Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants

"In HOME RULE Nandita Sharma examines the twentieth-century transition from a world system based on empires to one based on nations. The UN Charter of 1945 endorsed the rights of self-governance to peoples on their land. At the end of World War II many people were displaced or had become refugees. Sharma asks why such migrants would not have the same rights as those still on their land. She traces the history of the development of the categories of migrants, local residents, and indigenous peoples back through colonial administration, showing what these categories actually were designed to accomplish. She argues that while the desire for national self-governance might have seemed like an answer to colonial rule, it has done more for liberal capital than it has for actual decolonization. Accounts of settler colonialism and indigenous nationhood have often depended on this same self-rule on the land.