In 1951, the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru allegedly gave a signed blank check to the leader of the nationalist movement for an independent Nagaland, Angami Zapu Phizo. Nagaland, a remote state-in-waiting in the Himalayan foothills, sits at a strategic junction between India, China, and Burma.Footnote ¹ After Indian independence from Britain in 1947, Nagas sought their own independence from India. Nehru, eager to quell agitation for a separate state within his own state, attempted to bribe Nagas into acquiescence to Indian rule by asking their leader to name his price. But Phizo refused to sell the Naga claim of independence. Instead, he turned to insurgency and eventual exile, first in Pakistan and then in London, where he arrived in 1960 seeking international support for his people’s struggle. Phizo’s family preserved the blank uncashed check as an emblem of perceived Indian perfidy and their own resistance to it. Following Phizo’s death in 1990, his family feared losing their home in London due to foreclosure. Therefore, they enlisted the aid of David Ward, a Western advocate for Naga nationalist claims-making, who stepped in to save the house’s contents, including family papers and the blank check.Footnote ²

David Ward was born in Assam (a neighboring territory to Nagaland), the son of a Scottish tea planter. Sent to a British jail for robbery, and with time on his hands, Ward discovered the poetry of Easterine Kire.Footnote ³ Ward was so inspired by Kire’s poetry that, once released from prison, he traveled illicitly to Nagaland. There, he enlisted in the Naga cause. He was eventually captured by the Indian military and deported to Britain.Footnote ⁴ According to Naga accounts, Ward never returned the Phizo family documents that were transferred to him for temporary safekeeping after Phizo’s death. Repeatedly in the decades since 1990, Naga representatives have asked Ward to return those materials, which they consider their founding documents, their national patrimony; as of this writing, he has not done so.Footnote ⁵

Regardless of the collection’s status, the story of Nehru’s check remains a powerful symbol to Nagas – of their nationalist claim, of Indian deceit in attempting to compromise them, and of hope placed in a providential Western advocate and then dashed by his abandonment. It is a Naga national embarrassment with imperial overtones that an outsider apparently possesses some of the founding documents of a state-in-waiting in Southern Asia and has not returned them. The absence of this archive raises the question of who owns the historical record of a territory that has claimed independence but has never received international recognition.

This narrative of betrayal and disappearance within Nagaland’s attempt to become independent is an example of the hidden dramas of postwar decolonization. In the decades following the Second World War, and accelerating in the early 1960s, many states across the colonial world shook off imperial rule. The roads to national independence for postcolonial states such as India, Ghana, and Algeria are well known and well told. In contrast, stories that highlight little-known regions, marginalized individuals, hidden or lost archives, and the connections that form the analytical links between them produce the narrative of decolonization presented in States-in-Waiting.Footnote ⁶ In this narrative, the international ramifications of the Naga pursuit of independence unfolded not only in Phizo’s original journey from Pakistan to London, or in the coda of the missing papers decades later. Through the activities of international advocates working on behalf of nationalist claimants, the plot also crossed to the African continent, the epicenter of decolonization in the 1960s, where other states-in-waiting sought international recognition for their demands of independent statehood, utilizing similar – or sometimes even the very same – unofficial advocates as did the Nagas.

The relationship between claims-making and its advocacy, which provided representation and political support from those unaffiliated with official spheres of state governments or international institutions was central to the struggle that states-in-waiting waged for national liberation. This relationship was a mutually reinforcing as well as an undermining dynamic: nationalist claimants who had not yet achieved international-legal recognition for their territories relied on advocacy in order to access spheres of government and international power. Such reliance also made particular advocates influential, enabling them to, for example, testify before the United Nations. Yet the dependence of states-in-waiting upon such advocates, especially when protracted, underscored the lack of autonomy of particular nationalist claims. Independence required independence from advocacy, a fact to which advocates themselves were not always attuned. States-in-Waiting untangles the tensions inherent in the relationship between nationalist claims-making and its international advocacy, as well as the contradiction between decolonization’s promise of national liberation and its practice of limiting whose claims of statehood received international recognition. Those whose claims did not, lost not only statehood – they also lost the chance to build national archives, canons of founding figures, and even the opportunity to become a recognized field of historical inquiry.

