Like all laws that govern our countries, states, and communities, international law did not fall from the sky. It was conceived and established by a small cadre of Western powers against a backdrop of imperial expansion. It rationalized decades of pillage and domination by seeing non-Western peoples as uncivilized and therefore incapable of self-government.
The world has changed since then, and so have its legal institutions: top posts at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other major international organizations are routinely occupied by men and women from African, South American, and Asian countries, many of them postcolonial. Yet the origins of international law cannot be magically erased. To quote the Kenyan American law scholar Makau Mutua, their colonial influence to this day “legitimizes, reproduces, and sustains the plunder and subordination of the Third World by the West.”
This grim characterization is hardly what most people would associate with, say, the Geneva Convention Against Torture, or children’s rights treaties, or international regulation of toxic chemicals, which are all products of international law and whose loudest critics come not from the anticolonial left but from the nationalist far right. (If there is one certainty about international law, it is that it cannot please everyone—or anyone.) Nevertheless, third world critics of international law contend that many international legal, financial, and governance institutions have not been adequately decolonized.
From their point of view, this is why the International Monetary Fund inflicts exploitative economic policies on poor nations through its lending programs; why the UN Security Council includes Great Britain and France but not Brazil or Indonesia; and why human rights tribunals disproportionately prosecute Africans. Decisive aspects of international law were originally determined by prejudices that still govern the entire system’s commitment to true justice. Given that history, what credibility does international law have? We know it has changed. But has it changed enough?
The saga of the Chagos Islanders has been a revealing test case. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the decolonization of Mauritius, some two thousand Chagossians were forcibly removed from their homes by the British authorities who were clearing space for an enormous new US military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the islands in the Chagos archipelago, which had been considered a part of Mauritius under British rule. Crammed into small boats with just one bag per person, the Chagossians were told they could no longer live on their islands and were dumped a thousand miles across the Indian Ocean in Mauritius and Seychelles.
The islanders, whose ancestors were brought to Chagos in the late 1700s as slaves from Madagascar and Mozambique, have been fighting to return to their homeland ever since. And at the risk of sounding crude, they are as sympathetic a group of victims as you could imagine. There is no complicated “other side” to their story, no historically loaded countergrievance, no “fog of war.” Human Rights Watch, the UN, even a British court have called the actions of the British government an abomination. There’s a clear paper trail of violence and deceit to back them up: lawsuits in British and international courts have uncovered a brazen conspiracy between the US and the UK not just to take over the Chagossians’ land but to erase them from the historical record by “maintain[ing] the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population,” to quote a 1970 Foreign Office memo.
That these very inhabitants languished abroad for so long seemed to say a lot about what kind of justice was on offer for a small group of people coming up against the world’s biggest powers. But six decades later, they may finally get their wish. In 2019 the ICJ issued an advisory opinion stating that the British had not lawfully decolonized Mauritius, and then the UN General Assembly voted that its government must facilitate the Chagossians’ return with haste. In 2024 the UK agreed to a draft deal to hand back sovereignty of Chagos to Mauritius.
Not all Chagossians celebrated this news, however. Chagossian Voices, a group that lobbies for full sovereignty, contends that Mauritius, the plaintiff in the ICJ case, was itself a colonizer and that the interests of the Chagossian people weren’t properly represented. On April 1 it was reported that the US, which is party to the negotiations on account of its military presence on Diego Garcia, had signed off on a deal that would give the archipelago back to Mauritius. Britain would pay to keep leasing the military base. (According to the Associated Press, six stealth B-2 Spirit bombers appear to be stationed on the base, which is within striking distance of Iran and Yemen.)
The Last Colony, a recent account of this history by the British French lawyer Philippe Sands, and Diego Garcia, a novel cowritten by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, make sense of the Chagossians’ displacement in radically different ways. Sands writes from the inside, as part of the Mauritian legal team and as a scholar thinking through the complicity of his profession in the colonial project. He represented the Mauritius government in its bid to win back control over Chagos from the UK—a case that argued both for territorial reunification and for the Chagossians’ right to return. He concludes on a hopeful note: the Chagossians’ legal saga illustrates how institutions can evolve.
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Soobramanien and Williams take a less linear approach. In their haunting and rather bizarre novel they attempt a deconstruction of Chagos, dancing between forms and perspectives, merging fictional characters with personal histories and historical events, and turning to critical theory for insights, often to great effect. “Have you seen the US Navy website? The history section of the Diego Garcia page? Pure fuckin fiction,” their protagonist, Diego, complains. “That there had been people living on the islands prior to the base being built; that these people, the Chagossians, had been living there for many generations—no mention of them or their forced exile on the website. Ghosted.”
