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, explores the contested meanings of self-determination across the twentieth century. He traces how decolonization, indigenous and regional movements, the UN, and Cold War power politics shaped competing visions. The conversation spans Pacific islands, economic sovereignty, transnational activism, and modern parallels like Palestine and Greenland.

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ANECDOTE

Activism Sparked The Research

Bradley R. Simpson recounts his activism with East Timor in the 1990s as the project's origin story.
He noticed officials acknowledged East Timorese rights yet argued they were too small to deserve independence.

INSIGHT

Self-Determination Is Historically Contested

Self-determination is not fixed to one historical moment but shifts across the twentieth century.
Simpson argues its meaning is contested from both top-down institutions and bottom-up movements.

INSIGHT

Five Phases Shaped By Global Change

Simpson outlines five phases of self-determination shaped by global political and economic shifts.
Institutional contexts like the UN change how claimants can make and ground self-determination demands.

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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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