Trust Territory Research Articles

From Unincorporated Territory to Commonwealth Connecting Decolonization and U.S. Empire

My essay examines the transition of the Philippines and Puerto Rico from U.S. unincorporated territories to U.S. commonwealths in the mid-twentieth century. It studies the ideas of progress that are associated with this shift in legal and political status in order to then consider how they promote particular historical narratives and analytical frameworks for U.S. empire. The essay begins by examining dominant assumptions about the meanings and implications of the unincorporated territory and commonwealth in U.S. culture and history. Building on scholarship by Amy Kaplan, Christina Duffy Burnett, and Todd Shepard, I consider interpretations of the commonwealth as either a continuation or rectification of the U.S. colony status, but also as removed from the contemporaneous historical movement of decolonization. To understand how commonwealth stories operate as ambivalent narrations of U.S. decolonization, I analyze two fictional works, Bienvenido Santos’s 1955 short story “Brown Coterie” and the well-known 1957 musical West Side Story. The concluding paragraphs point to the possibilities opened up by situating the U.S. commonwealth in relation to twentieth century global and geopolitical formations such as United Nations trust territories and the outré-mer, rather than only within U.S. nation-based frameworks.

From Below and to the Left?: Human Rights and Liberation Politics in Africa’s Postcolonial Age

During the 1950s, the African United Nations Trust Territories became pivotal sites where the human rights principles outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights played a complementary role to anticolonial nationalism. A transregional human rights network provided international support to African nationalists and rights activists, and the Trusteeship Agreements and the UN Charter that administering authorities had signed set the conditions for legally implementable human rights norms. But as the trusteeship system came to a close circa 1960, the UN no longer had the jurisdictional means to enforce rights principles, and the transatlantic network that activists throughout Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States had put in place began to disintegrate. In the 1960s, the human rights movement in the global North parted ways with liberation politics as it narrowly redefined human rights as negative protections for individuals. Yet, as this comparative analysis of human rights in Tanzania and Cameroon reveals, in some parts of (post)colonial Africa, particularly in the former UN trust territories where a 1950s-era conception of rights had become prevalent, human rights remained the expression of a political solidarity rooted in the liberatory practices of anticolonial struggle.

Health Concerns of Micronesian Peoples

Several states in the United States have been experiencing an influx of migrants from an area of the world that most people have only heard of when learning about the atomic bomb and World War II. This area is the former U.S. Trust Territory of Pacific Islands now called the Freely Associated States. At the end of World War II, the United States took possession of many of these islands and in 1948, the United States formally took over administration of the Marshalls, the Carolines, Palau, and the Northern Marianas islands. Collectively this area is known as Micronesia. Micronesians come from areas that have high prevalence of several communicable diseases and there is growing concern that Micronesian immigrants may enable the spread of infectious disease to the United States from Asia. Data concerning Hansen's disease and tuberculosis support this claim. According to data from the Hawai'i State Department of Health, a 5-year trend examining new cases of tuberculosis in Hawai'i identified that 65 out of 77 new cases came from the Freely Associated States of Micronesia. Presented is an overview of the health concerns and health status of the people from the Federated States of Micronesia.

To Hell and Back: towards protecting our natural assets through tourism?

We have neglected our past and present, so that the future of our natural and built heritage is uncertain. Recent and current work, including an EU-supported joint project between the National Trust for the Cayman Islands, National Parks Trust of the Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos National Trust and UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum, are providing a future for natural and historical assets. We can now contemplate our future with a sense of optimism. We can imagine grandparents walking with their grandchildren, telling them tales of how their ancestors built forts with only their hands; school teachers leading trails of excited children through forests that have provided ecosystem services to generations. The approach is to improve facilities for conducting ecologically sustainable visitor tours, with trained staff generating self-sustaining income; to provide and implement environmental educational and public awareness material, involving local consultations and designed to provide information to decision-makers, developers and planning authorities; and to implement conservation measures to provide increased protection for key vulnerable ecosystems. In Cayman, one can send a postcard from a town called Hell. The preservation and sustainability generated through these projects is bringing the natural and built heritage a future, perhaps on a route to Hell and Back.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Future of Child Health Policy

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Future of Child Health Policy

"We Had Been Fooled into Thinking that the UN Watches over the Entire World": Human Rights, UN Trust Territories, and Africa's Decolonization

This article uses empirical evidence to engage recent scholarship on the historical place of human rights in decolonization. The case of the British and French Cameroons demonstrates that African nationalists and the Western anti-imperial human rights advocates who supported them viewed UN Trust Territories as the most politically and legally viable channel through which to address the human rights abuses particular to colonial rule. Yet, because of the political deformations arising out of decolonization, the transition to independence was accompanied by a widespread disappointment in the United Nations, the disintegration of collaborative, transregional activists' networks, and a withering away of human rights ideas.

