Anti-colonialism as human rights movement?

In recent years, scholarship has proliferated on the connection between human rights and decolonisation, and the fate of empire now constitutes an important node in the historiography of human rights.

Neither of these accounts fully captures the complexity of decolonisation, a phenomenon which spanned decades and continents. Anti-colonialism did have meaningful affinity with human rights, especially across the 1950s.⁴ The pursuit of national sovereignty was not incompatible with individual rights, and even universal human rights. The two strands of freedom, national and individual, had been closely coupled since at least 1776, and inter­laced across the European struggles of Greece in 1821, Hungary in 1848 and Italy in 1860.5 Nationalists in Asia and Africa drew, often explicitly, on a long tradition whereby popular sovereignty was the means and guarantor of the rights of the citizen. By the late 1940s, they renovated this idea with reference to universal human rights, most con­spicuously the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The politics of fighting empire naturally cultivated an interest in human rights, albeit an interest that was depressingly ephemeral in many cases. Transient as the coupling was, the later rupture between sovereignty and human rights across much of the post-colonial world should not obscure the efflorescence of human rights in the early and mid-phases of the anti-colonial era. It was not durable, but it did exist.