December 1960 closed the “Year of Africa” at the United Nations, when seventeen countries received independence. That same year, Phizo arrived in London and Naga nationalist claims-making entered international politics. Since India served as a model and symbol of “peaceful,” “successful” national liberation and postcolonial world leadership,Footnote ⁷ Naga nationalist claims for independence from postcolonial India forced many of the advocates who had supported India’s decolonization to confront the complicated issue of self-determination for minority peoples within new postcolonial states.

The early 1960s was a political moment when the global potential for national liberation seemed strongest, yet the United Nations only recognized nationalist claims that arose from the dissolution of European empire, not those that would alter the borders of newly independent states, such as the Naga claim. Therefore, when Phizo reached London and a Western audience, his demand for Naga independence became a tricky issue for the only people who would listen: a network of advocates – missionaries, anthropologists, journalists, peace and civil rights activists, political economists – who saw themselves as brokers of decolonization and conduits for the politically voiceless. Those advocates also relied on their connections with Indian and other postcolonial state governments to achieve their aims.

This transnational advocacy delivered informal representation for nationalist movements that did not have access to formal political forums in the United Nations’ state-centric system of international order. Advocates were spokesmen and women for nationalist claims, gatekeepers to international politics, and key intermediaries to circles of power and finance. They saw national liberation struggles as linked to the civil rights movement in the United States and as one among many humanitarian issues that merited extra-governmental intervention. In States-In-Waiting, I argue that advocacy, however necessary to the pursuit of sovereignty, was incompatible with sovereignty once it was achieved. Leaders of postcolonial states knew this. When nationalist movements became postcolonial state governments, in part with the aid of advocacy – India (1947), Zambia (1964), Namibia (1990), among many others – they disavowed the process that had helped empower them, ignoring, breaking with, and even deporting their former advocates after their states had achieved independence.

The relationship between nationalist claims-making and its international advocacy illuminates how nationalists themselves, whether successful or otherwise in their state-making, operated within an international context. For Naga nationalists, a sense of connection and belonging to a wider international community grew from notions of a Christian universalism, a result of large-scale conversion instigated by American Baptist missionaries in Nagaland from the 1880s to the 1940s.Footnote ⁸ States confronting nationalist demands within their borders made travel, reporting, and mail delivery as difficult as possible for people residing in these territories. For peoples such as Nagas – living in the periphery’s periphery, in regions only lightly connected to their ruling capital let alone to global centers of power – connections with and through advocacy and religious networks allowed them to see themselves as integrated into an international order, even when that order had established no means of recognizing their claims of autonomy. Petitioning the United Nations was not only a weapon of the weak; it was an appeal to a higher power, toward a universal aspiration of global belonging. Chief Hosea Kutako, who petitioned the United Nations for two decades through the use of advocacy on behalf of an independent South West Africa/Namibia, referred to international law as “God’s Law.”Footnote ⁹

In contrast to its preceding system of international order, the League of Nations – which had included a Mandate System and Minority Protections Regime for the former territories of the German, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires – the United Nations lacked a forum for hearing the political claims of peoples until the 1990s.Footnote ¹⁰ Unlike the League, the UN did not have institutional mechanisms in place to “see” certain dependent peoples as potential political subjects of international law, a reason why it can be considered a more limited international order than its predecessor.Footnote ¹¹ As studies identifying the restrictions of the UN’s Declaration on Human Rights (1948) have shown, the types of rights that the UN institution chose to recognize, while the subject of fraught debate, ended up being considerably circumscribed, though the most contentious rights were socioeconomic rather than political.Footnote ¹² At the same moment that the UN General Assembly affirmed the norm of self-determination in its declaration of December 1960, the institution, as it grew with new members, became both inclusively and exclusively state-centric – inclusive in that it encompassed almost all new states, exclusive in that the only political unit it recognized was that of the state.Footnote ¹³

Within the Interstices of International Order

States-in-Waiting is a connective history rather than a comparative set of case studies.Footnote ¹⁴ The Naga claim provides the narrative frame because it illustrates the limit to international advocacy on behalf of nationalist claims-making. As a claim from a region far from both its ruling capital (New Delhi) as well as from global centers of power and governance (such as New York or London), Naga nationalist claims-making relied on an attenuated advocacy network of only a few key individuals, rendering the intersection of claims-making and its advocacy clearly trackable. The Namibian nationalist claim, which achieved independence only in 1990, serves as both an analogue and a contrast to the Naga claim. The former had a much longer history of international petitioning – one that had inspired Phizo’s efforts on behalf of Naga independence – and it entered a new phase in 1966, when the International Court of Justice failed to rule on its claim to national self-determination.Footnote ¹⁵ The massive political transformation of Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s – centered around the Congo Crisis, the breakup of the Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and the emergence of Dar es Salaam as a hub for anticolonial nationalism – made that region the center of gravity and activity for a range of nationalist movements, and therefore ground zero for nationalist claims-making.

