The idea of self-determination belongs among the most important in modern international politics, yet its meaning and implications for decolonization, human rights, sovereignty, world economy, and international order remain fiercely contested. In The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2025), historian Bradley Simpson traces a century-long struggle over competing conceptions of self-determination and shows how crucial contributions emerged not only from the United Nations, but also from the claims of marginalized movements and peoples: Pacific Island territories, Indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups. The book recovers expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty that extended well beyond the era of formal decolonization, and shows how powerful states persistently rejected these broader interpretations, arguing that they threatened great-power conflict and the dissolution of international order.
In this interview, I speak with Bradley Simpson about the background to his research, the role of very small places and territories in debates about self-determination, the distinctions between decolonization and self-determination, and the relationship between self-determination and armed struggle. We also discuss the economic dimension of self-determination and the significance of UN General Assembly Resolution 1803 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources.
– Mirek Tobiáš Hošman (Einaudi Foundation; European University Institute)
Mirek Tobiáš Hošman (MTS): To begin, could you tell us how this project started? You mention that you began thinking about this topic more than twenty years ago. What were the intellectual or personal experiences that set you on the path toward writing The First Right?
Bradley Simpson (BS): I first started thinking seriously about self-determination in college, as a human rights and solidarity activist working on then–Indonesian-occupied East Timor, now Timor-Leste. I was involved in a US-based campaign for East Timor’s self-determination that sought to end Indonesia’s occupation by curtailing US military and economic support for Jakarta, which had invaded in 1975. And as activists, we used the term self-determination quite flexibly. We believed East Timor had an ironclad legal right to self-determination under international law and should be allowed to choose its own political future. At the same time, I saw that many US and other Western officials dismissed East Timor’s functional right to self-determination, arguing that it was too small, “backward,” or “primitive” to govern itself and would be better off integrated into Indonesia. Similar debates were unfolding in other places like West Papua.
While researching my first book, Economists with Guns (Stanford University Press, 2008), I realized that these debates over what self-determination could and should look like for places like West Papua and East Timor were part of a much broader story than I had realized. There were already important efforts to historicize self-determination, especially Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment, which examined debates around World War I, but I felt those works did not reach far enough in time and excluded large parts of the globe from their gaze. And so, I began taking sort of side trips in the archives, as we often do when we have a little bit of extra time at the end of a week-stay or so. I started looking for materials at the UN archives and the UK and US national archives concerning the US or British or Australian or other countries’ attitudes towards self-determination, both at the UN and in particular cases (some of which I made available on my website).
It became clear that these struggles were part of a much larger global story. In 2009, I presented some of this material at a conference in Freiburg. The positive feedback convinced me that there was a book to be written, one that would frame self-determination as a global, twentieth-century phenomenon, not just as an issue of the First World War or European decolonization.
MTH: One chapter of The First Right discusses self-determination in very small places that forced the international community to define the outer limits of self-determination and grapple with questions you just outlined such as were some places and people “too small and backward” to merit self-determination – and if so, how would their future look like in the international system and how would the relevant limits be identified. Could you tell us more about which challenges these small places posed to the international order and which solidarity networks and connections they built to promote their views.
BS: One of the arguments I make in the book is that self-determination claims and debates reveal persistent fears about the supposed dangers of expansive self-determination in the twentieth century. Already after the First World War, when the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires broke up and a number of new, mostly ethno-national states emerged in Southern and Eastern Europe, observers worried that these small states might generate instability. Those fears endured.
I also argue that “small” didn’t always mean geographically small – places like Sudan, Western Sahara, West Papua, or Greenland could be quite large – but territories portrayed as small in size or population provoked recurring anxieties. Critics doubted they could form viable states: they were seen as lacking industry, an adequate economic base, sufficient populations for workforces or armies, and the resources needed for self-sufficiency in a world dominated by large states. In this view, they were likely to become sites of invasion or chronic instability.
These concerns drew on a particular reading of European state-making that treated successful late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European powers – with big populations, big landmasses, big industries, and big armies – as the model of viability. From that standpoint, the “lesson” many distilled from the two world wars was that small states were dangerous to international society. After 1945, the victors, especially the United States, wanted an international system that would minimize the dangers supposedly posed by the self-determination claims of small territories and peoples.
When the United Nations was created, its architects – including the great powers, colonial empires, large heterogeneous states such as India, and first-generation independent states like Indonesia and the Philippines – worried about multiplying small states. They feared centrifugal forces that might pull apart heterogeneous states and undermine the international order, and they thought this might even delegitimize the UN by mocking the principle of sovereign equality. The idea that Malta and the United States were “equal” struck many US officials as absurd, even though sovereign equality lies at the core of the modern interstate system.
The second part of your question is about solidarity networks. Small territories, lacking large populations and dense diplomatic networks, depended on other ways of amplifying their voices. I argue that transnational solidarity was crucial for circulating and amplifying the self-determination claims of small peoples and territories, especially at the sub-state level. Regional, ethnic, religious, and other movements drew on advocacy networks they created or tapped into to spread what many critics considered radical claims – seceding from decolonizing states, or demanding new forms of sovereignty below the state level such as regional autonomy or federalism.
To gain legitimacy and international acceptance, these small peoples and territories needed political allies to voice their demands at the UN, and intellectual allies to develop new theories of sovereignty – economic, political, and cultural – that could justify claims running against established views on secession. They also relied on NGOs, anti-colonial movements, human rights organizations, and, by the 1960s and 1970s, international indigenous peoples’ organizations to promote new understandings of human rights, which I discuss in a different chapter of the book.
MTH: Another major argument of The First Right is that self-determination is not synonymous with decolonization, and that equating the two can obscure more than it reveals. You already alluded to this in your previous answer, but in your view, what gets lost when we collapse these two concepts into one another?
BS: One of the great things about being a historian is engaging in productive debate with other scholars, either directly or through your writing. For me, the two scholars that I engaged in some of the most productive debate with were Erez Manela, author of The Wilsonian Moment, and Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire, a political theory treatment of self-determination in the twentieth century. Getachew focuses mainly on decolonization movements from roughly the 1920s to the 1970s and argues that self-determination declines once those movements end and neoliberalism becomes the dominant way of organizing the world economy. Manela, by contrast, offers a geographically broad but chronologically narrow account of self-determination as emerging after the First World War and then being taken up by more radical actors as the limits of Wilsonian conception of self-determination became clear.
Both arguments are powerful, but focusing on either a narrow chronology or a narrow geography leaves out important dynamics. Treating self-determination simply as a proxy for decolonization, for example, obscures Latin America and Central America, where there was a long tradition of thinking about self-determination and sovereignty shaped by Spanish and Portuguese imperialism and by British and American interventions. There, self-determination was closely tied to defending sovereignty, sovereign equality, resource sovereignty, and anti-interventionism in international law. Likewise, concentrating only on the decolonizing world obscures how European actors thought about self-determination across the twentieth century. Debates over minority rights in Europe, including in the former Habsburg and Ottoman empires, followed different trajectories and shaped arguments about citizenship, personhood, and the rights of minorities in international law, as scholars like Laura Robson and others have shown.
There is also a chronological issue. As an idea, self-determination does not simply fade with the end of UN-sponsored decolonization in the 1970s. Many territories – Western Sahara, Palestine, East Timor, parts of the Pacific – still had unresolved decolonization questions, and beyond that we see a growing number of self-determination claims after the so-called end of empire. If we equate self-determination with decolonization, we cannot explain why these claims actually proliferate in the late twentieth century.
To capture this, we need to think about self-determination more expansively in geographical, chronological, and thematic terms. One example from the later part of the book is the creation, in the 1990s, of organizations like the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. Its founders explicitly framed it as a response to the limits of the UN’s decolonization mechanisms in dealing with the many self-determination claims that persisted into the 1990s and 2000s. The endurance and spread of these claims, in places far beyond the classic “decolonizing world” and well after formal decolonization, suggest the need for a longer and broader history of self-determination than a simple equation with decolonization allows.
We need to think about self-determination more expansively in geographical, chronological, and thematic terms.
MTH: One of the threads I found interesting in your book is the debate about the relationship between self-determination and violence. How central were debates about violence and armed struggle to the broader conversations about self-determination that you trace? Could you talk a little about this aspect of your research?
BS: A lot of historians, international legal scholars, and political scientists have examined debates among anti-colonial movements and at the United Nations over whether armed struggle was necessary and legitimate for achieving decolonization and self-determination. From the outset there were starkly conflicting views. Colonial powers tended to define any resistance as “terrorism” and therefore illegitimate, while anti-colonial movements broadly embraced armed struggle as a legitimate, and often necessary, route to national liberation and self-determination. In some contexts, like Indonesia, an armed independence movement made the legitimacy of violence widely accepted among anti-colonial actors. Elsewhere, many in the first generation of anti-colonial movements initially hoped decolonization could be won through political struggle, without recourse to arms.
In practice, though, armed struggle proved crucial in places such as Algeria, Vietnam, and parts of Southern Africa, both for delegitimizing colonial rule and for mobilizing nationalist forces. By the early 1960s this prompted increasingly explicit debates at the UN about whether armed struggle could be recognized as a lawful means of achieving self-determination, especially in Southern Africa, the Portuguese colonies, and Palestine.