Greening the United Nations Charter: World Politics in the Anthropocene

A revised version of this working paper has been published as: Biermann, Frank. 2012. Greening the United Nations Charter: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development. May / June 2012. A constitutional turn is needed to bring the UN system in line with the urgent needs of planetary stewardship and earth system governance in the 21st century. Yet how this could be organized in practice remains a challenge and subject to political and scholarly debate. This paper contributes to this debate by outlining four reforms of the UN system that would advance global decision-making by addressing major shortcomings in the current system: Lack of integration of economic and environmental policies in the UN system; institutional fragmentation and weakness of the environmental pillar of sustainable development; lack of high-level regulatory competence and oversight regarding areas beyond national jurisdiction; and insufficient integration of scientific insights into political decision-making. The reforms proposed would together create an Earth Alliance in the UN system, consisting of a high-level UN Sustainable Development Council, a World Environment Organization, a UN Trusteeship Council for Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, and an UN Global Environmental Assessment Commission.

The Republic of the Marshall Islands since 1990

The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has enjoyed nearly a quarter century of independence since dissolution of its status as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in 1986, and ov...

Translating between India and Tanzania: Sophia Mustafa's Partial Cosmopolitanism

Sophia Mustafa (1922–2005), novelist and political activist of South Asian origin, was one of Tanganyika’s first women members of parliament for the Tanganyika African National Union active in the transition from a British-administered trust territory to independent Tanzania under Julius Nyerere. This paper argues, by drawing on her novel Broken Reed (2005) and her nonfictional account The Tanganyika Way: A Personal Story of Tanganyika’s Growth to Independence ([1961] 2009), that her crosscultural position required multiple translations that profoundly shaped her political vision. Having witnessed the arrival of Independence in India in 1947, with its partition violence, Mustafa insisted repeatedly that she considered herself Tanganyikan, rather than a member of the Asian community. Mustafa’s life trajectory and writing, even though shaped by colonial migratory circuits, draws on alternative sites of knowledge production in the complex interaction between India and Tanzania and out of this South-South perspective emerges a nuanced, albeit at times unsettling, understanding of cosmopolitan nationalist politics.

Micronesia's Wartime Generation: Experiences and Memories

In Micronesia, the years of World War II produced dramatic political, economic, and lifestyle shifts as Islanders experienced attacks and invasion, followed by a transition in governance. After more than three decades of colonial rule by Japan, the islands came under American control, first through military occupation administered by the U.S. Navy, then as a U.N. Trust Territory. This article examines how the impact of this historical moment—the transition in power due to military conquest—forever altered the lives of the generation that came to adulthood during the war years, and how that transition is encoded in memory.

International administration over territories

The analysis of the cases concerning international territorial administration involves the results of research of taking over administration over the strategically and internationally important areas in the periods after World War I and II, respectively. All analysed cases among which are the mandates of the League of Nations, non-selfgoverning, strategic and trust territories or generally speaking, 'internationalised territories' in the system of United Nations indicate that international administration of territory is established by the division of power by two or more states in an area or by the transfer of administrative authorities to an international body or the international organisation. As a rule, they are established because the political and social conditions are not fully created as well as because of the unequal power of international legal subjects. The transformation of international territorial administration in the contemporary period results from the transformation of the United Nations collective security system. In critical situations it can serve to achieve political legitimacy and legal and economic subjectivity of the territory.

