Ranyta Yusran is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Law, Lund University. Her doctoral research focuses on the history of international law pertaining to decolonization prior to 1955.

From 2010-2018, prior to joining the Department of Law at Lund, Ranyta worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for International Law, National University of Singapore, and specialized in ASEAN law and policy.

"Decolonization in International Law before Bandung: Trusteeship, the Indonesian Question, and Self-Determination"

Conventionally, the process toward decolonization in international law began with the 1955 Asia Africa Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where postcolonial states pledged themselves to the goal of decolonization and delegitimization of colonialism. Their efforts culminated with the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries in 1960, the beginning of the decolonization era in international law. This dissertation, on the other hand, excavates and interrogates the emergence of the colonial questions, i.e., matters pertaining to the status of colonized peoples and their relations with their colonial ‘mother countries’, in international law as a site of sustained contestation between the principle of trusteeship and the right to self-determination from 1919 to the early 1950s, prior to Bandung and the decolonization era in international law.

The dissertation addresses a central gap in the historiography of international law and decolonization, which has often treated the rise of self-determination as a linear and inevitable development within the United Nations system. It focuses on three sites of resistance: the colonial metropoles in the West during the interwar period until 1945; the United Nations Security Council during the deliberations of the Indonesian Questions in 1946-1949; and the United Nations General Assembly during the great human rights debates in 1948-1952. These critical sites were where the competing visions of postwar international order – imperial domination and sovereign equality and independence – confronted one another. The protagonists in each site comprise elites from the colonized world from various backgrounds but not necessarily (international) lawyers. However, they shared one thing in common: anticolonial transnationalism (and later internationalism). Relying on the analysis of the contestation between the principle of trusteeship and self-determination in the said sites and by said protagonists from the colonized world, the dissertation argues that postwar international law emerged through a dialectical struggle between imperial efforts to preserve hierarchical governance through trusteeship and anticolonial demands for the right to self-determination.

Methodologically, the dissertation adopts global history as its principal historiographical approach and combines doctrinal analysis with multi-archival research integrating international legal history and the history of anticolonial transnationalism and internationalism. It draws on a wide range of primary materials, including international legal instruments, United Nations archives, state archives, and documents produced by anticolonial organizations and individuals. By tracing the circulation and transformation of legal and political ideas across imperial, anticolonial, and institutional settings, the dissertation demonstrates that self-determination, decolonization, was not simply granted by colonial powers or international institutions but was actively theorized, appropriated, and advanced by actors from the colonized world. In doing so, the dissertation contributes to the growing effort to globalize and decolonize the history of international law by repositioning anticolonial actors as central participants in the making of the postwar international order.

Ranyta is the course coordinator of SASJ02 - Introduction to International Law