The question of states-in-waiting – of territories with nationalist claims that had not (yet) received international recognition and therefore were termed “minority,” “subnational,” “tribal,” or “indigenous” nationalisms – challenged the United Nations as both an institution (meaning the bureaucracy set up in San Francisco in 1945 with a charter and committee structure) and as a system of international order (meaning the political organization of the postwar world reshuffled by decolonization). The UN institution came to have a vested interest in maintaining the legitimacy and territorial integrity of its new member-states. This legitimacy was granted through the UN order, in which national recognition was confirmed by a seat in the General Assembly, crafting a type of self-referential sovereignty. The claims of states-in-waiting to be nation-states had no place in either the UN institution or the UN order, and therefore had the potential for upsetting both UN arrangements.

States-in-waiting relied on international advocacy to advance their nationalist claims, and international advocates connected many of these nationalist claims to each other. Therefore, States-in-Waiting follows the rise and demise of a particular transnational advocacy network during the height of nationalist possibility in the early 1960s.Footnote ¹⁶ The advocates in this network – particularly its leaders Abraham Johannes (AJ) Muste of the United States, Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan of India, and Michael Scott of Britain – were individuals who had extensive experience with international peace politics dating from the Indian independence movement.Footnote ¹⁷ With the advent of 1960s decolonization, they decided to channel their activism into an organization, the World Peace Brigade, whose aim was to make sure that decolonization escaped its “entrapment in violence.”Footnote ¹⁸ Because this network grew out of the international peace movement and had been involved in the nonviolent activism working for Indian independence and US civil rights, States-in-Waiting emphasizes the role of peace politics during decolonization. However, it is important to underscore that most nationalist claimants faced degrees of violence – at times extreme – from their ruling authorities and engaged in it themselves.

This violence and the threat of violence drew the attention of the international peace movement. The World Peace Brigade launched a project in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, in 1962 in order to channel the forces of national liberation into peaceful postcolonial states. This first endeavor of the Brigade, the Africa Freedom Action Project, advocated on behalf of the neighboring state-in-waiting of Zambia and its leader Kenneth Kaunda. During this period the Brigade also worked to undermine the legitimacy of Katanga, a state-in-waiting in Southeastern Congo, arguing that its nationalist claim was a cover for neocolonialism and “made Western democracy look like a giant runaway circus calliope.”Footnote ¹⁹ Katanga also had its own, contrasting network of advocates – one that was stridently anticommunist.Footnote ²⁰ The intersection between nationalist claims–making and its international advocacy showcases the conflict and connections between different claims and multiple networks. These networked connections operated though the interstices, the unregulated spaces, of the United Nations: since neither claimant nor advocate officially represented a recognized state government, they lacked access to most official forums, unless brought forward by a UN member state.

Studies of the nationalist struggles of the Kurds, Tibetans, and Palestinians, of Biafra, of Western Sahara, of West Papua, among many others, show the important role that international advocacy (also called “rebel” or “insurgent diplomacy”) played in promoting the aspirations of a range of nationalist movements that did not achieve independence during the postwar era.Footnote ²¹ Nationalist claims moved, mutated, were actualized, and dissolved through networks of advocacy. As the operations of the World Peace Brigade make clear, these networks were full of internal disagreements on tactics, focus, and ideology, especially as they confronted the dilemma of how to support liberation movements seeking independence from recently decolonized states. For example, the Brigade community’s efforts on questions involving African decolonization relied on the support of Indians in government and in international civil society.Footnote ²² Therefore, the Naga claim, as a nationalist claim within India, eventually fractured the Brigade’s network and showed the limits of transnational activism when it confronted state sovereignty.