Paradoxes of internationalisation of the Anglophone problem in Cameroon

Historically it is not strange that the Anglophone elites in Cameroon took their case to the international community, since this was a strategy that they employed during the British colonial period. A number of petitions and constant visits were made to the United Nations (UN) by Anglophone elites concerning British neglect of their territory. These petitions were made in the form of presentations before the United Nations in New York or whenever there was a visiting UN mission to the trust territory. Nonetheless, since the early 1990s, the pattern of petitions has changed drastically. Petitions against the new state are different from those earlier petitions against colonialism. The aim of the petitions against the new state has been to draw the attention of the UN and the international community to the injustices inflicted upon minority English-speaking Cameroonians by the ruling government. The Anglophone elites believe that, by making their plight known to the international community, the latter might intervene to restore the statehood of Southern Cameroons.

The Republic of Palau and its Compact, 1995–2009

The Republic of Palau (ROP), formerly the only remaining trust area of the last UN–US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), has received major support from the United States government in ...

THE FORD ADMINISTRATION AND SECURITY POLICY IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC AFTER THE FALL OF SAIGON

ABSTRACTThis article enhances our understanding of the Ford administration's foreign policy by examining how it sought to react to a changed situation in the Asia-Pacific after the fall of Saigon in May 1975. It shows how changes in regional politics forced the administration to adapt to a situation in which allies began to look to the Communist countries for friendship and to reconsider having American forces on their soil. It illustrates this situation by looking at base negotiations in Thailand and the Philippines, and the administration's search for an alternative arrangement in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. It then reconsiders two crisis situations in the region to examine the relevance of the superpower competition to the administration's responses. This aids our understanding of the role that regional factors played in tactical foreign policy decisions taken by the Ford administration, extending beyond a focus on the superpower competition that has marked the historiography of the administration in the past.

Federated States of Micronesia: Country Report on Human Rights

This article provides a country report on the status of human rights in the Federal States of Micronesia (FSM). FSM's legal and regulatory frameworks are a direct import of the US laws which were used during the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI) period. There is an inherent danger in prioritising introduced rights over traditional duties, obligations and rights – or vice versa – without subjecting these two sets of human rights paradigms to systemic sociocultural analysis. However, there are human rights issues in the FSM in any capacity. These issues originate from three major sources: poor governance and leadership capacity, weak law administrative and enforcement capacity, and outdated legal and political frameworks. The author then provides strategies to protect human rights in the Pacific including major legal and political reform, and the use of region-specific strategies (including codifying customary laws). The challenge going forward is to have in place a unified human rights model that is based on the diverse cultural, spiritual, and democratic heritage of the Pacific.

Our Island Friends: Do We Still Care? The Compacts of Free Association with the Marshall Islands and Micronesia

Our Island Friends: Do We Still Care? The Compacts of Free Association with the Marshall Islands and Micronesia

A Benthic Terrain Classification Scheme for American Samoa

Coral reef ecosystems, the most varied on earth, continually face destruction from anthropogenic and natural threats. The U.S. Coral Reef Task Force seeks to characterize and map priority coral reef ecosystems in the U.S./Trust Territories by 2009. Building upon NOAA Biogeography shallow-water classifications based on Ikonos imagery, presented here are new methods, based on acoustic data, for classifying benthic terrain below 30 m, around Tutuila, American Samoa. The result is a new classification scheme for American Samoa that extends and improves the NOAA Biogeography scheme, which, although developed for Pacific island nations and territories, is only applicable to a maximum depth of 30 m, due to the limitations of satellite imagery. The scheme may be suitable for developing habitat maps pinpointing high biodiversity around coral reefs throughout the western Pacific.

