Decolonisation Interrupted: West Papua, the UN and the Limits of Self-determination

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Traditional histories of decolonisation have tended to focus on struggles for decolonisation against European powers, particularly in Asia and Africa. This talk moves beyond this canon to explore the West Papuan campaign for independence in the 1960s. West Papuan activists asserted their right to self-determination and independence from both Dutch colonialism and Indonesian imperialism. The West Papuan campaign in the 1960s was deeply influenced by ideas circulating in Afro-Asian networks and at the United Nations. Studying the campaign of West Papuan activists, reveals new imagined networks of solidarity cultivated between Africa and the Pacific, while also drawing attention to the ways in which Global South politics worked against the claims of colonial peoples such as the West Papuans. Focusing on the West Papuan movement offers a new perspective on a transformative moment in international history, revealing how ideas relating to self-determination and decolonisation were critically engaged with by thinkers outside centres of power at the United Nations in New York.

Speaker

Emma Kluge is Lecturer in Colonial and Environmental History at the University of Exeter, Cornwall. Prior to this, she was a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute and completed her PhD at the University of Sydney. Emma is a historian of decolonisation, anticolonial and environmental activism, and global governance. She focuses on the development of transnational activist networks in Oceania and interactions between these organisations and international institutions. Her first book, Decolonisation Interrupted (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), examines the strategies West Papuan activists used to launch a global campaign for independence at the United Nations in the 1960s. Her second project, The Green Pacific, investigates the intersection between anticolonial and environmental thinking and activism in Oceania across the twentieth century.