Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Spring 2024
ISSN
0889-1915
Publisher
Temple University School of Law
Language
en-US
Abstract
Philippe Sands’ The Last Colony1 tells the story of how Chagos Islanders won the right to return to the lands of their birth through a 2019 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).2 In 1965, while the United Kingdom stood in the midst of conceding to the independence claims of myriad anti-colonialists throughout its imperial holdings, it took the anachronistic step of creating a colony—the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).3 In flagrant violation of UN Resolution 1514,4 the United Kingdom detached the Chagos Archipelago from the colony of Mauritius. And between 1967 and 1973, the United Kingdom forcefully liquidated the Islands’ mostly Black African inhabitants so that the United States could use the island of Diego Garcia for a military base.5 In 2019, the ICJ sided with the government of Mauritius and the Chagos islanders in holding that the separation of the Chagos islands from Mauritius was a violation of international law, and the United Kingdom must end its control over the islands and allow the former inhabitants—individuals such as Madame Liseby Elysé—to return home.6
In this Article, I reflect on the kind of text that Philippe Sands has authored—a work of legal advocacy that departs from the specialized practice of doctrinal interpretation and argument, and that Sands instead grounds in legal archaeology, deterritorialized ethnography, autoethnography, and narrative. I applaud Sands’ The Last Colony as an example of two scholarly trends I wholeheartedly support: (1) the decolonization of (legal and academic) thought7 and (2) the increasing appreciation for the epistemological and methodological value of narrative in sociolegal inquiry and in legal advocacy.8
Domination happens not only through the brute force of armed occupation, counterinsurgency, and policing; but through domestic and international laws and processes (such as inter-state litigation before the ICJ),9 through the inculcating of “civic virtues” through state education, and even through the official recognition and suppression of language. It happens through the sanctioning of what constitutes “scholarly” discourse—through publication norms and tenure processes. In the Conclusion, I reflect on the need to decolonize the legal academy, and I recommend The Last Colony as one example of what that decolonization can look like.
Recommended Citation
Ayodeji K. Perrin,
The Last Colony of the Mind: Narrative, Legal Advocacy, and the Decolonization of Legal Knowledge
,
38
Temple International & Comparative Law Journal
37
(2024).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4069
