The Oxford Martin Programme on Changing Global Orders at the University of Oxford recently interviewed Lydia Walker about her book, "States-in-Waiting":

The concept of self-determination is constantly referenced in today’s news, from Kurdistan and Chagos to Palestine and indigenous peoples. It has become a hegemonic concept, particularly in postcolonial states after the success of multiple waves of decolonisation. In this interview with Boyd van Dijk for the Changing Global Orders blog series, the historian Lydia Walker discusses her groundbreaking book, States-in-Waiting, which explores the history of decolonisation through the lens of minority groups striving for self-determination within newly-formed postcolonial states. She focuses on the Naga nationalist movement in India and several other struggles for self-determination amidst a state-centric international order. Through her research, she shows how decolonisation and its legacies remain painfully relevant today, drawing parallels to various iterations of sovereignty in a changing global order.  

Could you share more about your journey towards writing States-in-Waiting? What initially drew you to this subject of polities-in-the-making, and who were the most crucial influences along the way?

I came of age in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and became fascinated by the concept of the ‘non-state actor’ – a capacious category that seemed to include both terrorist and humanitarian organisations – and their political impact on structures of international order. As the category of the ‘state’ creates that of the ‘non-state,’ my research interests zeroed in on the great state-making process of the twentieth century: global decolonisation – and those state-claiming movements that did not, or have not (yet), become independent, which I have come to call ‘states-in-waiting.’

After undergrad, I worked for a think tank in New Delhi, the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, where I had the opportunity to observe and participate in Indian domestic and international security studies spheres. There, I learned that India remains full of what Jawaharlal Nehru called its ‘fissiparous tendencies,’ demands for regional autonomy that control to varying degrees territory, resources, and popular mobilisation. One of them is Nagaland, at the junction of China, India, and Myanmar, which is often called ‘the mother of all insurgencies’ in Indian security circles, because Naga nationalist insurgents declared independence the day before Indian independence in August 1947, making their claim co-constitutive with that of the Indian state.

At the end of my time in Delhi, I decided to pursue a PhD, focused on the issue of nationalist claims within postcolonial states, such as Nagaland within India. I was fortunate to research and write my doctoral dissertation with the historian Erez Manela, whose scholarship on interwar era national self-determination movements and global approaches to historical research grounded my own. Looking back, my PhD years at Harvard also felt like a high-water mark in the training in international and global history. The pandemic environment had not yet shrunk cohort size or atomised education. My scholarship grew and sharpened in a hot house of daily seminars and works-in-progress workshops connected to the History Department and the international studies community at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Moreover, a portion of the archives I worked in have been moved, closed for periods of time, suffered fire and water damage, or have different access requirements. The research landscape that created States-in-Waiting has fundamentally changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermaths, changing political environments, as well as a contraction in research funding. I wonder what the long-term effects on global, multi-sited histories of decolonisation may be.

In the crowded fields of the histories of decolonisation and internationalism, what unique insights or perspectives does your book offer that set it apart from other works?

Conceptually, I think the most original contribution of States-in-Waiting is to highlight the unregulated or interstitial spaces of international order – the so-called peripheral regions, their nationalist claimants, and the transnational advocacy networks that helped move these claims through international politics – as central to a synthetic narrative history of global decolonisation after World War II. Most ‘grand’ narratives in international history focus on people and places that have already been deemed ‘important,’ while most existing studies of the places and individuals featured in States-in-Waiting analyse them in their own regional or organisational terms rather than in an interconnected, international context. Among other things, I argue that who gets to be considered significant to international politics is not intrinsic, but rather a matter of asymmetrical power relationships. So I wrote a book that considers how and why certain peoples and places got pushed out of the twentieth century’s great state-making process of decolonisation, and thereby came to define it, since exclusions are also definitions. This is why the book’s subtitle is A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization – a history of decolonisation outside of dominant narratives of nationalist celebration or imperial nostalgia that focuses on the people and peoples who knew the historical process’ constraints and complexity most intimately because they personally navigated through it.

You have visited an impressive number of archives across especially the English-speaking world. Can you share your experiences with doing archival research in, for instance, India and Southern Africa? What difficulties did you face while gathering materials and interviewing (former) activists aspiring for secession or other sovereignty-related projects?

At the onset, I did not set out to work on Southern Africa, nor work primarily in anglophone archives. However, Southern Africa was the epicentre for international action and debates surrounding decolonisation in the early to mid-1960s, was the region where many of my actors (e.g. the transnational advocates Rev. Michael Scott, Bill Sutherland, and Suresh Ram, among others) congregated and directed their focus and actions, so my research followed my actors to the decolonising African continent. I also had thought I would use more French and Hindi language sources. However, the advocacy network I came to track (which formed the World Peace Brigade organisation), whose leaders connected a range of nationalist claims with international forums, was deliberately anglophone due to its membership and the cost of translation, a policy which in turn reinforced the anglophone nature of this sphere of politics.