Their novel offers no redemptive moments or hope of undoing the trauma of the past. But for the authors the act of writing offers a path forward. “You can make whole nations disappear,” notes another character in a fictionalized interview, referring to the Chagossians’ erasure from the historical record. But also: “You can invent them with words.”
The story of the Chagos archipelago goes back centuries. The islands, located roughly halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia, had long been viewed as a part of Mauritius while that nation was under colonial rule: first by the slaveholding French until 1814, then by the British until 1965. Three years later Mauritius gained independence, but it went forth without Chagos in tow. The archipelago had become a new kind of entity: a British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as a BIOT. In the process of decolonization, the colonial power created nothing less than a brand-new kind of colony, using covert legal maneuvers the most committed conspiracy theorist would have trouble dreaming up.
In 1965 the Privy Council in London changed the Mauritian Constitution (which it still controlled) to remove Chagos from its definition of its territory. “The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours,” a British diplomat wrote in a memo to his Foreign Office colleagues the following year. To get the reannexation past the UN, the British government lied. There was no permanent population in Chagos, they claimed—just a few temporary laborers and some seagulls. “Along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure,” commented another British diplomat in the same note.
Once Chagos had been “dismembered”—that’s the UN’s term—the newly installed BIOT commissioner forced its inhabitants off their land, shipped them away, and left them to their own devices, ignoring all calls from the UN to stop. But the story gets darker. The UK was secretly in cahoots with the United States, which wanted to lease Diego Garcia as a military base. There wasn’t just a new colony in the world, but a new power in charge of it as well. That this all happened so recently seems proof that colonialism is less an archaic system of governance banished to the dustbin of history than a living, breathing force that continues to inform the daily lives of millions.
Over the years the British and American governments have pulled out all the stops to block the Chagossians from returning. They have invoked security concerns that border on the absurd: “We need to stay in control…. What if we get attacked by aliens?” said the British permanent representative to the UN, Karen Pierce—dead serious—to her Mauritian counterpart. They also hired consultants from KPMG to comment on the “feasibility” of resettlement. To their credit, the authors of the report recommended that the Chagossians be consulted—a rare admission in this multidecade ordeal.
All the while the deportees—who were living mostly in poverty in Seychelles, Mauritius, and the United Kingdom—were organizing themselves. The hero of the story is an electrician named Olivier Bancoult. In 1968, when Bancoult was four, his family took a boat from his native island of Peros Banhos to Mauritius to seek medical treatment for his sister, who’d been hurt in an accident. She died, and not long after, his family were told they could not return to their home. On learning this, Bancoult’s father collapsed and died of a stroke with the keys to his house in his pocket. His mother, Rita Bancoult, struggled for years to keep the family afloat but in 1983 managed to cofound the Chagos Refugee Group. (She died in 2016.)
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As an adult, Bancoult fils became something of an international legal expert in his spare time, and he pursued numerous claims in British courts as the leader of the group his mother cofounded. He ended up being one of Sands’s closest partners. But he also kept working as an electrician. There is a heart-wrenching scene in the French filmmaker Michel Daëron’s TV documentary on the subject, Unforgotten Islands (2011), in which Bancoult, who was working for the Mauritian electricity authority, is forced to turn off the power at a fellow Chagossian’s house. “The Chagossian president cuts our power,” the woman, flanked by small children, remarks as she stares down the camera. “It takes the cake.”
In 1998 the Chagossians almost had their moment when a British court ruled against the government in Bancoult’s first case as plaintiff, overturning a 1971 ban on their repatriation. But next came the Iraq War, and, the British foreign secretary abruptly issued an order preventing their return. Diego Garcia then became one of the places from which the Americans launched the war—another breach of international law justified by a bald fabrication—and, as widely reported, it was turned into a site where individuals accused of terrorism were secretly taken for questioning by the CIA. On Chagos, US employees enjoyed the comforts of home with all the legal conveniences of an offshore jurisdiction—but no islanders were employed there, not even as contractors.
