The "Fate of Minorities" in the Early Afro-Asian Struggle for Decolonization

Abstract:This article explores the significance of minority rights to postcolonial internationalism by examining an emerging Afro-Asian collective at the United Nations in the late 1940s. As postcolonial nations became UN memberstates, they fostered transnational solidarity through the Arab-Asian group, a predecessor of the Afro-Asian bloc, and constructed an anti-imperial project that directly engaged with the making of the new international human rights system. However, the Arab-Asian group did not advance minority rights in their struggle for decolonization at the UN. Instead, they favored a gradual path toward formal self-rule and the recognition of national self-determination that worked within the international order, most clearly expressed through the removal of a minority rights article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.