From the perspective of nationalist claimants, international recognition for national self-determination was essential to their political survival. Writing to his nephew in January 1960 while stuck in East Pakistan, Phizo knew that the Naga people needed to be recognized as sovereign to be recognized at all: “[A]ny organization without a sovereign territory cannot be articulately universal in its human scope. … Whether we call it a political aim or national ideology, it makes very little difference.”Footnote ²³ Global decolonization made the nation-state the legitimate form of international recognition for a people’s claim of resistance against oppression. Phizo and other nationalists recognized this political reality. Their advocates, who also participated in struggles for political justice within states and across national boundaries, did not. They were interested in how a Nagaland could be a “test case” for how to answer the question that minority peoples within new postcolonial nations posed to the postwar international order.Footnote ²⁴ Their criticism was directed at how India ruled Nagaland, not that India ruled Nagaland.

As this analytical separation indicates, nationalist movements may have relied on international advocates, but the two groups often did not share the same end goals. Over the long term, these political divergences increased and hampered advocacy’s effectiveness. Decolonizing empires often had elaborate plans for federation-type structures in which minority interests would have had greater representation.Footnote ²⁵ These plans were abandoned by decolonizing states, to a large degree because of the (often correct) suspicion of soon-to-be independent and newly independent elites that such plans could be the thin end of the wedge of neocolonialism, using minority concerns to preserve enclaves of colonial influence – a fear that drove the UN’s intervention against the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga (1960–1962).Footnote ²⁶

The early 1960s was a period of rapid regime change and promise for decolonization’s liberatory potential. After the fact, advocates of states-in-waiting realized that they had actually had an extremely limited temporal window in which to act.Footnote ²⁷ Katanga’s secession in July 1960, was “the point where the ‘wind of change’ [of decolonization] began to veer,” according to Katanga’s UN envoy, a friend and colleague of World Peace Brigade members.Footnote ²⁸ From some perspectives, the window of political opportunity of the early 1960s was closing at the same time that it opened.

Decolonization and its international-legal recognition of former colonies as postcolonial states solidified the nation-state as the unit of political organization and appropriate container for sovereignty. The United Nations expanded rapidly as it recognized more and more new postcolonial states; in the process, the institution came to have a stake in the importance of international-legal sovereignty as a defining feature of national sovereignty and to control the granting of it.Footnote ²⁹ In circumstances that reinforced the UN’s own authority, the UN could patrol international-legal sovereignty from the outside, and at the decision of the departing colonizer, particular colonies would be passively and peacefully assigned independence. Such was the situation of the British High Commission Territories of Basutoland/Lesotho, Bechuanaland/Botswana, and Swaziland/Eswatini (as of 2018) – all granted independence in 1966. However, what of less ideal circumstances? Naga nationalists wondered, If Zanzibar could claim statehood,Footnote ³⁰ if Rwanda, Burundi, or Gambia could do soFootnote ³¹ – why not Nagaland?

The short answer to “Why not Nagaland?” was India, since that country was not going to voluntarily recognize a new state within its own national borders, especially when Nagaland epitomized India’s many “fissiparous tendencies” – its regional, ethnic, and religious autonomous demands.Footnote ³² Naga nationalists grasped the precarity of their claim given Nagaland’s geopolitical position. Therefore, they attempted to internationalize the Naga claim and to place it in the context of the rapidly decolonizing African continent of the early 1960s – a context in which the feasibility of their claim seemed more reasonable – rather than within the regional context of a Southern Asia that had already decolonized.

It was not accidental that Nagas made analogies to nationalist movements on the African continent and not to groups closer to home with similar aims, such as Tibetans, other Hill peoples in the Indian Northeast, Bengalis in East Pakistan, or the multitude of communities (including Nagas) across the border in Burma.Footnote ³³ The window of nationalist possibility of the early 1960s, with all its constraints, opened on to the African continent, not on to the disputed regions of “upland South East Asia.”Footnote ³⁴

When chronicling the month-to-month political fluctuations in the early 1960s, “decolonization” can seem to be an anachronistic term, carefully denuded of the moral valence of “national liberation” or “nationalist revolution” – the words in general use at the time among both supporters and opponents of decolonization. At that moment, decolonization was not referred to as “decolonization” by Anglophone politicians: British prime minister Harold MacMillan rather obliquely referred to the “wind of change.” The Kennedy administration in the United States used the Wilsonian language of “national self-determination,” a word choice that elided issues of violence and the need for external recognition (often from the US government).Footnote ³⁵ “Self-determination” emphasized that it was the people who determined their own political status; while “international recognition” underscored the role played by the foreign policies of powerful states to determine and affirm the borders of the political unit in question.

