Nauru is often figured as an anomaly in the international order. This book offers a new account of Nauru's imperial history and examines its significance to the histories of international law. Drawing on theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy, it reconstructs four shifts in Nauru's status – from German protectorate, to League of Nations C Mandate, to UN Trust Territory, to sovereign state – as a means of redescribing the transition from the nineteenth century imperial order to the twentieth century state system. The book argues that as international status shifts, imperial form accretes: as Nauru's status shifted, what occurred at the local level was a gradual process of bureaucratisation. Two conclusions emerge from this argument. The first is that imperial administration in Nauru produced the Republic's post-independence 'failures'. The second is that international recognition of sovereign status is best understood as marking a beginning, not an end, of the process of decolonisation.
| ISBN: | 9781108498500 |
| Publication date: | 17th September 2020 |
| Author: | Cait (University of Technology Sydney) Storr |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 318 pages |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law |
| Genres: |
Public international law: territory and statehood Australasian and Pacific history |