"With fullness of heart we espouse their cause, which is our cause, the cause of all peoples spiritually free.” - The anticolonial transnational efforts of the Third World in the drafting of the Declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this investigation is to explore and highlight the role of the Third World within a human rights framework during the era of decolonization. More specifically the investigation analyzes in what ways states from the Third World used human rights to argue for the abolishment of colonialism within the context of debates in the 15th session of the UN General Assembly in 1960 and in relation to the Declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples. With a base in archival and empirical research, the agency and arguments of the sponsor states are investigated by conducting a qualitative content analysis of meeting records from the 15th session of the UN General Assembly. The human rights themes of “agency”, “the right to freedom and self-determination and the indivisibility and interdependence of all rights”, “universality” and “invoking the human rights framework”, were inductively coded from the primary material. The second purpose was to investigate how the draft declaration and the advocacy for decolonization within the UN General Assembly could be understood as a result of the collective effort of the Third World; this purpose was met by applying a theoretical framework of the so-called anticolonial transnational onto the primary material. The investigation concludes that the Third World did play a significant role within the human rights framework in the context of decolonization in 1960. Furthermore the investigation highlights the relationship between the perspective and conceptuality of the anticolonial transnational and the concept of human rights.