Nationalists from the decolonizing world talked about “national liberation,” and their international advocates referred to the “struggle for independence,” “world development under world law,” or “world revolution.”Footnote ³⁶ In the early 1960s, most people actively involved in or sympathetic to decolonization-the-process did not use the term itself to describe it.Footnote ³⁷ They preferred terms that signaled their political orientation. During its contemporaneous moment, the word “decolonization” rendered the transformation of empires into states an agentless and bloodless process, deemphasizing the determination and action of the individuals and groups who drove that transformation and, thereby, obscuring the accountability of those who fought for and against anticolonial nationalism.

National independence did not simply involve flipping a “sovereignty” switch from colony to state; it entailed a set of negotiations with no predetermined result. Yet such negotiations consistently produced unitary nation-states as the successors to empires, while alternative postcolonial political forms, whether those of federation or secession (with a few important exceptions), were either unrealized or short-lived.Footnote ³⁸ Secession and federation were not necessarily mutually exclusive or incompatible with decolonization. Katanga, which attempted to secede from Congo-Leopoldville during this period of heightened national possibility, proposed several alternative models: a federated Congo along the lines of the US Articles of Confederation,Footnote ³⁹ a federated Copperbelt state with Northern Rhodesia,Footnote ⁴⁰ as well as an independent Katangese nation-state.Footnote ⁴¹ None of these alternative political forms achieved international recognition because the United Nations, at the invitation of newly independent Congo-Leopoldville and with US financial and political backing, launched an armed intervention to prevent their occurrence. The UN as an institution of international order had a stake in empowering and protecting the boundaries of its members.

From the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, the UN General Assembly’s Fourth Committee, on “special political and decolonization matters,” was the institution’s most active committee and housed the Committee on South West Africa, which was the international forum for Namibian nationalist claims-making.Footnote ⁴² The Fourth Committee was so active during the 1960s because it was the venue that both the United States and the Soviet Union chose to handle the process of decolonization. The USSR first proposed and sponsored the UN General Assembly’s December 1960 “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”; the Committee on Decolonization was set up under Indian chairmanship to implement that declaration. Footnote ⁴³ (After John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, US foreign policy played a supportive role regarding the Declaration on the Granting of Independence.) The Fourth Committee and its Committee on Decolonization were the chosen destinations for nationalist claimants and their international advocates. However, these committees were established to address the claims of peoples within empires, not within states.

Who had access to the UN’s Fourth Committee and thus the potential of international recognition was a matter determined by the states who made up the institution. Soviet pressure on China regarding Mongolia led to the UN’s recognition of statehood for Outer Mongolia, while the lack of such explicit, powerful backing for Tibetan independence forced Tibetans to remain a humanitarian concern. There was no universal agreement on which people comprised a nation, or on which nation deserved a state: India assisted in the creation of an independent Bangladesh (though it is striking how long it took New Delhi to actively support East Bengali nationalist insurgents), and Biafra had a few state-government proponents, though much of its backing came from humanitarian-oriented non-state actors.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet these counter-examples still demonstrate the constraints on state sponsorship for nationalist movements that sought to revise existing national boundaries.

Into the seeming political flexibility of decolonization, Cold War polarity appeared to impose a strict division between the free world and communist totalitarianism, or between capitalist exploitation and fraternal socialism, depending upon one’s political outlook.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet these binaries generally did not reflect the interests or concerns of most of the nationalists discussed in States-in-Waiting, or of those of their advocates in the international peace movement who perceived themselves to be nonaligned. However, Cold War binaries shaped how nationalists made and mobilized their claims, and the political pathways to which advocates had access. In this way, the Cold War became a trap that limited the horizons of nationalist possibility even for those who claimed, and sincerely believed themselves, to be neutral during the Cold War.

During the Cold War era, the Soviet Union’s fears concerning its own nationality questions caused it to generally block minority nationalisms from international forums.Footnote ⁴⁶ This Soviet absence made Washington’s official support for national self-determination, however lukewarm, crucial for how minority nationalists – particularly those whose nationalism had religious components (as for Nagas and Tibetans) – made and framed their claims. The advocacy network that formed the World Peace Brigade and supported particular nationalist claimants in the decolonizing world of the early 1960s was composed of American, British, and Indian members of an international civil society community who worked on issues of political justice within and across national borders.Footnote ⁴⁷ Their nongovernmental organizations received funding directly and indirectly from the Central Intelligence Agency and Anglo-American multinational corporations. This web of funding did not make them stooges of US power, of which they were sincerely critical; however, their perceived utility to US power projection indicated forms of ideological alliance, whether or not individual advocates considered themselves supportive of US interests or were even aware of the source of their funding. That is how US hegemony operated – not as omnipotent, but as inescapable.