The core dilemma was framed roughly as follows: if self-determination is indeed the “first right” from which other human rights derive, do anti-colonial movements have the right to use whatever means they can – including armed struggle – to secure it? Within the UN General Assembly, the broad consensus among anti-colonial and post-colonial states in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America was yes. The Assembly and its committees issued a stream of resolutions affirming the right of peoples in Southern Africa, Palestine, and elsewhere to use armed force to achieve self-determination, in part because they recognized that colonial powers would label almost any resistance as terrorism.
Debates over the meaning of “terrorism” in the 1960s and 1970s were therefore closely tied to these liberation struggles. Historians like Paul Chamberlin, in The Global Offensive, have shown how the Palestinian liberation struggle and the movements in the Lusophone territories of Southern Africa generated a disproportionate share of UN debate about terrorism and the legitimacy of armed struggle. Many regional conferences, formal and informal, echoed the view that armed struggle was a human right for peoples seeking to realize what was also defined as a human right, self-determination, and urged rejection of the blanket characterization of such movements as terrorist.
At the same time, many post-colonial states were very reluctant to endorse the idea that armed struggle was a human right, because they were themselves facing secessionist movements using violence – Nigeria, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and of course Israel all opposed UN efforts that would legitimize armed struggle in international law. The battle lines in these debates did not simply run along Cold War East–West or Global North–South axes. They often ran between large, heterogeneous states confronting internal secessionist pressures and smaller states or movements that did not face those same challenges.
One of the broader points I make in the book is that debates about self-determination, violence, and terrorism were truly global and cut across the usual categories of Cold War history or simple colonizer–colonized narratives. Understanding them requires a different map of the conflicts and alliances that self-determination claims produced in international politics – fault lines that do not fit neatly into our conventional frameworks and really need to be understood on their own terms.
MTH: Next to political self-determination, you also explore economic self-determination, especially through the lens of UN Resolution 1803 on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources. Among the multitude of UN resolutions, why did this one become so important? Could you tell us about its background and explain what was its purpose and promise that made it such a touchstone for so many states and movements?
BS: A basic question in international law – especially for decolonizing and postcolonial states – was: who actually controls the resources on and under a country’s territory? Is it the people, foreign investors and multinational firms, the former colonial powers, or someone else? For decolonizing peoples, this went to the heart of whether they could exercise economic sovereignty after political independence.
Latin American jurists and diplomats had been grappling with these issues since at least the late nineteenth century, partly because of repeated military, economic, and political interventions by the United States and Britain. I argue that Latin American thinkers were among the first to develop what Christopher Dietrich and others call resource sovereignty: the idea that states have a right to control their own natural resources and should not be deprived of them by external actors – whether multinational oil or mining companies, or foreign governments punishing them for nationalizing firms or resources needed for development.
From the early 1950s, the United Nations began debating whether economic self-determination was itself a human right. Between 1950 and 1952, the General Assembly and various UN committees affirmed that self-determination was a human right, but many advocates insisted that political self-determination was meaningless without economic sovereignty. This view came not only from anti-colonial movements and newly independent states, but also from Latin American and Central American diplomats and jurists – especially from countries like Bolivia and Costa Rica – drawing on their own efforts to secure economic independence from the United States and Britain.
These questions were especially acute in decolonizing territories because international law, crafted largely by colonial powers, did not recognize the right of newly independent states to nationalize their own resources or renegotiate exploitative concession agreements – steps they regarded as essential to meaningful political and economic sovereignty. The UN debates that culminated in Resolution 1803 emerged directly from these struggles over whether economic self-determination should be recognized as a human right.
Colonial powers and many resource-importing states fiercely opposed this. They saw claims to permanent sovereignty over natural resources as an attack on the post-1945 global economic order shaped by the United States. And in a sense they were right: asserting such a right directly challenged the prevailing view among US and Western officials that the resources of what we now call the Global South were effectively global public goods, open to relatively unrestricted access by industrialized states and their firms – and countries like Venezuela, Iran, Indonesia, or Spanish Sahara were not assumed to have an unquestioned right to control those resources.
Throughout the 1950s, these debates were extremely bitter. British, French, US, and other Western officials argued that acknowledging a right to economic self-determination threatened their economic interests in postcolonial states. Western firms lobbied the UN aggressively and even sought common cause with some human rights and anti-colonial organizations to argue against recognizing such a right.
What made Resolution 1803 so important, then, was that it crystallized this broader struggle to enshrine economic self-determination as a core principle of international law. Participants on all sides understood that the stakes were much larger than whether a particular country could control its oil. These debates raised fundamental questions about whether states had the right to control their economic affairs more generally, and whether sovereignty had any real meaning if countries could not control not only their resources but also macroeconomic policy and the terms under which foreign firms operated.
