My research explores the history of decolonisation, anticolonial and environmental activism, and global governance in Oceania.
Press conference featuring N. Tangghama, F. Torey, Nicolaas Jouwe, Marcus W. Kaisiëpo and H. Womsiwor, 17 April 1962, Amsterdam, Anefo Collection, Nationaal Archief, CCO.
Decolonisation Interrupted: West Papua, the UN and the Limits of Self-determination
My first monograph examines the strategies West Papuan activists used to launch an international campaign for independence at the United Nations. I focused on how West Papuan activists advocated for independence against the backdrop of Indonesian statehood, while navigating the rise of Afro-Asian anticolonial politics and Cold War-era neo-colonialism, which threatened the sovereignty of indigenous peoples in the Pacific. I reconstructed the connections formed between West Papuan activist networks and Afro-Asian anticolonial thinkers, which drew on discourses of race and rights, and the broader transformation of self-determination claims at the United Nations in the 1960s. West Papuans ultimately failed to achieve sovereign statehood, bringing into question who achieves self-determination, and how, in the era of decolonisation. More broadly, I demonstrated the need to integrate the Pacific into international histories, as Pacific Islanders challenge understandings of colonialism and conventional chronologies of decolonisation.
Photo by Ernests Vaga on Unsplash
The Green Pacific: Anticolonialism and Environmentalism in Oceania
My second project expands on my existing work by excavating the connected histories of anticolonial and environmental activism in Oceania from the mid-twentieth century to today. This project analyses several decolonisation campaigns which combined anticolonial and environmental critiques. Focusing on this region reveals a new perspective on the global history of environmental activism and decolonisation. In Oceania, decolonisation was not a story of the making of postcolonial nations through industrial modernisation or the struggle for economic sovereignty. Instead, it was, and is, a story of Pacific peoples seeking to regain sovereignty over oceans and land to protect their lived environment and as an underlying condition of possibility for future existence. As such, I argue that environmental history is the history of decolonisation in Oceania, one that underpins ongoing international discussions about climate change mitigation and state and human rights.