The Cold War, Human Rights and Self-Determination
Tuesday, October 8, 20134:00 PM - 5:30 PM (Pacific)
Encina Hall Basement, Room E008
About the Topic: During the Cold War countless peoples and movements in both the decolonizing world and the advanced industrial states mobilized under the banner of self-determination, and sought to institutionalize its status as a human right in international law. This talk, focusing on the end of European empire in the 1970s will explore why self-determination came to have such expansive and potentially disruptive meaning in the post-WWII era, serving as a short-hand for a wide range of claims to sovereignty.
About the Speaker: Brad Simpson is an assistant professor of history and international studies at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests are twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations and international history. His first book, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Stanford 2008) explores the intersection of anti-Communism and development thinking in shaping U.S. Indonesian relations.
He is currently researching a global history of self-determination, exploring its political, cultural and legal descent through post 1945 US foreign relations and international politics. Simpson is also a founder and director of a project at the non-profit National Security Archive to declassify U.S. government documents concerning Indonesia and East Timor during the reign of General Suharto (1966-1998). He has recently published in International History Review, Cold War History, Reviews in American History, Diplomatic History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Critical Asian Studies, and Peace and Change.