The First Right

Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941–2000

Bradley R. Simpson (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

384 Seiten

2025
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-994440-8 (ISBN)

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The idea of self-determination is one of the most significant in modern international politics. For more than a century diplomats, lawyers, scholars, activists, and ordinary people in every part of the globe have wrestled with its meaning and implications for decolonization, human rights, sovereignty, and international order. The First Right argues that there was no one self-determination, but a century-long contest between contending visions of sovereignty and rights that were as varied and changing as the nature of sovereignty itself. In this globe-spanning narrative, Simpson argues that self-determination's meaning has often emerged not just from the United Nations but from the claims of movements and peoples on the margins of international society. Powerful states, he shows, persistently rejected expansive self-determination claims, arguing that these threatened great power conflict, the dissolution of international order, or the unravelling of the world economy.

Pacific Island territories, indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups, among others, rejected the efforts of large, powerful states to define self-determination along narrow lines. Instead, international historian Bradley R. Simpson shows they offered expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty ranging far beyond the movement for decolonization with which they are often associated. As they did so, these movements and groups helped to vernacularize self-determination as a language of social justice and rights for people around the world.

An ambitious work of global breadth on a key geopolitical issue, The First Right transforms how we think about the making of the twentieth century world order and the place of the global South and decolonization in it.

Bradley R. Simpson, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut Bradley R. Simpson is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 and the director of the Indonesia documentation project at the nonprofit National Security Archive.

Introduction: One, Two, Three, Many Self-Determinations
1: The Global Purchase of Self-Determination
2: Defining Self-Determination
3: African Decolonization and Self-Determination
4: Economic Sovereignty and Self-Determination
5: Self-Determination in Very Small Places
6: Self-Determination Beyond Decolonization
7: Self-Determination in the Age of Globalization
Conclusion: Afterlives

Erscheinungsdatum	17.10.2025
Reihe/Serie	Oxford Studies in International History
Zusatzinfo	4 b/w illustrations
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	160 x 239 mm
Gewicht	726 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Wirtschaftsgeschichte
ISBN-10	0-19-994440-7 / 0199944407
ISBN-13	978-0-19-994440-8 / 9780199944408
Zustand	Neuware