Chagos: Dispossession and Exile in Paradise

Abstract

The expulsion of Chagossians in the late 1960s and early 1970s by British authorities resulted in the dispossession of the whole population and the survival of colonialism in the Indian Ocean. Following decades of resistance, the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 2019 condemned the British continued administration and required the decolonisation of the archipelago. This project investigates to what extent ICJ’s opinion is based upon colonial grounds and how it has affected the Chagossian community to challenge their current situation of exile and dispossession. To this end, content analysis of primary and secondary sources was conducted while postcolonial theory provided the conceptual underpinnings. Through the development of the thesis,

the paper identifies several colonial grounds in ICJ’s opinion. Among them, the non- questioning of the obtention of British sovereignty, the reliance on colonial borders, and

the non-identification of Chagossians as the concerned peoples for self-determination. Given the importance of these argumentations for the decolonisation process laid by the Court, the paper ascertains that ICJ’s advisory opinion did not provide increased autonomy and agency to Chagossians. Therefore, the exiles cannot challenge their situation of dispossession by themselves and remain subject to the decisions taken by other sovereign entities.