Religion, particularly but not exclusively Christianity, played a role baiting the Cold War trap.Footnote ⁴⁸ Almost all nationalists and their advocates in States-in-Waiting were religious, though not of the same faith, creed, or denomination.Footnote ⁴⁹ A shared language of faith and a practice of appealing to members of faith communities pervaded nationalist claims-making and its advocacy, aligning these projects with ideological elements of US hegemony even when the US government ignored the actual claims.Footnote ⁵⁰ Religious networks also created forms of belonging, connection, and affinity that did not move through states, creating useful political pathways for claimants who lacked international recognition.

The processes of claims-making and advocacy relied on and reified the individual – whether as nationalist leader or international advocate – as the agent of political change, not the collective, with its socialist undertones. Religion, individualism, and financial connections pulled particular nationalist claimants and their advocates into the realm of US power projection, even as their activities often (but not always) had very little to do with formal US foreign policy. Histories of international relations that deal with US power usually make it their primary point of focus. While understandable because of the superpower status of the United States, this emphasis can obscure the actual workings of US hegemony. For histories of international order and its limits after 1945, US foreign relations (in all their multiplicity) does not have to be its chief subject for a study to demonstrate their pervasive effects. That is how hegemony, as indirect domination, works.

Throughout the 1960s, independence for many new states looked very different as the decade progressed from 1961 (Tanganyika) to 1962 (Algeria) to 1964 (Zambia) to 1966 (Lesotho). The pressure of time, and the increased visibility of the limits of many new postcolonial governments, shrunk optimistic hopes about the possibilities of national liberation. When Lesotho became independent in 1966, the political economist and international advocate Winifred Armstrong sent a series of letters to its new national government. As in the manner of many advocates, she wrote these letters in a personal capacity but while employed by (and using the letterhead of) AMAX, the American Metal Climax mining company, a US multinational corporation with operations and subsidiaries in Katanga, in Zambia, and in South West Africa.Footnote ⁵¹ One of Armstrong’s letters of “congratulations” read:

Armstrong’s qualifications to her congratulations to Lesotho hinted at the limits of Lesotho’s new sovereignty: congratulations on “independence” while it remained a landlocked labor reserve surrounded by apartheid South Africa. These remarks show how advocates as well as nationalists were well aware of the challenges facing new postcolonial states and the restrictions on national liberation even – or most especially – at the moment of independence. Tragedy, or its potential, hovered behind moments of national success.Footnote ⁵³ As a mode for understanding geopolitical transformation, tragedy shatters narratives of progress or nostalgia.Footnote ⁵⁴ At the same time, it can foreclose change or hope – outcomes that would be anathema to the nationalists and their advocates who dedicated their lives and careers in pursuit of independence.

Organization of the Book

Transnational advocacy networks are loosely organized international civil society organizations, networks of individuals working in non-state capacities (though often involved in their own state’s politics and policies) tackling problems that have been deemed outside of state-to-state relations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nationalist movements are non-state actors who have a connective non-state archive, located in the papers of the individuals and organizations who participated in, were sympathetic to, or closely tracked their aims. This archive’s placement and composition depict the results of advocacy’s operations, producing a source base that privileges the role of advocates, whose papers often provide the most accessible, documented record of nationalist claims, more so than those of the nationalist claimants themselves or those of the states that controlled their territory. This asymmetry of sources reflects the imbalanced relationship between nationalist claims-making and its international advocacy, and became a defining feature for a state-in-waiting.Footnote ⁵⁶

