An analysis of the failed West Papuan decolonisation process: national narrative vs the rights of a Non-Self-Governing Territory

Historical narratives are significant in that they are mobilised at critical junctures in political life to pursue national and/or international agendas. In this thesis, I develop a political analysis that critically interrogates divergent historical narratives regarding the 1962 derailment of the decolonisation of West Papua. The four narratives are the counter-hegemonic West Papuan political sovereignty claims (as advanced in 2000 and earlier), subsequent counter claims of sovereignty made by the dominant Indonesian state (2000 to 2005) and the much earlier US justification of its Indonesian appeasement as well as a historical narrative of international legal commentary (1961–1980). My methodology involves two stages. First, I articulate a representation of each narrative by organising the sources under the rubrics of commentary of ‘our’/ ‘their’ historical claims, and representations of ‘us’/‘them’ as key players. Here, I juxtapose the narratives with each other, political events and legal contexts of the processes of a decolonisation of a Non-Self-Governing-Territory (NSGT). Second, I interrogate these representations by applying an interpretative paradigm combining Settler Colonial Studies and Critical Indigenous theories to explain political contexts. Through this, my analysis decolonises dominant US and Indonesian historical narratives by revealing their disavowal of the rights of an NGST to genuine self-determination, and their settler colonial and colonial tropes. It is argued that the truncation was stage-managed by the United States (acting under the aegis of the United Nations [UN]), in order to appease Indonesian agendas to annex the territory. My research foregrounds how West Papuan claims (undergird by both inherent and modern liberal ideologies) function as a hybrid critique of the settler colonial forms and narratives. My analysis demonstrates that the hybrid narrative is also supported by International Law commentary. Thus, my interdisciplinary paradigm contributes to theoretical innovations concerned with Indigenising the study of Politics and International Relations (IR) beyond narrow nation-/empire-state statist framings. As an example of settler colonialism instituted within the UN era, and outside the context of former British colonies, the particularity of the topic informs the articulation of the settler colonial project generally. In addition, legal researchers interested in investigating the West Papuan case of failed self-determination may find my political/ historical contextualisation of the international legal issues pertinent.