Decolonial Consciousness 3/3: On Opening Still Yours For Scotland. Scotland and the Unfinished Moment of Decolonisation. Truth, Solidarity, and the Work That Begins with Awareness

This is the third and final post in the founding trilogy of Still Yours For Scotland. The first post, "Awareness Is the Beginning of Everything", introduced the decolonial intellectual tradition and the founding purpose of this platform. The second post, "The Embassy That Named Scotland Out of Existence", traced the personal awakening that led to this project, examined Scotland's linguistic erasure in diplomatic space, and presented the Scottish scholars and activists whose work grounds the colonial analysis in law and evidence. This third post briefly situates Scotland within the global history of decolonisation, examines the principle of self-determination in international law, and sets out the international stakes of Scotland's liberation and the work that lies ahead.

Scotland and the Unfinished Moment of Decolonisation

The great wave of decolonisation that reshaped the international order after 1945 was itself an act of collective awareness. Peoples across Asia and Africa who had lived under colonial rule for generations came to see that rule as neither natural nor permanent. The intellectual work preceded the political transformation. Nkrumah, Nehru, Sukarno, Nyerere, Cabral: these were thinkers before they were political leaders. Each understood that liberation required, first, a transformation of consciousness, a refusal of the categories through which colonial power had taught the colonised to understand themselves and their condition. Through my long-term presence in Indonesia, I have become deeply familiar with the Bandung Spirit and the legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement, and with the role these traditions may play in Scotland’s path through decolonisation and towards liberation. I also happen to have a longstanding personal connection with Bandung itself as a place. Situating Scotland within that historical legacy is both essential and truthful. Scotland needs to share with the world and benefit from the experience of other colonised and former colonised peoples globally.

Nkrumah's insistence that political independence without intellectual decolonisation remained incomplete was not a peripheral observation. That insistence was the centre of his project, also underlined in his concept of neocolonialism. The same insight animated Amílcar Cabral's concept of the "return to the source": the recovery of cultural and historical knowledge that colonialism had suppressed, because only from within that recovered knowledge could a genuinely decolonised political imagination be built. Sukarno’s bravery and intellectualism, his insistence on the importance of seeking the truth in decolonisation, his brilliant geopolitical views and instincts can only inspire Scotland’s own struggle. Scotland's decolonisation must place itself in the footsteps and legacy of the struggles of the Bandung, non-aligned and Global South nations. Celtic nations are in many ways Global South nations, having faced and still facing the biggest coloniser in history. Decolonisation means learning how to breathe again with the support of other peoples and nations.

Scotland's constitutional and colonial situation intersected with the global post-war decolonisation moment in ways that deserve serious scholarly attention. The Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs, established between 1952 and 1954, operated precisely during the years when the United Nations framework for decolonisation was being constructed, and when independence movements across Asia and Africa were making successful cases for self-determination before international audiences. The English commission functioned to consolidate a narrative of voluntary union at the very moment when such narratives were under sustained international scrutiny. The English colonial state lied to the international community and the United Nations by stating Scotland had entered into a voluntary union and was not a dependency. Actually, under the UN Charter Chapter XI (Articles 73–74), the English colonial state should have reported Scotland as a colony alongside Kenya, Nigeria, Jamaica, Malaya, Singapore, Fiji and other English colonies (Non-Self-Governing Territories) that it reported in 1946. That omission was a deliberate colonial act.

The principle of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter and elaborated through successive General Assembly resolutions was not designed for a particular geography or complexion. Application of that principle has been profoundly uneven, shaped by the power of states with every interest in limiting its scope. But the principle itself admits no such limitation. Belonging to peoples, not to the states that would constrain them, self-determination has not been exhausted by the decolonisations of the mid-twentieth century. Scotland has been forgotten or omitted from decolonisation. It is essential to put an end to that injustice. Liberation Scotland is doing just that.

Truth as the Foundation of Awareness

Gandhi called his method satyagraha: truth-force, soul-force, the insistence that the struggle for justice must be grounded absolutely in truth. Not a moral decoration applied to a political strategy. Rather, Gandhi's understanding of what political transformation fundamentally requires. Power sustains itself through falsification. (Exactly like in Scotland). The antidote is not counter-propaganda but rigorous, uncompromising truth.

In Indonesia, I have learned about Sukarno. He described decolonisation as the purification of political life from inherited domination: the removal, layer by layer, of the frameworks through which colonial power had organised consciousness, law, economy, and culture. Nkrumah understood purification as an intellectual project before anything else.

These leaders shared a pedagogy. They understood that the people they were addressing had been taught, through every mechanism available to colonial governance, to misrecognise their own condition. The work of liberation therefore began with education: patient, rigorous construction of an alternative understanding grounded in historical evidence, legal analysis, diplomacy and comparative scholarship.

Still Yours For Scotland works within this tradition. The arguments advanced here are grounded in evidence. The comparisons drawn are grounded in scholarship. The legal claims rest on analysis. No objective of spreading disinformation, contrary to what the English colonial state does in and about Scotland while shamelessly claiming to fight disinformation or what it calls FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) globally. None of this is beyond scrutiny. All of it requires and welcomes engagement.

