonized peoples might have hung their claims to independence, we know that this historical conjuncture between decolonization and the norm of self-determination, came on the back of earlier—often failed—attempts to re-interpret what the Wilsonian norm originally entailed, and of anti-colonial action that unfolded without reference to international law.Footnote ³

Decolonization—the outcome of agentic action of subjugated people—surely challenged, at the institutional, and at the epistemological level, the imperial foundations of post-war international law. But how far did it transform a historically unequal world order? And how extensively was the emancipatory potential of the decolonization moment felt? We know that the democratic impetus of anti-colonial politics was thwarted, partly by the machinations of the West and transnational capital,Footnote ⁴ and partly by its own logic of seeking emancipation in the form of the national state.Footnote ⁵ On the other hand, the question as to whether anti-colonial movements sought self-determination in, or were propelled toward, the national state form itself remains open for scrutiny. Could decolonization have perhaps produced an international order in the image of non-domination? The subaltern cosmopolitanism that undergirded anti-colonial politics in the Black Atlantic world certainly gestured toward such a vision of world order,Footnote ⁶ even if those aspirations ultimately were less than fully realized.

In short, as historians, political theorists, and international lawyers, we are far from settling on a narrative about what decolonization meant for the form of international political organization, sovereignty, and international law. Questions about the emancipatory possibilities—political and economic justice—that anti-colonialism entailed remain fraught. But as scholars bravely continue to trudge on this path, an impressive new contribution by Lydia Walker, assistant professor of history at Ohio State University, States-in-Waiting, will further enrich, and complicate, our assessment of the historical possibilities that decolonization opened and foreclosed. States-in-Waiting is an account of the unevenness of decolonization; a study of the contrasting fortunes of different nationalist movements, intended to query the limits of political self-determination.

Walker stitches together a narrative of the fortunes of a set of lesser-known nationalist movements across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, with the connecting tissue of a transnational advocacy network starring the American pacifist Abraham Johannes Muste, the Indian politician Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), famous for his (later) role in opposing Mrs. Gandhi's emergency, and the British-born anti-apartheid activist Reverend Michael Scott. The book starts with the nationalist movement in Nagaland, India. Nagaland is Walker's key state-in-waiting, a movement which sought to internationalize its claim to statehood, embedding itself within global decolonization currents, but whose chances of success were foreclosed by the very tides that even allowed it to seek out international recognition. International recognition for nationalist claims depended on accessing transnational advocates; and transnational advocates relied on allies among anti-colonial political elites in places like India. The process through which the movement for an independent Nagaland found access to an advocacy network, witnessed its nationalist claims being reconfigured as claims about the treatment of national minorities, and ultimately, countenanced failure, frames what I understand Walker's overarching argument, or “counternarrative” to be: decolonization was not merely the expansive realization of nationalist self-determination, but also, a process through which a host of transnational actors set the terms, and limits, on self-determination. Walker offers a critical account of how the norm of self-determination was reshaped by these actors in a manner that excluded the claims of some anti-colonial movements, but not others, with those that adopted peaceful means being privileged. These terms and limits were forged not only in the case of Nagaland, but also in Africa, where Walker's network of advocates played an active role.

Muste, JP, and Scott, among others, coordinated the World Peace Brigade, a pacifist organization that took African anti-colonialism as a project to be shaped in the image of non-violent resistance. The Brigade allied with specific anti-colonial movements, such as Kenneth Kaunda's in modern day Zambia, supporting their claims to statehood, and concurrently relied on the support of newly independent governments, such as Julius Nyerere's in (what was then called) Tanganyika. Alongside the Brigade, a host of other transnational actors, including representatives of American capital, allied themselves in various degrees with some anti-colonial movements. These transnational actors advocated on behalf of nationalists, helping draw international attention to their claims for recognition as sovereign states.