Focus on the state-making attempts of non-state actors can seem to reinforce definitions of “state” and “non-state” in the global history of decolonization. However, that distinction did not neatly map onto the activities of nationalist claimants who sought statehood while remaining outside an international order made up of states that they hoped to belong to if they achieved their aims. Nor did the dividing line between realms of “state” and “non-state” hold for international advocates who moved between spheres of government, civil society, international institutions, and corporations. The advocates who populate this narrative – the American political economist Winifred Armstrong, the wealthy British newspaper editor David Astor, the Indian Gandhian civil-society leader Jayaprakash Narayan, the Indian peace activist Suresh Ram, the US civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, the British anti-apartheid activist Michael Scott, the pan-Africanist and US civil rights activist Bill Sutherland, the American anthropologist Laura Thompson, among others – worked to legitimize nationalist leaders in international politics. Prospective national leaders such as Angami Zapu Phizo (Nagaland), Mburumba Kerina (Namibia), Moise Tshombe (Katanga), and Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia) made use of the prestige, connections, and expertise of advocates. If or when they became the leaders of actual state governments, as Kaunda did, they broke with their former advocates because the advocacy that had empowered their ascent to power had the potential to undermine their regimes once their governments were ensconced.

Following the networked activities of nationalist claimants and their international advocates, States-in-Waiting charts the rise and fall of an advocacy network that became the World Peace Brigade, framed by the attempted internationalization of the Naga claim from 1960 to 1966. These two histories are set against the broader context of global decolonization – of nationalist possibility and its constraints in the postwar era – playing out simultaneously on the African continent. Chapter 1, “Sovereignty in the Hills,” relates the history of Naga nationalism from the China-Burma-India theater of the Second World War, to the Naga declaration of independence the day before India gained its independence in August 1947, to the subsequent Indian counterinsurgency operations against the Naga nationalists. One group of Nagas sought an accord with India, driving the leader of the nationalists, Angami Zapu Phizo, to seek international support to combat those negotiations.

Stymied by the Indian military and moderate Nagas who sought a settlement with India, Naga nationalists looked for international support. Chapter 2, “Advocates of Not-Quite Independence,” relates Phizo’s journey from Nagaland to London, where he placed the Naga claim within the context of African decolonization and reached out to the advocate Reverend Michael Scott because of Scott’s role as an international spokesperson for Namibian nationalist claims-making. This chapter analyzes the role of missionaries, activists, anthropologists, and journalists as intermediaries between nationalist movements and international politics, as well as the contentious friendships between Indian politicians and Western advocates who worked together on African decolonization questions. Chapter 2 closes with the attempt of Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), an Indian advocate for African nationalist movements, to turn Scott away from work on behalf of the Naga claim and toward their shared advocacy for African decolonization by inviting him to a peace conference in India.

Chapter 3, “The Anti-Algiers,” opens with the peace conference that Scott and JP attended from December 1960 to January 1961. At this conference, organized by the War Resisters International and held at the ashram of Gandhigram, outside Madras, Scott, JP, and their colleagues decided to create a “World Peace Brigade”: a nongovernmental advocacy organization run by JP (who was also a disciple of Gandhi), Scott, and A. J. Muste. Its first project was in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, in 1962. There, at the invitation of Julius Nyerere (then prime minister of Tanganyika and, later, the president of Tanzania, its successor state), Brigade members Suresh Ram, Bayard Rustin, Bill Sutherland, and Scott supported Kenneth Kaunda’s claim for an independent Zambia. This chapter shows how the Brigade tried to make Dar es Salaam the anti-Algiers: its headquarters for channeling decolonization’s “wind of change” into peaceful, anticommunist, postcolonial states. However, anticolonial nationalist guerrilla camps encircled Dar es Salaam, undermining the Brigade’s pacific state-building.

The Brigade’s efforts on behalf of Zambian state-making became enmeshed in the dynamics of the African Copperbelt – a zone of copper deposits and associated mining interests stretching between Zambia and Katanga – particularly in the international and regional dynamics surrounding Katanga’s secession and the UN intervention to prevent it. Chapter 4, “The Spectre of Katanga,” considers how the Congolese province of Katanga served as the ultimate example of illegitimate nationalism and of the potential failure of decolonization when not guided into the “correct” political shape. The Brigade’s advocacy against Katanga and its supporters at the UN and elsewhere precipitated the American Metal Climax mining company’s (AMAX) decision to back Kaunda in neighboring Zambia. This chapter shows how Katanga’s secession led the UN and its Euro-American backers to fear that the “wrong kind” of decolonization would undermine new postcolonial states.

The political climate of Katanga’s secession also influenced AMAX to give forms of private support to the South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), which became the dominant Namibian nationalist group. Chapter 5, “Capital and Claims-Making,” focuses on Namibia/South West Africa, showing how, due to the presence of multinational mining interests, the advocacy networks that connected Southern Africa to international politics were much thicker and more complex than those that stretched toward Northeast India. This chapter demonstrates how, while they may not have always agreed with each other, activists and nationalists worked with corporations that supported particular nationalist claimants. Capital as well as claims flowed through advocacy networks.

