Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960-8 (Cambridge, 2023)
Umut Özsu (Carleton University, Ottawa)
April 12, 2024
Friday, Noon, 509 O'Brian Hall
Abstract: After the Second World War, the dissolution of European empires and emergence of 'new states' in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere necessitated large-scale structural changes in international legal order. In Completing Humanity, my new book, I recount the history of the struggle to transform international law during the twentieth century's last major wave of decolonization.

Commencing in 1960, with the General Assembly's landmark decolonization resolution, and concluding in 1982, with the close of the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis, my book examines the work of elite international lawyers from newly independent states alongside that of international law specialists from 'First World' and socialist states. A study in modifications to legal theory and doctrine over time, it documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the 'Third World' and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.

Preview the book on Academia, here.

Speaker Bio: Umut Özsu is a scholar of public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Recounting the struggle to transform international law during the last major wave of decolonization, the book documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the “Third World” and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.

Özsu is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford University Press, 2015), which situates “population transfer” within the broader history of international law by examining the interwar exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey—the first legally structured large-scale endeavour in compulsory population exchange in modern international history. Özsu is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Edward Elgar, 2021) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.