Imagining nation, state, and order in the mid-twentieth century

Abstract

This essay considers the relationship between the United Nations and the Third World. Using the apartheid debate as a framing device, it explores Indian and African nationalism in the mid-1940s and early 1960s. In focusing on themes of nationhood, statehood, and international order, the essay explicates the factors that separated Indian nationalists from their contemporaries in Africa, and hints at a novel portrait of the Third World as a contested political project in the mid-twentieth century.