Later developments – from the push for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s to subsequent disputes over structural adjustment, globalization, and even the patenting of genetic resources and biotechnology – show that arguments about economic self-determination reached far beyond decolonization. Resolution 1803 became a touchstone because it offered a legal and symbolic anchor for these broader claims: that postcolonial states should have genuine control over their resources and, by extension, a greater say over the shape of the global economy.
MTH: How would you assess the concrete impact of Resolution 1803, especially as the UN resolutions are sometimes perceived as largely symbolic or ineffective? To what extent did it shape state practice or international law beyond its formal, declaratory status?
BS: I would actually suggest that the impact of these debates was quite substantive. Recognizing the right of states to permanent sovereignty over natural resources provided the legal warrant for the expropriation of oil by petroleum-producing states in the 1960s and 1970s, and for the nationalization of mineral resources – tin, gold, copper, and so on – by Latin American and other states during the same period.
What this recognition did not do was automatically grant those countries full economic sovereignty, because their resources could only be exploited within a global capitalist system in which prices and demand were not set by resource-producing states themselves. So, materially, acknowledging the right of states to permanent sovereignty over natural resources had a very important impact – arguably an immeasurable one – on the ability of resource-producing states to capture most of the rents from resource production that would otherwise have gone to foreign firms and former colonial powers.
At the same time, this did not fundamentally transform the structure of international economic relations in the way some advocates of a New International Economic Order hoped it might. Countries of the Global North and the firms based there moved quickly to create new rules and institutions designed to blunt the force of these new legal categories – for example, systems of international arbitration for investment disputes, and mechanisms that shifted decision-making away from the United Nations and its General Assembly, where post-colonial states had growing influence, into forums where multinational corporations and powerful Western states enjoyed greater leverage.
In that sense, movements for economic sovereignty helped to generate not only new rights but also new institutional counter-measures. We can see a kind of call-and-response dynamic: demands for economic sovereignty prompted, in some cases, a withdrawal by the United States and other powerful states from active participation in UN committees and processes, and the creation of alternative organizations and mechanisms for governing the world economy that enabled them to preserve many of the unequal practices and relationships that had characterized the colonial era.
MTH: Finally, having completed The First Right, what is your next major project?
BS: I have a couple of projects in mind, some flowing from this book and others building on earlier work. One of them is an edited history of self-determination that would bring together both younger and more senior scholars to lay out the current state of the field and, ideally, help establish a research agenda for future historians of self-determination. One of the main conclusions I drew while writing The First Right is that we need many more local studies of self-determination – close studies of debates in particular places – because none of us has the linguistic or archival reach to map these debates globally on our own. What I hope this edited volume will do is serve as a kind of methodological provocation: an invitation to connect these local debates about the scope and meaning of self-determination with their global counterparts, and to trace the points where they intersect, whether in international organizations, in journals of international law, or in the work of transnational movements and organizations that circulate self-determination claims from one part of the world to another.
And my next book will be a global history of the East Timor solidarity movement co-authored with David Webster. I first started writing about it more than 20 years ago; in fact, my first published article, “Solidarity in the Age of Globalization”, was an early attempt to conceptualize the movement, but at the time I didn’t yet have either the methodological tools or the archival material to give it the treatment I thought it deserved. Now, having written something that looks and feels like a global history, I have a much clearer sense of how to write an “inside-out” global history of a solidarity movement rooted in a particular place. The book will trace how East Timor’s struggle for self-determination both drew on and helped create a truly global network of solidarity activists over roughly a quarter century, all working to amplify Timorese demands for self-determination. East Timor is one of the few genuinely successful self-determination struggles – and one of the few transnational solidarity campaigns – that actually won. Because of that, Timor-Leste has important lessons to offer not only to scholars of transnational solidarity, human rights, and self-determination, but also, hopefully, to contemporary self-determination movements and solidarity campaigns in places where self-determination remains an unrealized promise.
MTH: So, you’re going back to where it started.
BS: There’s a line in the last Matrix movie where they say “oh, we’re going back to where it all began, Mr. Anderson”, so this is kind of how it feels [laughs]. But I think I’m ready to try and write about a single place again, even if that single place sent out feelers to many other parts of the world.
Bradley R. Simpson is a historian of twentieth-century US foreign relations and international history at the University of Connecticut. He is the founder and director of the Indonesia documentation project at the non-profit National Security Archive. He is the author of Economists with Guns and has published extensively in the International History Review, Cold War History, Diplomatic History, and Peace and Change, among other journals. For more information, visit his personal website.