Introduction

Summary

On 24 October 1945, when the UN Charter entered into force, an estimated 750 million people, nearly a third of the world’s population, lived in territories under direct or indirect foreign rule. By the end of 1990, thirty years after it adopted the landmark Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and established a special committee to oversee the process of decolonization,¹ this number had cratered to a few million and the UN General Assembly felt enough pride in its track record to celebrate the inception of an ‘International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism’.² Today, roughly 70 per cent of the world’s population is descended from colonizers or colonial subjects, in many cases from both.³ The experiences of countless occupied territories, oppressed nations, unrecognized states, secessionist movements, and Indigenous peoples, to say nothing of those struggling against ongoing neocolonialism, make it clear that colonialism has not come to an end – and that it certainly cannot be reduced to the formal processes of decolonization coordinated by states and international organizations. But the fact remains that over eighty states gained their independence within a single generation after the Second World War, with most colonial territories thereby reconstituted as states possessed of de jure sovereignty. Fewer than two million now live in the seventeen territories that continue to be designated as ‘non-self-governing’ on the United Nations’ admittedly incomplete and controversial list.⁴