This chapter examines decolonisation and ‘real democracy’ in Occupy Oakland (OO) and links the failure to decolonise to the institutionalisation of real democracy. Our argument is that the attempt to channel the militancy Occupy unleashed across diverse, internally divided communities, exposed the fractures within the so called 99% and privileged the norms of the dominant groups. Rather than enabling challenge, revision and adjustment, to forestall secession or lessen its harms, Oakland’s rules about legitimate action scuppered mutual aid, creating mistrust and division. Decolonising initiatives were arbitrated by a demos that claimed to speak for the 99%, against those who spoke for a specific subcommunity: the indigenous peoples of Oakland. The chapter opens with a short history of Occupy and presents an account of Oakland’s municipal politics and urban development. The second part shows how Oakland was constitutionalised through Occupy as a forum for ‘real democracy’. The third part uses the architecture of anarchist constitutional politics outlined in Chapter 1 to describe the main camp pitched outside City Hall, the institutions, rules and decision-making processes OO adopted to sustain its version of ‘real democracy. The fourth part examines the breakdown of the consensus following the spectacular general strike of November 2011.

The chapter examines the role of the UN Charter in shaping the Cold War’s ideological and legal landscape. The chapter begins with Winston Churchill’s 1946 ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech, which highlighted the duality of the post-war world: the creation of the United Nations and the emerging division between East and West. The UN Charter, while promoting sovereign statehood and universality, also formalised the Amero-Soviet rivalry, embedding ambiguities that allowed ideological contestation within a lawful framework. The Charter’s emphasis on sovereign statehood and the nation-state form provided a template for decolonisation, yet left space for rival interpretations and political agendas, particularly from Latin American, African and Asian states. The chapter explores how the Charter’s ambiguities facilitated US–Soviet competition, focusing on representation, intervention and self-determination. It highlights the Charter’s role in enabling covert US–Soviet rivalry and its impact on global order, decolonisation and the stabilisation of property ownership. The chapter concludes by setting the stage for the next chapter, which will explore the Amero-Soviet project of world-making through the UN Charter and its broader geopolitical implications.

This chapter introduces Rival Legalities: Practices of International Law in the Cold War, exploring international law’s practices during the Cold War. The authors aim to redescribe Cold War international law, revealing a rich plurality of legal forms and practices. Contrary to the narrative of the Cold War as an interruption in international law’s development, the authors propose viewing it as a period of rivalrous yet mutually constitutive accounts of the ‘international’. This perspective highlights diverse world-making projects beyond the East-West dichotomy, including anti-colonial and anti-anti-colonial efforts. Recognising the plurality of rival world-making projects demands a different conceptual frame than one focused solely on American-Soviet rivalry. The authors argue that international law during the Cold War was not a settled body of norms but a set of practices emerging from the period’s unique conditions. By examining these practices, the book offers a new lens on the Cold War’s impact on international law, highlighting the creative and strategic uses of law by various actors, particularly from the Global South, in their struggles for decolonisation and new international legal orders.

The years from 1956 to 1968 saw a profound cultural transformation in majority attitudes to religious minorities, and the latter’s engagement with Ireland. Israel’s victory in the wars of 1956 and 1967 changed the self-perception and public standing of the Jewish community. The disbanding of the British Empire in Africa, which was virtually completed by 1967, helped to detach Protestants from residual ‘West Briton’ nostalgia. In parallel with decolonisation, the beginning of the process of European integration created the prospect of a future political settlement within which minority status would be resolved in a pluralist definition of legitimate belonging. Finally, Vatican II (1962–5) was decisive in transforming the atmosphere of the country, but liberalisation was gradual, and at first often superficial. In 1966 – on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising – The Irish Times denounced the terrifying conditions of the country’s industrial and reformatory schools. That the minorities as a whole were unmoved by such revelations showed the extent to which – despite professions of liberalism – they were largely part of Ireland’s conservative consensus.

Up to at least the 1960s, English was seen as a world language integrated around two equipollent standards, British and American. Since then, in the wake of decolonisation, this bi-polar constellation has given way to models arguing for various pluricentric constellations. What tends to be overlooked, however, is the fact that the agents of standardisation and the sociocultural environment in which standardisation is taking place are markedly different today from what they were in the mid twentieth century. The power of educated elites to define linguistic standards has weakened considerably, while language technologies and software algorithms enforce homogenisation of usage in the written domain, promoting new norms that are not always in line with traditional notions of ‘good English’. In addition, the global spread of English has not only involved standard varieties, but also some non-standard ones. Removed from their vernacular home-bases, these non-standard forms have gained prestige and become available for new functions. This has produced the ‘standardisation paradox’ that Global English is facing in the early twenty-first century and that the present chapter will illustrate and analyse.

This chapter delves into the concept of ‘Rights of Nature’ (RoN) through a semiotic lens; in particular, the ethnological semiology of Jean Baudrillard has significantly influenced this contribution. RoN challenges conventional anthropocentric legal paradigms by integrating Indigenous cosmovisions in Western jurisprudence. By examining legislative examples such as New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua Act and Australia’s Yarra River Protection Act, this chapter assesses whether these recognitions faithfully reflect Indigenous viewpoints or merely adapt nature into pre-existing Western ontological (legal) philosophies.

