Petitioning the Mandates: Anti-colonial and Anti-racist Publics in International Law

Abstract

This dissertation is the first systematic legal-historical study of how transnational anticolonial and antiracist solidarity movements shaped the international law of non-state activism in the Mandates System of the League of Nations. In particular, this dissertation examines how anticolonial activists, colonial officials, and members of the newly-formed international bureaucracy in the League negotiated a language of grassroots international protest, one based around the practice of individuals and social movements petitioning international organizations about colonial abuse. African American activists were particularly active in this field, framing their involvement in the Mandates as a protest against racial discrimination, turning a mirror on the United States’ own racial politics while embodying a new stateless subjectivity. Petitioning in the interwar and immediate post-war years shows us how inter-continental forms of protest could be deployed in fighting what states saw as primarily local battles. These battles spanned the period from 1920 until at least 1956, when the International Court of Justice engaged with the history and jurisprudence of the right to petition in international law.

This dissertation traces the origins of petitioning in the Mandates System to grassroots activism in 1918 and 1919, far earlier than other works on the League have suggested. Petitioning was an innovation of the League that was pushed by a transnational public of activists and scholars, keen to make the League a forum for antiracist protest. A series of colonial scandals, and the role petitioning played in publicizing those scandals, led to a wide-ranging retrenchment in the League. Colonial powers pushed for a formal procedure that would limit the access non-state actors had to international institutions. This dissertation demonstrates how that process, while certainly limiting petitioning, also entrenched it in the normal functioning of the League.

Petitioning the Mandates System of the League also created an academic audience of African American activists who built up an expertise in colonial administration in the 1930s. This dissertation tracks how the longer histories of Pan-African activism intersected with the internationalism of the League to produce new opportunities for protest. African American activists like Rayford Logan, Ralph Bunche, and W.E.B. Du Bois used the precedent of petitioning the Mandates System to argue that the United Nations Charter needed an effective system of human rights petitioning to protect people, especially non-white people, from their own governments. Drawing on their recognized experience with the Mandates and colonial internationalism, African American scholars were able to influence the drafting of the UN Charter in ways that have not been identified before, shaping the possibilities of the early Cold War international order. As such, this dissertation engages historiographical debates in global history, histories of international institutions and human rights, histories of transnational social movements and decolonization, and histories of the United States in the world.