The advocacy network that Walker opens a window into operated in a Cold War context. Everyone involved appeared to denounce Communism and generally wished to mold nationalist movements into democracies. The independent states that would emerge could then be imagined as assurers of peace, and stable, capitalist, economic development. Anti-colonial actors bargained with representatives of mining corporations behind closed doors, and openly with the Brigade. Each transnational advocate helped build legitimacy for the nationalist claims they supported, aiding in the international recognition of the demands for statehood. However, obtaining the support of these advocates was not without costs; the benefits of international appeal came at the price of nationalist claims getting filtered through the frameworks privileged by transnational actors. And the fortunes of these nationalist movements came to depend, at least in part, on that translation. The normative standards for these movements to receive international recognition, paving the way for independent statehood, emerged through the entanglement of nationalist actors with their transnational advocates. Those movements that sought statehood through peaceful protest against European empire appeared as best fit for recognition.

Walker's transnational network emerged as a key force for opposing the splintering of newly independent Congo. The Brigade worked to delegitimize the movement for an independent Katanga, the province where independent Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. The movement for an independent Katanga, which gained support in virulently anti-communist American networks, was otherwise widely understood as tainted by a neo-colonial association with Belgium. The limits of self-determination for secessionist movements emerged thus, on account of a complex interplay of political and ideological forces: the normative standards that transnational advocates privileged, Cold War geopolitical calculations, and, the moral taint of the attempted Katanga secession—what Walker calls the “spectre of Katanga”—becoming generalized.

The nationalist trajectories in Zambia, Namibia, and Congo, helps frame the Naga nationalist movement in India's northeast in a global context. There, Angami Zapu Phizo led the movement for an independent Nagaland, a movement that gathered steam synchronously with Indian independence in 1947. The newly independent Indian state swiftly sought to undermine the Naga people's nationalist claim by refracting it into a claim for statehood within the Indian Union, albeit with some degree of autonomy. The Naga nationalist movement itself splintered between accommodation and militancy, leading New Delhi to pursue dialogue on the one hand, and a counterinsurgency operation on the other, which placed the land in a longstanding state of emergency. Phizo, understood as a criminal from the point of view of the Indian government, escaped to London, and there, sought to elevate the Naga claim to an international audience, where Rev. Michael Scott became his key interlocutor.

Scott's network would eventually transform Phizo's nationalist claims into the question of treatment of minorities within states, and about investigation of atrocities. Still, all of this advocacy would run into formidable difficulties. Scott's advocacy on Phizo's behalf would run into opposition from within the Peace Brigade itself; after all, a key member of Brigade, JP, had limited sympathy for the movement which he primarily understood as violent. And it would raise the ire of the Indian government, which was otherwise a key source of official support for the Brigade's activities in Africa. Questions about support for Naga nationalists would hamper the Brigade's planned peace march through Indian and Chinese territories following the 1962 Sino-Indian territorial conflict. As such, the Naga nationalist claim would not go very far. The movement suffered political defeat inasmuch as Nagaland is still, a state within India. But Walker also points to an epistemological loss: the archive, of papers and objects, of the Naga national movement remains thin, and the status of the Naga people remains a fraught question, caught between the aspirational category of a nation, and the colonialist ethnographic category—embraced by the Indian state—of a tribe.

This twin defeat of the Naga nationalist claim, of which Walker offers a deeply sympathetic account, raises questions both about the broader history of decolonization, and about etching a claim into the historical record (and thus, about historiography itself). Walker approaches these questions delicately: laying out reasons for being skeptical of the official line of the Indian state, and asking if the very idea of post-colonial statehood made certain histories impossible. Walker paints her “counternarrative” of decolonization in South Asia and Africa—how the aspiration toward nationalist self-determination countenanced its limits—ultimately as a re-enactment of a set of timeless struggles in modern history: which people can legitimately claim rights of self-determination at all, and what structures of power make those claims visible (p. 240).

At a still deeper level, this historiography also offers an important insight into the temporality of decolonization. Walker's nationalist movements are states-in-waiting because they are looking at a horizon marked by statehood, where other successful anti-colonial movements are situated. In this framing, it is easy to see the imprint of the German philosopher of history Reinert Koselleck, who suggested that modernity is marked by the condition of people understanding themselves as situated in history. Moderns experience history as forward movement, with the sense that this forward movement will close what they see as the gap between their own “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation” that they look at.Footnote ⁷ What Walker's historiography shows us is that in the 1960s, the “horizon of optimistic nationalist expectation” was rapidly foreclosed (id.), suggesting a rather frenzied passage of time. In other words, it stands to show that decolonization really, was just, a moment. In all, it makes for a fascinating read.

