Overview

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.

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9780199944408

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Reviews

Brad Simpson's history of self-determination since World War II achieves a remarkable vision of the stakes of decolonization-and how agents around the world put a concept of international politics to original ends that still define our time. The result is an epic masterpiece, one of the few indispensable books on our contested global past and present. * Samuel Moyn , Yale University * In his magisterial The First Right. Brad Simpson transforms our understanding of self-determination in the modern world. Tracing the long arc of decolonial struggles in Asia and Africa along with movements for Indigenous rights and climate justice, he makes clear the meanings of self-determination were never fixed but instead the product of sustained local struggles for political, economic, and cultural rights in an always shifting and often hostile global system. In its remarkable reach and strikingly original claims, this is international history at its best. * Mark Philip Bradley, National University Singapore * A stunning and indispensable analysis of how tensions between ideas of self-determination and rights shaped global power relations and decolonization from the 1940s onward. No other book has so deftly and consistently captured the interplay of top-down international politics and bottom-up claims by anticolonial and sub-state and nonstate movements to show how these dynamics produced the contours and challenges of our present moment. * Penny Von Eschen, University of Virginia *

Author Information

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.

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