RoN frequently intersects with Indigenous cosmovisions, suggesting a profound, metaphysical significance beyond Western legal constructs. This discussion illuminates the evolving character of RoN and its interplay with legal pluralism. The incorporation of RoN into Western legal systems unveils a dynamic where Indigenous knowledge is recognised but simultaneously streamlined to conform to established legal structures.

The chapter further contemplates the possibility that RoN may simply codify Indigenous rights without capturing the full depth of Indigenous perspectives. Ultimately, RoN signifies an endeavour to broaden the legal recognition of nature and its purported intrinsic values, albeit at the risk of misrepresenting Indigenous knowledge as mere extensions of Western legal ontology. In doing so, RoN adorns itself with the Indigenous symbol and ritual to advance environmental politics.

Like most other African states, the nature of British rule meant late-colonial and early post-colonial Kenya was an extraverted state, inseparably tied in a peripheral manner to global networks of power and capital. As its political leaders set about challenging British rule in the 1950s, they had little choice but to engage with external actors seeking to influence the outcome of the process of decolonisation. But the likes of Tom Mboya did so in nuanced and sometimes contradictory ways. Mboya was certainly a worldmaker, who saw links to international allies as key to the overthrow of British colonialism and the reconstruction of the global economy and international organisations as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence. In this effort he found considerable support from the United States. But this effort set him in competition with Kenya’s other worldmakers, such as Oginga Odinga, who had very different networks and more radical visions of what a post-colonial world might look like and Kenya’s place within it. In his efforts to assert control over Kenya’s links to the wider world and to exclude his political rivals, Mboya became an adept gatekeeper.

This chapter explores the experiences of hundreds of Kenyan students who travelled to the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria and other communist states during the late 1950s and 1960s and the politics surrounding them. Initiated for similar reasons as Mboya’s own airlift of students to the United States and expanded in a deliberate effort to compete with Mboya’s programme, the support of students for study in Eastern and Central Europe was a major part of Odinga’s efforts to build his own political base and to address Kenya’s urgent educational needs. After independence in 1963, and with Odinga increasingly in conflict with both Mboya and Kenyatta, these students became a source of considerable political controversy. The fact that some of the students had been sent for military training under agreements struck by nationalist leaders before independent Kenya’s military deals with Britain were finalised meant that returning graduates became the subject of Cold War–inspired rumours of coup plots to support Odinga. With Odinga forced out of the ruling party and government in 1966, the graduates from Eastern and Central Europe were frozen out of senior roles in government.

The conclusion to the book considers the significant contribution of Kenya’s worldmakers to the anti-colonial cause and the place Tom Mboya rightly holds within the pantheon of Kenya’s great nationalist leaders. He is held dearly in the memory of Kenyans as the personification of the potential for a successful Kenyan multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan democracy. His legacy has been invoked regularly at moments of political crisis in the decades following his death. But the conclusion argues Mboya’s legacy was more complicated and interesting than this posthumous memorialisation allows. He shows instead how the practices of worldmaking ran alongside those of gatekeeping. Mboya and others like him had little choice but to adopt this dual strategy of global engagement because of the context of the Cold War. Drawing on Mary Dudziak’s work on the civil rights movement in the United States, the conclusion considers in detail the influence of the Cold War on the politics of decolonising Kenya. Although the Cold War helped enable decolonisation, it also acted to limit the possible trajectories states such as Kenya could adopt once independent.

Mboya’s engagement with the AFL-CIO was a critical stage in his development as a nationalist and Pan-Africanist leader. Cultivated during a hugely successful tour of the United States in 1956, his relationship with figures connected to the American labour federation would last until his death in 1969. But Mboya’s network in the United States stretched beyond the labour movement. By following Mboya on his 1956 tour, the chapter shows his rapidly developing and deep connection to the American Committee on Africa, which had emerged out of the civil rights movement. Mboya returned home to Kenya as a hero, and decided to capitalise on his fame by standing for election to the colony’s legislative council in 1957, the first opportunity Kenya’s African population had to vote for their representatives. Mboya’s charisma, record as a trade union leader and policy platform certainly made him very popular in his Nairobi constituency, but the financial support his American allies provided was also a significant reason for his success. Mboya also leveraged his international profile on the Pan-African stage too, most notably when chairing the All-Africa People’s Conference held in Ghana in 1958.

Perhaps Mboya’s most famous initiative was the so-called ‘Airlift’, a programme that provided travel assistance to hundreds of Kenyans to enable them to take up scholarship opportunities in North America. Remembered now for its alumni, the airlift was a major part of Mboya’s efforts to get returns from his international networks, both in terms of the political capital he accrued as a result of the massive popularity of the programme and the opportunities it provided to Kenyans. Education was a particularly powerful issue within the politics of decolonising Kenya. The limited educational opportunities provided by British colonial rulers to Kenya’s African subjects meant there was enormous demand and need for any opportunity to travel overseas to acquire a university education. However, the programme was also highly political. The chapter considers the role played by members of Mboya’s American network and how their participation was shaped by Cold War priorities. It also examines the personal experience of the students, with a particular emphasis on the financial hardships many faced as a consequence of the way the programme was deliberately structured.