The Battle for the Recognition of Wars of National Liberation

Abstract

Abstract The chapter revisits the third world struggle for a full legal recognition of ‘wars of national liberation’ in the 1960s and 70s. Supported by famous United Nations (UN) resolutions, the growing number of ‘newly independent states’ had managed to confer increasing institutional legitimacy to the still-ongoing struggles for independence by incriminating colonialism and racism, as well as by actively promoting support for third-world self-determination. Armed revolts of independence movements against colonial or racist rule between 1945 and 1975, for example in Indonesia, Vietnam, Algeria, Kenya, Namibia, Angola, Guinea, and Western Sahara, figured as ‘wars of national liberation’ in various UN resolutions. Led from beginning to the victorious end by Georges Abi-Saab, the G77 battle for the full recognition of wars of national liberation framed these wars as ‘defensive’ military actions against continuing foreign ‘aggression’ through colonialism. During the 1960s and early 1970s, this move was strongly opposed by most Western authors, who argued that these conflicts were internal struggles and thus merely ‘civil wars’ or legitimate reactions to ‘terrorist’ activities. The chapter argues that even though the third world could ultimately secure a victory in this legal struggle, it could not prevent that Cold War interventionism of the superpowers and the former metropoles, as well as proxy-wars, nationalism and militarization further destabilized the societies in the ‘newly independent states’. decolonization, international legal transformations, Bandung, hegemony, boundary drawing, Sattelzeit, law of the sea, use of force, humanitarian law, human rights law