Bradley R. Simpson, "The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Jan 25, 2026

Bradley R. Simpson, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at UConn, explains how self-determination evolved across the twentieth century. He traces competing visions from decolonization to indigenous and economic claims. Short, globe-spanning stories examine UN debates, small states, Pacific and African cases, and modern movements reshaping sovereignty.

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ANECDOTE

Genesis From East Timor Activism

Simpson began thinking about self-determination as an activist on Indonesian-occupied East Timor in the 1990s.
He noticed official recognition of the right but simultaneous denial in practice, which sparked his research.

INSIGHT

Five Phases Structure The Argument

Simpson divides self-determination into historical phases shaped by global politics and economy.
Key phases include pre-WWI intellectual roots, the Wilsonian moment, WWII/UN institutionalization, postcolonial diversification, and post-Cold War reinvention.

INSIGHT

Atlantic Charter Opened A Pandora's Box

The Atlantic Charter served as a fulcrum for global hopes and fears about self-determination despite not naming it.
Anti-colonial movements seized its vague language while great powers tried to narrowly contain its implications.

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The idea of self-determination is one of the most significant in modern international politics. For more than a century diplomats, lawyers, scholars, activists, and ordinary people in every part of the globe have wrestled with its meaning and implications for decolonization, human rights, sovereignty, and international order. The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000 (Oxford UP, 2025) argues that there was no one self-determination, but a century-long contest between contending visions of sovereignty and rights that were as varied and changing as the nature of sovereignty itself. In this globe-spanning narrative, Simpson argues that self-determination's meaning has often emerged not just from the United Nations but from the claims of movements and peoples on the margins of international society. Powerful states, he shows, persistently rejected expansive self-determination claims, arguing that these threatened great power conflict, the dissolution of international order, or the unravelling of the world economy.

Pacific Island territories, indigenous peoples, regional and secessionist movements, and transnational solidarity groups, among others, rejected the efforts of large, powerful states to define self-determination along narrow lines. Instead, international historian Bradley R. Simpson shows they offered expansive visions of economic, political, and cultural sovereignty ranging far beyond the movement for decolonization with which they are often associated. As they did so, these movements and groups helped to vernacularize self-determination as a language of social justice and rights for people around the world.

An ambitious work of global breadth on a key geopolitical issue, The First Right transforms how we think about the making of the twentieth century world order and the place of the global South and decolonization in it.

Dr. Bradley R. Simpson is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Samee Siddiqui is Assistant Professor of World History at Drury University.

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