In addition, Hindi is not an indigenous language in Northeast India, and the very nature of the pursuit of nationalist claims-making in international politics made English the default during postwar decolonisation for accessing international forums. Elsewhere, I have written on Goan diaspora responses to the December 1961 Indian annexation of Goa and independence of Tanganyika, as well as on elements of the diffusion of French counterrevolutionary warfare doctrine from the Algerian War, topics that have been treated at greater depth in embedded narratives by Margaret Frenz and in forthcoming work by Terrence Petersen, respectively. Different decolonisation subjects lend themselves to different linguistic frames, driven by topic and actors. The way English can dominate global histories that focus on those accessing (or attempting to access) ‘the international’ is a symptom of how nationalist claims can be re-shaped by advocacy in their pursuit of international recognition.

In the end, for States-in-Waiting I followed my actors and their records in Northeast India (Assam and Nagaland) and New Delhi; in British, European, and American collections; as well as in Namibia, South Africa, and more briefly in Tanzania. I was very lucky to have support for 24 months of research on four continents, in over 50 collections, in over 30 archives. In my experience, nationalist claimants are assiduous in keeping their records, disseminating them to their advocates, and interested in talking to researchers – all forms of claims-making. After all, if you are not a state, you cannot build a state archive. Therefore, their networked collections formed a non-state archive of nationalist claims-making filtered through its transnational advocacy. The shape my research took became a methodology that I have expanded in other forms: at my current institution, The Ohio State University, I have launched the Non-State Archive and grants scheme, which supports researchers and practitioners to organize, catalogue and digitise their ‘non-state’ (broadly defined) collections so that they may be available for future scholars. We ran our first call this past academic year and were able to support a range of fascinating research materials. There will be subsequent ones annually, opening in December. Researchers themselves create archives that capture in freeze frame the access they had, which with changing political and economic environments, may be greater than what may be available to future researchers. However, researchers are generally not supported financially to organize their materials so that they can be utilised by others in the future. The Non-State Archive is an attempt to address that lacuna in existing funding sources.

How do you define a ‘state-in-waiting’?

State sovereignty has two aspects: internally claiming it (national self-determination) and its external acknowledgement it (international legal recognition). A state-in-waiting is my purposefully capacious term for communities that have the first characteristic but lack the second, so they seek recognition in all sorts of informal, unofficial ways. I am thrilled when scholars of other regions and communities find resonance with the concept of a ‘state-in-waiting’ and the relationship between nationalist claims-making and its advocacy chronicled in States-in-Waiting. While ‘state-in-waiting’ is not an actor’s category, it is a term many of my interlocutors have found meaningful with how they perceive their own movements. Perhaps others may as well. Regardless, it is a matter of their own self-determination (double meaning intended) if they find it resonant. As a work of historical scholarship, my book does not seek to justify particular claims as ‘legitimately’ national, or not – rather I have sought to explain the processes that hedged in, limited, or constrained particular nationalist claims during a moment of perceived nationalist possibility – postwar global decolonisation.

Strikingly, you emphasise peace politics during decolonisation, rather than the often-highlighted themes of armed struggle or Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence. What drove you to focus on postcolonial peace politics instead, especially given that some of your protagonists faced violence and sought to radically overturn the international order to create more space for their respective claims?

In scholarship on global history and histories of international relations (as well as in contemporary security studies), there is often a divide in focusing on war or peace, when in reality, the two are intertwined. When studying insurgent movements, peace processes create two things: records and factions. First, they become document repositories for insurgency and counterinsurgency, when the insurgent movement may otherwise lack the infrastructure to retain their records and the counterinsurgent government may choose not to make their records public. Second, each peace negotiation between the insurgent movement and counterinsurgent government creates new factions – those within the movement who chose not to negotiate with the government, versus those who do. Therefore, peace processes can be crucial moments where irregular warfare is documented and may well shift the character of that struggle, if it remains ongoing. This is why the final chapter of States-in-Waiting details a peace mission that attempted to broker a settlement from 1964-1966 between Naga nationalists and the Indian government, whose dissolution also fractured the advocacy network (drawn from the international peace movement) that had worked to bring particular nationalist claims into international politics.

How do you envision the future of international history as a field? What emerging trends or challenges do you foresee shaping its trajectory?

As for the future of international and global history as a field, I wonder if there is a shift underway to focus more on issues of economic inequality, as well as on global environmental histories. My own research, however, is not following those general trends: I am currently crafting a project on how ‘war’ became ‘intervention’ after World War II, through the lens of the evolving role of the United Nations and its military-humanitarian operations.