Congratulations to Lydia Walker on being awarded the James J. Busuttil Medal and Prize for Human Rights by the Royal Asiatic Society. From its website:

"Lydia Walker’s States-in-Waiting is a wide-ranging and ambitious global history of nationalist movements that sought sovereignty but fell outside the formal decolonization framework of the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on under-utilised archives, Walker reconstructs the history of claimants such as the Naga independence movement, showing how their aspirations were mediated by international legal and humanitarian advocates who operated outside official diplomatic channels. Walker reveals how human rights concerns emerged where sovereignty claims were denied, offering a powerful counternarrative to conventional histories of decolonization."

About States-in-Waiting:

Lydia Walker’s book States-in-Waiting (Cambridge, 2024) offers a counternarrative of global decolonization after the Second World War, when national self-determination became a recognized international norm, yet it one that effectively only extended to former colonies. Highlighting little-known regions, marginalized individuals, and their hidden or lost archives, this history begins and ends in Nagaland at the junction of China, Burma, and India, a region that was invaded by the Second World War and declared independence the day before Indian independence in August 1947. After years of resistance to Indian rule, the Naga nationalist leader Angami Zapu Phizo arrived in London in 1960, the same year that seventeen countries became independent world-wide and national self-determination became an international norm at the United Nations.

However, that international-legal conception did not apply to peoples within postcolonial states. Therefore, Nagas like many other nationalist and humanitarian claimants relied on unofficial advocates to attempt to access international forums. Yet these advocates drawn from global human rights movements had their own agendas and allegiances, which could undermine the autonomy of the claimants they supported. By foregrounding nationalist movements and their transnational advocacy networks, States-in-Waiting articulates how particular nationalist claims were transformed into human rights concerns when they did not fit postcolonial notions of state sovereignty. In this way, the book illuminates the un-endings of decolonization—the unfinished and improvised ways that the state-centric international system replaced empire, which left certain peoples perpetually awaiting recognition.

Walker is Provost Scholar Assistant Professor and Seth Andre Myers Chair in Global Military History at The Ohio State University, USA. In 2025, she is also a visiting fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK. Her current research focuses on the history of international intervention in postwar conflict zones through the evolving role of the United Nations.

States-in-Waiting was published Open Access through a TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) grant awarded by Ohio State Libraries in collaboration with the Association of American Universities, Association of Research Libraries, and Association of University Presses.