Historicising Mauritian self-determination at the International Court of Justice

Between 2018 and 2019, the International Court of Justice considered whether the formation and current existence of British Indian Ocean Territory violated international law. This article reveals how three temporalities – decolonial nation-state, colonial and indigenous – shaped, and were shaped by, differing conceptions of Mauritian self-determination within the Case. In doing so, this study provides an account of previously unrecognised notions of self-determination that were formative of the recent Chagos Archipelago dispute. I argue that the British delegation recasts the meaning of Mauritian self-determination as an expression of intra-colonial rights, past and present. Furthermore, I contend that Chagossian responses to the Case advanced a notion of indigeneity as having multiple moments and sites of emergence – with corresponding rights claims that extricate self-determination from a singular period and space of injustice. These colonial and indigenous conceptions of self-determination are shown to challenge, yet ultimately become subordinated to, the familiar nation-state debates on complete/incomplete Mauritian decolonisation. A focus upon representations of time does more than uncover aspects of the recent Chagos Archipelago dispute, which were structured by novel attempts to conceptualise self-determination. This article holds wider significance for post-colonial IR. The competing registers of shaped time strove to reinforce or revise what counts as post-1960 norms of self-determination.