What this platform does not accept is the prior dismissal that "British", that English, constitutional discourse habitually offers: the assertion, without engagement, that the comparison is inappropriate, the question illegitimate, the framework inapplicable, the thought ridiculous. That prior dismissal is itself a colonial epistemic practice. Naming it forms part of the work of awareness. Scotland is an English colony. It makes no doubt at all. We are simply explicating and describing the ways and mechanisms of English colonisation; for Scottish and international audiences that deserve the truth.

Scotland Among the Nations: The International Stakes

Scotland stands among the oldest nations in Europe. The Scottish state largely predates the English state. The Saltire is widely regarded as the oldest national flag still in use in Europe. A distinct legal tradition, a distinct educational philosophy, a distinct culture, and distinct ecclesiastical institutions have survived centuries of constitutional incorporation and colonisation. These are not quaint remnants. They are evidence of a continuous national presence that colonial absorption has constrained but not erased. As in many colonial contexts, including India, the English colonial state did not seek to eliminate these institutions entirely. Instead, it frequently preserved and adapted them to exercise governance more effectively. Colonial rule frequently operates through existing structures rather than simply destroying them. In this sense, colonial systems are rarely imposed in isolation. They function through forms of collaboration, co-optation, association and accommodation. Without such mechanisms, colonial governance would be far more difficult to sustain.

A constitutionally restored and internationally recognised Scotland will bring distinct intellectual, institutional, and moral resources to global governance. Scotland's contributions to philosophy, science, economics, sports and medicine are not merely historical. They represent a tradition of rigorous, democratically oriented inquiry with ongoing relevance. The working-class internationalism, the anti-imperial traditions within Scottish culture, the country's democratic sensibility, Scotland’s humanism and activism, even under English colonial rule, would be genuine assets in multilateral institutions that are currently failing. We will also come back to those issues relating to geopolitics. Scotland’s liberation will be a trigger for global reordering.

More fundamentally, questions of annexation, territorial alienation, colonisation and blocked self-determination, when established, engage what international lawyers call erga omnes obligations: duties owed not merely between the parties to a dispute but to the international community as a whole. When sovereignty is clarified, the architecture of international law is strengthened for everyone. Every successful decolonisation recalibrates the norms by which other peoples measure and articulate their own condition.

Societies across the Global South understand this because they have lived it at great cost. Scotland's decolonial project stands in genuine solidarity with those experiences, as a shared commitment to the principle that sovereignty belongs to peoples and that the international order is answerable to that principle. I can testify from my daily and long-term experience in the Global South that Scotland’s colonial condition is rapidly understood when clearly exposed outside English propaganda.

The Work That Begins with Awareness

Still Yours For Scotland is dedicated to the cultivation of decolonial consciousness: not as ideology but as disciplined awareness; not as grievance but as rigorous, comparative understanding of Scotland's historical and contemporary condition.

This means sustained engagement with decolonial scholarship and its application to Scotland's specific case. Archival investigation of the historical record. Legal analysis of the constitutional questions that mainstream discourse has kept confined. Comparative study taking seriously the evidence that colonial markers are present, while remaining genuinely open to the scrutiny such claims require. Recovery of the cultural, linguistic, and historical knowledge that colonial absorption has suppressed: because Cabral was right, and only from within recovered knowledge can a genuinely decolonised political imagination be constructed. Liberation Scotland has been doing tremendous work on Scotland’s colonial condition. We now need to share it more with the international community and with Scots themselves. We also need to benefit from the thinking of other Scots and other international voices. We will share this on this platform.

The invitation is open and unconditional. To scholars and activists working within and across the decolonial tradition. To members of the Scottish diaspora who carry cultural loyalty and are ready to add constitutional consciousness to that loyalty. To international partners in the Global South and elsewhere who recognise the structural logic of what has happened and continues to happen in Scotland. To Scottish citizens, at home and scattered across the world, who sense that something has not been named clearly and who are ready to do the work of naming it.

We welcome contributions. Yet, in full honesty, I must also say clearly that as editor of this blog, I will necessarily be selective in the pieces we publish. These choices will sometimes be made in consultation with some of my senior colleagues in Liberation Scotland and will always be guided by the primary objective of this platform: contributing to Scotland’s liberation in solidarity with peoples around the world, particularly in the Global South. Every effort will be made to act with fairness and integrity. At the same time, editorial decisions will ultimately remain my responsibility, and they will not be subject to justification or negotiation. Contributors can nevertheless be assured that all choices will be made in good faith and with respect.

Awareness is not the end of the journey. Awareness is the precondition for beginning. Once a structure is seen, the structure cannot be unseen. We increasignly hear this about Scotland's colonial status. Once the mechanisms of colonial governance are identified and named, the narrative management that sustained those mechanisms begins to lose its power. This is why every serious decolonial movement in history has invested so heavily in education and scholarship, in the patient construction of an alternative understanding.

We wish to contribute to that construction here.

Awareness expands collectively while historical recovery deepens collectively. Constitutional restoration, when it comes, will be collective.

The work is already underway. Deepening with every reader, every scholar, every diaspora community member, every international partner who joins the inquiry.

We are still yours, Scotland. And we are becoming, finally, fully conscious of what that means.

This concludes the founding trilogy of Still Yours For Scotland. Read the full trilogy from the beginning: "Awareness Is the Beginning of Everything" | "The Embassy That Named Scotland Out of Existence"

Still Yours For Scotland | decolonise.scot

Christophe Dorigné-Thomson