A family rethinks what it is to be an empire
Author: Richmond American University London
Together with his daughter, Imogen Alessio at McGill University in Canada, Professor of History, Dominic Alessio, has just had an article published in the Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies.
Entitled, “Re-thinking agents of empire: The role of the United Nations in the Indonesian occupation of West Papua”, the article argues that the post-World War II years were not necessarily a period of independence for everyone.
As Professor Alessio explains, “This is especially the case for a number of Pacific locales, West Papua in particular, wherein one colonial power seems to have merely been switched for another.”
The piece argues that this takeover was done with the connivance of the United Nations, a non-state agency which, following World War II, was designed to maintain the peace. By way of the 1969 UN-brokered Act of Free Choice, it suggests that the peoples of this former Dutch colony were instead subjected to an invading Indonesian military and colonial culture.
This work, whilst not only drawing attention to an under-discussed process of recolonization in the Pacific, focuses upon another, albeit overlooked method by which empires can be created, namely by way of a non-state agency. In doing so it critiques theories of empire that concentrate primarily upon large state-led entities characterized by physical conquest.
Professor Alessio continues, “Whilst it is true that big state-led powers with vast military forces bent on conquering other sovereign states are the most easily discernible of empires, we argue that this is only one type and that colonialism needs to be differentiated. We suggest that other actors, including non-state players such as private companies, religious organizations, filibusters and now, as emphasized here, international/inter-governmental organizations, should be scrutinized too.”
The article forms one part of a much larger research project that Professor Alessio is developing which re-thinks what it is to be an empire and how empires are constructed.
