Testing the Atlantic Charter: linking anticolonialism, self-determination and universal human rights

The historical link between anticolonialism and human rights has recently become a subject of wide-ranging scholarly debates. A growing number of human rights scholars argue that anticolonialism was not a human rights movement because it was concerned with popular liberation rather than curtailing state power over the individual. This article interrogates these and similar arguments by exploring how anticolonial activists in Africa invoked the …