Conference on Reckoning with Empire: The Right to Self-Determination in Historical View

Event time: 
Friday, November 12, 2021 - 7:45am to Saturday, November 13, 2021 - 2:30pm
Location: 
Online () See map
Event description: 

On November 12-13, Yale will host an international conference on decolonization. The conference celebrates a historic occasion—the 60 th anniversary of UN Resolution 1514, “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” Not only was Resolution 1514 a key moment in terms of codifying the international right to self-determination. It also marked a turning point in the history of anticolonialism. While gathering for the conference, titled “Reckoning with Empire: The Right to Self-Determination in Historical View,” more than thirty international scholars will investigate the afterlives, precedents, and consequences of Resolution 1514.
Conference organizers, Professor Samuel Moyn, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, and Charlotte Kiechel, PhD candidate in History at Yale, noted how contemporary audiences, as well as historians, have yet to fully engage with the significance of Resolution 1514’s passage. “Resolution 1514 was a pivotal moment in the long struggle against empire, and it electrified the world, with many unsuspected consequences. Indeed, even today, its legacy is not exhausted,” Professor Moyn reflected.
Register to attend: https://resolution1514.yale.edu/conference-registration
For the Full program & schedule: https://resolution1514.yale.edu/program
On Friday, Nov 11th, at 10:30 AM, the keynote address will be delivered by Professor Adom Getachew. A political theorist, the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and a Yale alumnus, Professor Getachew works on the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination from Princeton University Press (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of the forthcoming W.E.B. Du Bois’s International Writings. The keynote address is titled “Africa for Africans: The History of Self-Determination before Decolonization.”
Generously sponsored by the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center, and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund