Leading scholars demonstrate how colonial subjects, national liberation movements, and empires mobilized human rights language to contest self-determination during decolonization.

The right of peoples to self-determination seems well-settled and covered extensively in the scholarly record. Yet old Trotsky’s question – of whom is this right and to what? – haunts the self-determination literature. Somehow almost every work on it begins with an expression of puzzlement. This right turns out to be elusive, underdefined in its scope and content, paradoxical in almost every aspect. This book mobilises all powers of critical legal theory and modern philosophy to take the bull by its horns. Instead of ironing out the paradoxes, it aims to finally give them a proper explanation based on the concept of exception.

"For several decades conflicts within states rather than between them have been the prevalent form of organised political violence worldwide. Most intra-state conflicts since 1945 have originated in insurgencies, not just against incumbent regimes but, more often, against those regimes' external sponsors, whether imperial governments or dominant regional powers. This Handbook focuses on the former group, on the insurgencies and counter-insurgencies fought out as European overseas empires collapsed. Seeking to identify the causal dynamics and violence processes of such violent decolonization, the Handbook will address the most taxing problems in conflict limitation: how to constrain the actions of insurgents and counter-insurgents in asymmetric 'guerrilla wars'; how to mitigate the consequences of proxy involvement in intra-state conflicts; and how to protect civilians in war zones where combatant-non-combatant distinctions have broken down. Underlying these questions is a unifying theme - and a core Handbook objective - the need to recognize the cultural practices of insurgent movements and counter-insurgent forces as a prerequisite to comprehending their violence"--

A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

This history of colonial legacies in UN peacekeeping operations from 1945-1971 reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Margot Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together histories of humanitarianism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats sheds new light on the mechanisms through which sovereignty was negotiated and re-negotiated after 1945.

This Research Handbook takes stock of the state of the art in sociological research on globalization and the contributors outline future trajectories for this, one of the most pressing and challenging sociological themes of our time.

In Red Internationalism, Salar Mohandesi returns to the Vietnam War to offer a new interpretation of the transnational left's most transformative years. In the 1960s, radicals mobilized ideas from the early twentieth century to reinvent a critique of imperialism that promised not only to end the war but also to overthrow the global system that made such wars possible. Focusing on encounters between French, American, and Vietnamese radicals, Mohandesi explores how their struggles did change the world, but in unexpected ways that allowed human rights to increasingly displace anti-imperialism as the dominant idiom of internationalism. When anti-imperialism collapsed in the 1970s, human rights emerged as a hegemonic alternative channeling anti-imperialism's aspirations while rejecting systemic change. Approaching human rights as neither transhistorical truth nor cynical imperialist ruse but instead as a symptom of anti-imperialism's epochal crisis, Red Internationalism dramatizes a shift that continues to affect prospects for emancipatory political change in the future.

The Routledge Handbook of Mega-Sporting Events and Human Rights is the first book to explore in depth the topic of mega-sporting events (MSEs) and human rights, offering accounts of adverse human rights impacts linked to MSEs while considering the potential for promoting human rights in and through the framework of these events. Drawing on the contributions of an international group of leading researchers, practitioners and advocates, the book introduces key concepts in human rights and considers how they relate to ethical, social, managerial and governance issues in contemporary MSEs, from inclusion and welfare to corruption and sustainability. It examines the role of key stakeholders in the delivery of MSEs, including organising committees, sport governing bodies, governments, athletes, sponsors and broadcasters, as well as the role of activists and advocates, and presents historical and contemporary case studies of human rights as an active issue in MSEs. The book provides new perspectives on human rights as a lens for understanding modern sport and as a guiding principle for responsible sport that protects the interests of individuals and communities, as well as offering guidance on best practice. It is essential reading for all advanced students, researchers, practitioners, policymakers and stakeholders with an interest in organisation and delivery of MSEs, as well as general sport management, sport policy, sport governance, the ethics of sport, event management, political science, development studies, ethical business or the significance of sport in wider society.

The first volume to explore transnational anticolonialism as a global phenomenon spanning the entire twentieth century. Leading scholars demonstrate that anticolonial movements everywhere in this period were invariably transnational in terms of their imaginaries, mobilities, and networks, and that their legacies fundamentally shaped the present.

This volume explores the application of human rights to higher education through a critical lens. Combining theoretical and applied perspectives, it asks what a human rights framework grounded in liberation and justice can offer to ways of working and teaching practices in higher education. Human rights, in this edited compilation, call for continuous critical engagements around the higher education transformation project. The book recognizes human rights simultaneously as law, values, and emancipatory vision. It showcases global north and global south perspectives and encourages a dialogue between the human rights approach and other approaches to higher education transformation, such as decolonialization, anti-racism, diversity and inclusion, and intersectionality. Individual chapters featuring a range of case studies written from global south and north perspectives critically examine higher education practices linked with human rights, ranging from curricular practices to student activism and community partnerships. The critical space of the university and its role in the transformation of society is therefore viewed in multi-dimensional ways. Underlining the value of applying human rights as a framework in understanding and designing higher education transformation, the book will be of great interest to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of the sociology of education, human rights education, higher education, and social justice education