States-in-Waiting is rich in detail about the role that advocacy networks, made up of people ranging from peace activists to mining company executives, played in enabling, and sometimes disabling, international recognition for nationalist movements. Following this network allows Walker to write a global history of decolonization, of nationalist movements both successful and failed, along an interesting new axis. The phrase “global history of decolonization” usually conjures up the intellectual circuits within which radical reinterpretations of the self-determination norm, or Marxism-inflected notions about domination,Footnote ⁸ flowed. By contrast, the central characters in Walker's narrative are not so much radical anti-colonial leaders than their advocates/interlocutors with access to the higher echelons of international politics. By focusing on an ideologically heterogenous cast—including militants for peace, lapsed Communists, labor leaders, civil-rights activists, and capitalist peacemakers—Walker's story allows us to see the complicated political alliances that supported the end of empire.

This rich mezzo-level social historiography has valuable lessons for the study of international law. States-in-Waiting can be read as offering a historical iteration of the familiar modern phenomenon, of non-governmental actors, with vastly differing political and economic interests, shaping the norms of international law and politics, the bread-and-butter of global governance studies.Footnote ⁹ Walker's description of advocacy networks as an “unofficial sphere of international politics” (p. 118) underscores the proposition that to see the high politics of international law and relations at work, we ought to look beyond formal legal institutions and into the activities of social networks. It is within advocacy networks that norms come to be defined. Arguments rooted in legal norms play second fiddle to bargaining and negotiations. Thus, before we can draw the doctrinal bounds of “self-determination” from legal treatises and court decisions, we ought to appreciate that an interesting mix of transnational actors shaped the contours of self-determination by lending support to some nationalist claims, reconfiguring others, and denying still others. As international lawyers, we have now largely settled the idea that in most situations, the right of self-determination coincides with rights of representation (and to protection) within existing territorial states; and only under certain repressive situations—resembling a colonial context—does a right to secede exist.Footnote ¹⁰ Walker's work elegantly demonstrates an interesting social history, and a counterintuitive confluence of political and economic ideologies, lying beneath that doctrinal proposition.

Yet, even while States-in-Waiting seems to nudge us toward the social construction of legal norms, Walker does not commit fully to a social-constructivist view of the norm of self-determination. She takes us through the interaction between nationalist movements and interlocutors (and indeed between transnational advocates and their political benefactors) in a way that we can see how standards for proper self-determination, i.e., claims deserving of international recognition, were set. Yet, her account seems to retain a vaguely formal notion of what the norm of self-determination purely, or intrinsically, entails: national statehood—and the failure, on part of international actors, to sometimes adhere to that norm. This assumption, that self-determination, in the era of decolonization, was essentially a claim to liberation through nationhood, ultimately pushes some oddly Manichean conclusions, about turning focus from “decolonization's . . . liberations to [its] oppressions,” to exposing how a “postcolonial political order . . . celebrate(s) . . . national liberation, while in practice restricting access to that recognition” (pp. 206, 231).

Notwithstanding the difficulty of this “counternarrative” of decolonization that essentially reduces it to normative ideals and their incomplete realization, there is little to disagree with the broader proposition in States-in-Waiting: that progress—which decolonization surely was—is not evenly experienced. But how precisely should we evaluate this unevenness? In my view, Walker's account, framed as the contrast between “decolonization's promise of national liberation and practice of limiting whose claims . . . received international recognition” (p. 4), overestimates what the promises were. In other words, there are historical and theoretical difficulties with what is operating in the background here as the idealized version of self-determination. Of course, territorial borders inherited by post-colonial states, and then jealously guarded, were obstacles for smaller nationalist movements within those borders. But the contradiction between the norm of self-determination, and the foreclosing quality of borders is perhaps overstated. The inviolability of national borders of post-colonial states, a stress on territorial sovereignty, and international non-interference were not incidental to, but rather constitutive of, the normative order that anti-colonial actors sought to encode after World War II.Footnote ¹¹ Without territorial integrity, anti-colonial self-determination could not have been even theoretically envisioned. At several points in the book, Walker takes national self-determination to be an international norm, relying on the 1960 General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples (pp. 85, 136, 144, 231, 234). Yet, as most international lawyers would quickly recognize, the resolution in question is almost as insistent on the integrity of national territory of post-colonial states, as it is on the grant of independence. The co-constitution of anti-colonial self-determination and territorial integrity is directly evident from the text.