Meanwhile the British government continued to find new ways to keep the islanders away for good. In 2010 the government announced that the islands would be part of a vast new maritime environmental protection zone, one of the biggest in the world. The new maritime zone might have benefited the coral reefs, but it was also geopolitically expedient: it would prohibit fishing in its waters, making it virtually impossible for resettlement to proceed. Mauritius quickly moved to contest the legality of the plans under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, arguing that it had fishing and property rights in the zone. That treaty was drawn up after decolonization, in the 1980s; cases can be taken to a specialized tribunal, the ICJ at The Hague, or an arbitral tribunal in which judges are chosen by all the parties concerned.
The question now was whether Britain’s claim was legitimate under international law—and whether a postcolonial tribunal would side with a colonial power.
Philippe Sands entered the picture that same year, when he received a phone call from the Mauritian prime minister, Navin Ramgoolam. Would he consider helping Mauritius find the strongest case against Britain’s maritime proposal? The Mauritians believed they had a strong argument for asserting sovereignty over the zone and, of course, the Chagos archipelago, based on their coastal geography and their history. If the tribunal made a call over who had the right to the maritime area, the issue of Chagos could finally be resolved, at least as far as Mauritius was concerned. For some (but not all) Chagossians, this also represented their best chance at going home.
Sands knew little about the Chagossians, but in 2005 he had published Lawless World, a book about the illegality of the invasion of Iraq, and had uncovered information about how the British government authorized use of the Chagos islands in order to help wage that war. “I read up about it, appalled by a story of continuing injustice and my own ignorance,” he recalls in The Last Colony. “I was well aware of Britain’s colonial past, but not the story of the last colony it created in Africa.”
Sands describes how quickly he became invested in the case because the plaintiffs’ stories moved him so deeply (as a student of decolonization, he must have found it intellectually engaging as well). Sands developed a rapport with Liseby Elysé, who at the age of twenty was taken from her home on Peros Banhos in 1973 and who testified on video for the case at The Hague in 2018. He also worked closely with Bancoult, her nephew, not realizing at first that the electrician had no formal legal training.
Sands writes with moral and intellectual clarity, much as in East West Street (2016), his outstanding book on the Jewish jurists who in the aftermath of World War II laid the foundations of international criminal law. But The Last Colony’s great strength is the way it weaves the Chagossians’ journey into the bigger picture: the gradual decolonization of dozens of nations and—perhaps—of international law itself. Sands sees the progress of the courts as crucial to the Chagossians’ future, and he has witnessed this evolution firsthand.
As a schoolboy in London, Sands “was taught that the end of empire was akin to the situation of ‘parent and child,’” he writes, “where the parent won’t admit that the child is quite grown up, and the child rebelliously insists it is.” His time in law school, while happy, “was dominated by teachers who were male and white, schooled in a view of the world in which Britain was presented as special, a rare player with an abiding commitment to rule of law.”
During his studies, international courts like the ICJ were scarcely seen as credible among postcolonial thinkers: after The Hague decided that Liberia and Ethiopia had no right to challenge a case concerning South African apartheid in 1966, Sands notes that it was “plunged…into an abyss of disrepute, from which it would not emerge for two decades.” (The ruling was eventually reversed, which paved the way for Gambia to sue Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya community—another case Sands is involved in.) International courts, at that moment, were hardly agents of change.
Sands’s perspective began to shift in the early 1980s at Harvard, where he studied with Clyde Ferguson, a Black professor who’d helped draft the 1967 UNESCO declaration on race and racial prejudice. This was also the period during which Nicaragua was suing the United States for mining its harbors and supporting the Contras in their fight against the socialist Sandinistas. Nicaragua won on the grounds that the US had violated its sovereignty. It did not put an end to American adventurism of this sort, but it was, Sands says, “a first step to making [the Court] a place to which a former colony might turn, in future, to free itself from continued colonial domination.”
Another important development of that decade was the UNCLOS, the convention that Mauritius claimed Britain was violating with its 2010 maritime zone. In 2015 the arbitrators came out with their decision. They were unanimous in their belief that the “marine protected area” was established illegally and that it violated Britain’s obligations toward Mauritius when it came to fishing and other marine resources. But they fell short of ruling on the bigger questions: which of the two countries had sovereignty, and whether Britain had illegally detached Chagos. Three of the five arbitrators said the law of the sea convention did not allow them to decide on such matters, but the remaining two dissented on the merits in the Mauritians’ favor.
Though not an outright victory, this was still welcome news for Sands: he has acquired a knack for reading the tea leaves and interpreting minority opinions as signs of what’s to come. His team decided to take the matter of decolonization up with the United Nations General Assembly in the hopes that their vote would lead the ICJ to resolve it once and for all.