The Secret Guam Study: How President Ford's 1975 Approval of Commonwealth Was Blocked by Federal Officials (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret Guam Study: How President Ford's 1975 Approval of Commonwealth Was Blocked by Federal Officials Robert C Kiste The Secret Guam Study: How President Ford's 1975 Approval of Commonwealth Was Blocked by Federal Officials, by Howard P Willens with Dirk A Ballendorf. Mangilao, Guam: Micronesian Area Research Center; Saipan: Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Division of Historical Preservation, 2004. ISBN 1-878-453-77-7; xvii +238 pages, bibliography, appendixes.US$10.00. Howard P Willens and Deanne C Siemer are a Washington DC–based husband and wife legal team who have served the people of the Northern Marianas since the early 1970s. Most importantly, they represented the Northern Marianas in the negotiations that made the islands a commonwealth in political union with the United States. Willens and Siemer have authored two books: National Security and Self-Determination: United States Policy in Micronesia (1961–1972) in 2000 and An Honorable Accord: The Covenant between the Northern Marianas Islands and the United States in 2002. Willens is also the principal author of The Secret Guam Study. Dirk A Ballendorf is the director of the Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam. In the course of their research for An Honorable Accord, Willens and Siemer discovered evidence that in the mid-1970s, at the direction of President Gerald R Ford, a study had been made concerning Guam's future political status and the United States was prepared to offer Guam commonwealth political status, under terms that were at least as advantageous as those for the Northern Marianas. At a meeting in 2000 with Ballendorf and his colleagues at the University of Guam, Willens and Siemer learned that no one on Guam had ever heard of the presidential initiative. They suggested that relevant information might be obtained by requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Ballendorf served as the plaintiff, with Siemer as his lawyer. FOIA requests were submitted to the Departments of State, Interior, and Defense in late 2000. Although the requests were acknowledged, they were stonewalled. In May 2003, thirty months after the FOIA requests, Ballendorf filed complaints against the same three departments, and they quickly produced some [End Page 182] documents. Nevertheless, the record seemed suspiciously incomplete, and in response to further legal action, more documents were forthcoming. The indigenous people of all the Marianas share a common Chamorro culture and language. Guam, the southernmost of the Marianas, became separated from the others when it became a US territory in 1898 and was placed under US Navy rule. In 1950, the US Congress passed the Guam Organic Act. Guam thereby became an unincorporated territory lacking in local autonomy, belonging to but not an integral part of the United States. Administrative authority was transferred to the Department of Interior. Under the Organic Act, Guam's people became US citizens. At the end of World War II, the United States acquired most of Micronesia as the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands within the United Nations trusteeship system, and again, the Department of Interior was given the responsibility for administration. Negotiations about the future political status of the Trust Territory began in 1969. Internal differences precluded any chance that the territory would evolve as a single nation, and it became divided into four political entities. The Northern Marianas was the first to break away when it began separate negotiations with the United States in late 1972. The people of the Northern Marianas voted for commonwealth status in political union with the United States in 1975, and the status of Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas became finalized when the Trust Territory was dissolved in 1986. The arrangement provided US citizenship for the people of the Northern Marianas, the privilege of drafting their own constitution, and increased autonomy over many local affairs. Not long after its implementation, the people of Guam evidenced discontent with the provisions of the Organic Act and lobbied for an improved political status. When US negotiators wanted Guam's support for the commonwealth arrangement for the Northern Marianas, the White House was urged to address the issue of Guam's political status. In late 1973, a...

Management of Arthropod Pests of Agriculture in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands

AMERICAN ENTOMOLOGIST • Summer 2004 Located more than 5,000 km west of Hawaii, the Marianas are among the most distant of the U.S.-affiliated islands in the Pacific. The Mariana Islands were taken from the Japanese by U.S. forces in 1944 in some of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific. The Northern Mariana Islands—all of the islands except for Guam—were administered as a Trust Territory by the United States until 1978, when they became a U.S. commonwealth. In 1986, the indigenous islanders—Chamorros and Carolinians—became U.S. citizens. Many federal programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to protect and support U.S. agriculture are established in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). These include the U.S. Cooperative Extension Service, which is administered through Northern Marianas College (NMC). I worked as an agricultural entomologist for the Cooperative Extension Service in the CNMI in 2001. The U.S. Cooperative Extension Service is established at land grant institutions in each of the former Trust Territories of the Pacific. In addition to the CNMI, these include the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Management of Arthropod Pests of

Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law. By Karen Knop. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxii, 434. Index. $75, £55.

Part I. Cold War International Legal Literature: 1. The question of norm-type 2. Interpretation and identity 3. Pandemonium, interpretation and participation Part II. Self-determination interpreted in practice: the challenge of culture: 4. The canon of self-determination 5. Developing texts Part III. Self-Determination Interpreted in Practice: The Challenge of Gender: 6. Women and self-determination in Europe after World War I 7. Women and self-determination in United Nations trust territories 8. Indigenous women and self-determination Conclusion.