So much for the evidence in the key UN legal text. In my view, more importantly, the theoretical ambit of the norm of self-determination was always more limited than Walker appears to assume. One way to understand the theoretical constitution of anti-colonial self-determination is to consider how the two concepts, “colonialism” and “self-determination” came to be related. The anti-colonial political agenda—independence and the transformation of world order—rested on first conceptualizing a diversity of experiences of alien rule in Africa and Asia as colonialism.Footnote ¹² Within this interpretive framework—which must be taken seriously to understand anti-colonial action—the term colonialism achieved a semantic range wide enough to encompass various forms of European domination. This transformation made the older theoretical distinction between colonialism as settler activity, and imperialism, as rule from metropole, less salient. Instead, “colonialism” was imbued with a new moral charge, and became the basis for political action.Footnote ¹³ This also meant that the oppositional political action—claims to independence, statehood, and self-government—became irretrievably bound up with prior alien subjugation. Self-determination, in this anti-colonial vein, thus, simply could not become a norm that could legitimize every claim to statehood. International lawyers will find this incredibly familiar, given how the legal community has habitually differentiated between claims of internal and external self-determination, reserving the latter as a norm applicable only to colonized—which is to say subject to alien rule—people.Footnote ¹⁴

No doubt, the very act of making a claim to independence, by Phizo (Nagaland), or Tshombe (Katanga) should be relevant for assessing the range within which the norm of self-determination was understood. But one must be cautious in this assessment. The absence of widespread international support for secessionist movements points only partially to the ways in which transnational actors, post-colonial states, and the United Nations, foreclosed the reach of self-determination; it surely also indicates that the claim to statehood for both Katanga and Nagaland stretches—in the historical context on the 1960s—what might have been within the ambit of self-determination broadly construed.

In the case of Katanga, the difficulties are obvious enough, though Walker spends surprisingly little time on the most glaring demonstration of neocolonial political machinations: Patrice Lumumba's assassination. The secessionist movement in mineral-rich Katanga was led by Moishe Tshombe, a leader deeply aligned with Congo's former colonial sovereign, Belgium. Tshombe's concern of course, was the possible nationalization of mineral-extraction profits in an independent Congo led by Prime Minister Lumumba. Given the constitution of mining interests in Congo at the time, Tshombe naturally found direct support from Belgium, and indirect assistance from the Eisenhower administration. From this crucible, came an armed attempt at secession, which the United Nations did little, at first, to prevent, despite being invited to send a peacekeeping force. As Patrice Lumumba turned to the Soviets for assistance, the United States also came to increasingly view his removal necessary. That removal ultimately took a brutal turn, with Patrice Lumumba arrested, tortured, and ultimately murdered in Katanga, by some accounts, personally by Tshombe.Footnote ¹⁵ That it is only following this assassination that a United Nations peacekeeping force would bring Katanga's attempted secession to an end, makes it an oddly straightforward instance of the international community parsing illegitimate claims of independence from legitimate ones. Paradoxically, as a result, we can draw very few deeper insights about the nature of decolonization from this episode; except perhaps one lesson that Walker draws: the case of Katanga raised the worry that many sub-national movements could be tainted by the same brush.

