In the three decades after World War II, anti-colonial activists attempted to throw off the shackles of colonialism. But their aims went far beyond winning political independence or building a new nation. For many, the goal was nothing less than the reinvention of the international legal, political, and economic order — to create a world where dominated peoples would finally secure self-determination and true national independence.

Postcolonial statesmen like Kwame Nkrumah, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere successfully pushed to enshrine a right to self-determination at the United Nations (UN), proposed ambitious projects of regional federation, and called for a rebalancing of the world economy that would redistribute wealth and power to the Global South. Anti-colonial nationalists, Adom Getachew shows in her new book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, were also egalitarian internationalists.

Jacobin contributor Sa’eed Husaini recently spoke with Getachew about the “worldmaking” of the anti-colonial project in the postwar period and the need to topple the global hierarchies that have survived long after the formal fall of colonialism.