Testing the Atlantic Charter: linking anticolonialism, self-determination and universal human rights

Abstract

The historical link between anticolonialism and human rights has recently become a subject of wide-ranging scholarly debates. A growing number of human rights scholars argue that anticolonialism was not a human rights movement because it was concerned with popular liberation rather than curtailing state power over the individual. This article interrogates these and similar arguments by exploring how anticolonial activists in Africa invoked the Atlantic Charter in struggles for self-determination and deployed an emergent human rights lexicon to strengthen longstanding demands for independence. It queries the logic and historicity of delinking the discourse of self-determination within anticolonialism from the discourse of human rights in post-World War II internationalism. It argues that constructing anticolonialism and human rights as intersecting social and intellectual movements allows for a more nuanced and holistic history of human rights in the twentieth century.