But even the case of Nagaland runs into a set of problems that are internal to the norm of self-determination. These problems have little to do with India's official framing of the question as a domestic issue. On that count, I agree that there is good reason to be skeptical of the official narratives. Undoubtedly, through the exercise of political power, new, large states like India, limited the reach of international norms within their borders. But theoretically, I fear, Walker overestimates the “nationalist possibility” that was baked into self-determination in the decades of decolonization. Walker treats Nagaland (and Katanga) as states-in-waiting because they invoked the fact of being a “people” and asserted independence. But this view of self-determination—privileging a subjectivist standpoint—sits at theoretical odds with the broader terrain of anti-colonial politics that made self-determination available to the non-Western world in the first place. At its foundation, political self-determination in the Third World, was irresistibly tied up with the idea of colonial domination. As I noted above, it is a theory of domination—made intelligible as “colonialism”—that supported claims to independence. The point is explicit in the final communiqué issued at the end of the 1955 Bandung Conference. The text shows that anti-colonial leaders yoked their own support for self-determination and human rights to their condemnation of racial segregation and discrimination; while their explicit support for national independence is reserved for people subject to “alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation.”Footnote ¹⁶

The crux of the independence movement in Nagaland, as Walker describes, revolved around distinctiveness of the people, rather than on a claim of domination by alien-rule. There lies an important theoretical wedge between these two distinct ways to lay stake to self-determination: on a theory of being a dominated people, and on a theory of being a distinct people. In the historical context, for anti-colonial norm-entrepreneurs, only the former claim could take the national independence form. This is why, while Nehru's government could see the Nagaland issue as embedded in a global context about decolonization, it could maintain it as an issue of autonomy within borders, rather than of national liberation (pp. 51–53). Even though Walker's treatment of the material provokes important questions about whose nationalism, or whose claim to independence, would become legitimate, it ends up overestimating the gap between the norm and “the actual practice of international recognition” (p. 23).

There is yet another way of getting to the point above. In recasting decolonization as a story of some nationalisms honored, some denied, Walker appears to treat the process of decolonization as essentially extensive nationalist claims-making; and nationalist claims-making as essentially the exercise of political self-determination. This calls for a note of caution. Decolonization might be better understood as the process that undid, or attempted to undo, a specific form of injustice: alien rule. No doubt, this took the form of national movements, but nationalism was only one of the many possible solutions to the problem of European empire, that were available in the historical context. As I noted above, this is precisely the point that Adom Getachew made in showing that African decolonization was a politics of reworking world order, and the creation of national states was somewhat orthogonal to that politics.

India's anti-colonial movement—key foil for the Nagaland story—is itself difficult to reduce to simply nationalist terms. As recent work in the history of political thought has stressed, for anti-colonial leaders like Nehru, the question was only partly about what/who constitutes the Indian nation. The bigger issue was to resolve whether a sufficiently developed Indian “people,” capable of authorizing their own government, existed? In this sense, Nehru's anti-colonial politics drank from the same nineteenth-century theoretical well, filled with ideas about civilization and historical development, as liberal imperialism. This anti-colonial politics could only see the Indian people as essentially masses. How could such masses, not yet developed, authorize independence? Leaders like Nehru solved this problem of independence-in-waiting by reversing its logic: a centralized developmental state in the Soviet model—accelerating economic development—could bring a people into being, rather than the people first authorizing sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁷ This logic, at once developmental in the nineteenth-century sense, and also radically undermining of those premises, had salience across the decolonizing world. It explains why across Asia and Africa, centralized state power and economic planning became the core elements of post-colonial governmental technology. Seen from this perspective, in the colonial context, the question of being/becoming a “people” entitled to exercise self-determination was not the same as the one that we are more familiar with in international law, of being a distinct group capable of staking claim to nationhood. Rather, for anti-colonial thinkers, it became a question of resolving the conditions under which a people might authorize self-rule. Self-determination became less about the national form that independence took, than the governmental form that independence allowed. Thus, while States-in-Waiting shows that the movements in Nagaland and Katanga certainly stressed their distinctiveness as groups, referring to Christian faith, and overall westernization, one might have to consider that distinctiveness itself was a tangential issue in context. Secessionist movements appeared to run into the problem, of not merely the jealousy of newly independent states about their borders, as Walker describes, but of the very conceptual ground upon which decolonization was being forged.

My reserved judgment on this count notwithstanding, historically minded international lawyers will find this book greatly enjoyable and will nod at the idea that we cannot sharply distinguish between imperial orderings of the world, and post-colonial orderings. And we certainly benefit from learning that the transition from the world of European empires to a world of largely independent states was midwifed by a universe of transnational actors whose own ideological proclivities, and political priorities, do not easily map onto the lofty rhetoric of liberation that we usually associate with decolonization.