After its work to prevent Katanga’s secession and to support Zambia’s independence, the World Peace Brigade turned its attention toward Asia, particularly the contentious relationship between India and China. Chapter 6, “Marching into the Great Wall of State,” narrates the Brigade’s second project in the recently decolonized world, a planned Delhi-to-Peking Friendship March, which could not cross the border because the Chinese government would not provide visas. Brigade members disagreed about whether an ostensibly apolitical, pacifist endeavor could – or should – have leaders who supported particular nationalist movements in India (Scott for Nagaland) and China (JP for Tibet), movements whose claimed territory bordered the march’s route. By detailing these disagreements, Chapter 6 describes the contradictions that arose between transnational advocacy and nationalist claims-making on behalf of states-in-waiting: the nationalist movements that worked with advocates in pursuit of independence broke with them if and when they achieved statehood. The transnational activism that had supported their ascent to government now provided alternative sources of political mobilization that could counter state power.

Chapter 7, “Postcolonial Imperialism,” picks up at the point when the World Peace Brigade’s Friendship March was forced to halt (in Ledo, Assam), in January 1964. Three weeks later, the Nagaland Baptist Church Council invited JP and Scott to form a peace mission in order to turn a ceasefire between Naga nationalist insurgents and the Indian government into a lasting peace. This chapter details the mission’s negotiations and disputes over definitions of “national” and “non-national” sovereignty. Eventually, due to a lack of trust on all sides, the mission dissolved after JP resigned and the Indian government deported Scott. This chapter explains how Scott’s deportation in May 1966 marked the end of an era for nationalist claims-making and its international advocacy, an era that began in 1946 (before India was yet independent) when the Indian Mission to the United Nations allowed Scott to speak as part of their delegation.

By foregrounding the issue of nationalist claimants within postcolonial states, States-in-Waiting shows how the norm of national self-determination, declared and accepted by the UN General Assembly in 1960, did not meet the actual practice of international recognition. In political practice, international recognition favored communities that had mobilized earlier under empire, that had already begun to take over the infrastructures of authority under colonial rule, and that had acquired leverage with the colonial power (such as in India); or, alternatively, that had the militarily strength and regional allies to command the primacy of force when colonial powers withdrew (as in Algeria). In either process, successor regimes were able to secure the acquiescence – forced or grudging – of their departing colonizer and its Great Power allies (usually but not exclusively the US) on their route to international recognition. The contradiction between self-determination and international recognition as a sovereign state arose for communities with national aspirations who mobilized toward the end of empire or were considered by both colonizer and successor states to be incapable of the development and “civilization” necessary for self-rule.Footnote ⁵⁷ Their route to recognition was much more logistically difficult, and opposing them were the interests of the emergent postimperial order, an order that denied recognition to what it considered to be the subunits, or even the vestiges, of the old colonial system.

Postcolonial state leaders denounced the aspirations of “minority” nationalists, as Nehru did, on the grounds of “balkanization” or argued that “backwards” and “tribal” peoples were incapable of their own national development.Footnote ⁵⁸ While unofficial advocates and the informal political representation they provided were these groups’ best – at times seemingly the only – avenue to international recognition, the asymmetries of power and the dependent relationship of advocacy hindered the scope and legitimacy of these intermediary allies. The constraints on nationalist claims-making and its international advocacy show not only the complexity of decolonization but also its limits. Halted journeys, stalled endeavors, refused hearings, deportations, and exiles – these disappointments all express the parameters of what is a legitimate national claim, who can provide recognition, and the process in which recognition may or may not be achieved.

In May 1971, against the background of postcolonial secession crises in Biafra and Bangladesh, Michael Scott outlined the type of history he wanted to see written of decolonization:

What follows in these pages is the history Scott thought he wanted written. It is not necessarily a narrative that is particularly kind to him. Nevertheless, it is a story that centers him, the network he belonged to, and the causes to which he dedicated his life. This is not simply a recovery project of a previously unwritten history. It is a counternarrative of decolonization from the vantage of the individuals – nationalists and their advocates – who knew that process most intimately because they navigated through it. Their journeys, exiles, and deportations illuminate the histories of states not made, and states in the making, of States-in-Waiting.