This time history swung in the Chagossians’ favor. With Brexit (and a shifty, unreliable Boris Johnson in particular, according to Sands) losing Britain many allies, the General Assembly voted for the Mauritian cause, with a large majority. The vote was also a referendum on the British Empire: only three of the fifty-four Commonwealth countries supported Britain. The assembly then kicked the case to the ICJ and asked it to rule on two questions. Was the decolonization of Mauritius completed lawfully? And if it wasn’t, how could the Chagossians be made whole?
The tribunal’s 2019 decision came down to this: Chagos was and had always been part of Mauritius. By deporting thousands of its people, Britain acted unlawfully, and it must now cede Chagos as quickly as possible.
While Sands observes the spirit of decolonization wedging its way into the creaky technicalities of votes, procedures, and judgments, the authors of Diego Garcia tackle the subject much more discursively—and ambivalently. Soobramanien and Williams’s collaborative novel takes place in Edinburgh in 2014. In addition to being the authors’ former home, the setting is thematically on the nose: the Scots were voting that year in a referendum that would have detached them from the United Kingdom, which many Scottish “leave” voters still perceive as a colonial power.
Two good friends, a British Mauritian writer named Damaris and a Scottish writer and Bitcoin trader named Oliver, have moved to Edinburgh from London, where Oliver’s brother Daniel recently killed himself. Struggling with grief and barely scraping by on their meager earnings, they encounter a Chagossian poet named Diego who wanders the streets carrying his belongings in shopping bags.
When Diego disappears, leaving only his bags under a bench at a bar, the pair begin writing a quasi-fictional tale that maps Daniel’s life onto Diego’s by way of a story told in the third person, with first-person reflections formatted as parallel columns, an interview with a fictionalized Chagossian woman (who appears in nonfictional form in Sands’s account), descriptions of Daëron’s documentary, and letters between the two writers discussing their lives and shared project.
Diego Garcia’s unconventional structure is a commentary on whose story gets to be told, how, and by whom. It is also an attempt to “connect the social death of the Chagossian people ghosted by the British government to the structures of intercontinental superexploitation too complex to represent through fiction alone,” Damaris writes. Coming from anyone else, this statement might feel cloying or sanctimonious, but the novel is self-aware, even funny. Damaris and Oliver may be broke, but they’re not without resources. They hop between London, Edinburgh, and a writers’ colony by the sea because they choose to. They feel marginal to society, but unlike the Chagos deportees, nobody’s claiming they do not exist. They don’t lose sight of that.
A common theme throughout their fragments—and also in the Chagossians’ lawsuits—is sagren, the Creole for “sorrow.” Sagren is the condition of the Chagossian people: it is the feeling of being dragged away from home in boats like chattel, dumped somewhere foreign and strange, and treated as nonentities as the world moved on. Billionaires on yachts and marine biologists on missions could visit the islands, but they themselves could not. And, as Sands points out, the British would invoke the right of the (white) Falklanders to self-determination, while depriving the (Black) Chagossians of their homeland for generations. “Where you were born—why does this matter more than where you die?” the narrators wonder.
Though its authors’ politics are unabashedly radical, the contribution of a book like Diego Garcia is less to advance a cause than to capture the messy emotional fallout of the Chagossians’ expulsion. In the world of the novel, the damage is already done: the poet, Diego, is gone for good; Damaris and Oliver are left to figure out what they should do with his (literal) baggage. Soobramanien and Williams deconstruct sagren in large part because the story of Chagos can’t be contained by legal complaints, court decisions, or even newspaper articles. Diego Garcia’s literary creole is, itself, a way of decolonizing the story.
After a long career in international law, Philippe Sands is still a believer. He believes in its ability to bring about justice even though the “last colony” is unlikely to be truly the last. Decolonization did not end with the establishment of the 193rd United Nations member state—South Sudan—nor will it end with the 194th, or 195th. It will not end with Palestinian or Puerto Rican statehood or Corsican sovereignty. And it certainly won’t end if, or when, the Chagossians return.
The Chagos case is limited in an important respect: it was never intended to send the Americans packing from Diego Garcia or to make a Chagos for the Chagossians. It is only the beginning of what may be a much longer search for justice. Bancoult, for his part, is demanding an apology and reparations for what happened to him and two thousand other people. He believes the Chagossians will return. His ancestors’ graves are still there. It’s where he, too, hopes to be buried one day.
This Issue
May 15, 2025
Measles Gone Wild
Internalizing the Crises
String Theory