Description
This paper analyses West Papuan activists’ appeals to racial solidarity in their campaign for independence at the United Nations. During the 1960s, the West Papuan activists sought liberation from Dutch colonisation and Indonesian annexation. Papuan activists combined claims to self-determination with arguments about their distinct ethnic identity and racial difference from their Indonesian colonisers. While Pacific peoples had been excluded from earlier anti-colonial networks due to their geographic isolation, Papuan activists sought to link their struggle to those of marginalised populations across the Global South, particularly in Africa, and win support for their independence at the United Nations. In emphasising their racial difference to seek allies among African delegates, West Papuans sought to tap into campaigns against racial discrimination. However, by drawing attention to their racial identity West Papuans risked inadvertently centring ideas about the ‘primitiveness’ of Black Pacific islanders within debates at the UN over the future of the territory. Through studying the campaign of West Papuan activists, I reveal new imagined networks of solidarity cultivated between Africa and the Pacific, while also drawing attention to the ways in which Global South politics and racial hierarchies worked against the claims of indigenous peoples such as the West Papuans.
