Free Association: What Greenland and Denmark can learn from other former colonies

Illustration © Photo: Office of the PM, Cook Islands

Prime Minister from Cook Islands Mark Brown and Foreign Minister in New Zealand Nanaia Mahuta.

Free Association is a UN recognized way of decolonizing and a model of independence that Greenland has been investigating since the early 1990ies. In Greenland’s draft constitution presented in April Free Association is discussed as one way of organizing a future sovereignty.

Today just five former colonies have a Free Association agreement. Cook Islands and the Marshall Islands are two of those five.

In this podcast we talk about their experience with Free Association, which pros, and cons such an association can entail, and what Greenland and Denmark can learn from that.

Free Association: What Greenland and Denmark can learn from other former colonies

Regions

Marshall Islands Cook Islands

Climate resilience and Cook Islands' relationship of Free Association with Aotearoa / New Zealand

policy-brief-marshall-islands-free-association-greenland

DIIS Policy Brief

2022

Free association: between self-government and dependence ,

Some insights from the compact of free association between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands

Billede/illustration af Marie Barse

Podcast

2023

Grønlands ønske om selvstændighed er et ønske om at blive en ligeværdig del af verden

Forholdet mellem Grønland og Danmark er kompliceret. Et flertal i Grønland ønsker selvstændighed, men endnu flere er enige om, at selvstændighed ikke må gå ud over velfærden.

Photo/illustration by Leiff Josefsen

'Free Association' in Greenland? Caribbean and Pacific experiences

DIIS, auditorium

To understand what future course, Greenland might be setting itself on, DIIS invites for a seminar with professor Rafael Cox Alomar, expert in comparative constitutional law in the context of decolonization.