Decolonization's Unfinished Territories

The United Nations General Assembly established the Special Committee on Decolonization, commonly called the Committee of 24, in 1961 to monitor the implementation of its 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Despite six further decades of work, the UN's official list of Non-Self-Governing Territories still includes seventeen entries as of the mid-2020s, among them Western Sahara, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda, French Polynesia, and several other small island or enclave territories, demonstrating that formal decolonization remains, by the UN's own accounting, an incomplete project.