The historical trajectory of states-in-waiting was determined by many overlapping factors: their international-legal status vis-à-vis the United Nations, their popular support within their territories, the presence or absence of regional allies, their role in global Cold War politics, as well as the influence and impact of their international advocates, who often served as the connectors between these geopolitical spheres. In addition, a territory’s possession (or lack) of economic resources desired by multinational corporations shaped the pathways of particular nationalist claimants. In Southern Africa, the presence of natural resources made advocacy networks thick, overladen, multiple, and intertwined. Beyond the international-legal dimensions of Namibia’s struggle for national liberation, the territory was integrated within international politics through mining interests. Claims to territory and its resources are central to the demand for sovereignty.

States-in-waiting are territories that claimed statehood but had not (yet) received independence. By foregrounding the nationalist insurgent movements that arose from these regions, States-in-Waiting illuminates the un-endings of decolonization – the unfinished, messy, and improvised way that the state-centric system of international order replaced empire. Nationalist claimants from communities left out of the global order (as it was radically expanded by decolonization) were forced to work through unofficial channels to advance their claims in international politics. Therefore, the ambiguous and at times unreliable role of their advocates, the intermediaries they used to navigate these channels, highlighted the uncertainties of the transitions from empires to states. This uncertainty, and the political weakness of particular nationalist demands, left certain claimants seemingly perpetually awaiting international recognition.

The place of minority peoples in new postcolonial states presented the international community with a quandary: if national liberation presumed that dependent peoples deserve self-rule, what should be the response to peoples within newly independent states who demanded political autonomy? In order to move their claims onto the international stage and win the support they required, nationalist claimants – on the African continent, in India, and elsewhere across the globe – had to find and work with advocates outside their communities. In 1960, Angami Zapu Phizo, the Naga nationalist leader who claimed independence from India, journeyed to London in search of such advocacy. The history of internationalized Naga nationalist claims-making emerges through the complex of correspondence, journeys, identities, and friendships that made possible Phizo’s journey to London.

The World Peace Brigade was one of many advocacy organizations in a sphere of unofficial international politics, a sphere in which corporations also paired with nongovernmental organizations to provide de facto recognition to nationalist claims. The political turmoil surrounding the United Nations intervention in Congo and the breakup of its neighboring Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland made sub-Saharan Africa the epicenter for this transnational advocacy. It may seem counterintuitive for a mining company with operations in regions controlled by colonial or settler-colonial regimes to support anticolonial nationalist aspirations. However, in 1962 the American Metal Climax mining company (AMAX) chose to back certain anticolonial nationalists in Southern Africa, in direct response to the blowback that its competitor, Union Minière, received for backing the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga. Katanga hovered over the imagination of advocates and nationalists as the ultimate example of illegitimate nationalism – the potential of failed national liberation – in which Western imperial interests had co-opted a state-in-waiting and violated postcolonial state sovereignty.

Three weeks after and three hundred kilometers from end of the World Peace Brigade’s Friendship March in Northeast India, The Nagaland Baptist Church Council called for a peace mission to arbitrate between the Indian Government and Naga nationalist insurgents, choosing Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan and Michael Scott as members. Peace negotiations under the auspices of a civil society mission that did not officially represent either a nationalist movement or a state government seemed safely apolitical. However, the transnational network in which JP and Scott were key members was integrated into official government as well as international institutional circles of power and affiliated with a number of sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory movements and interests. JP and Scott were far from politically disinterested free agents—and the web of political causes that bound them extended to the Peace Mission, constraining its impact. JP’s resignation from the mission and Scott’s deportation from India marked the end of the influence and international opportunity for their network’s advocacy work on behalf of states-in-waiting.

Many of the unofficial advocates for states-in-waiting were individuals affiliated or identified with the international peace movement. These transnational advocates often found themselves championing independence struggles in states-in-waiting that were situated within newly decolonized postcolonial nation-states. While some within these postcolonial state governments may themselves have relied on these advocates during their own independence struggles, they opposed such advocacy after they won their independence, since it had the potential to undermine their own state sovereignty. The 1963 Friendship March – launched by the World Peace Brigade, a transnational civil society organization set up to find peaceful solutions to global decolonization, exemplified this contradiction. The Friendship March started in New Delhi, India, and intended to cross the Chinese border in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

In December 1960, the international advocates Rev. Michael Scott and Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan met for a conference at Gandhigram Ashram in Madras State (now Tamil Nadu), India. Although Scott and JP did not agree on certain issues – such as the demands of Naga nationalist claimants within India – they both supported anticolonial nationalism across much of the decolonizing world and were committed proponents of nonviolent political action. At the conference, JP called for the creation of a World Peace Brigade, an international civil society organization that would send peace activists to intervene nonviolently in confrontations between states, empires, and nationalist movements. The Brigade’s first endeavor, the Africa Freedom Action Project, was launched in Dar es Salaam in 1962, which they hoped to make the “anti-Algiers” – a training ground for nonviolent, anti-communist, anticolonial national liberation.