Alanna O’Malley, Leiden University.
Of the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN), over half belong to the grouping known as the Global South (also called the Developing World or Third World). Since its creation in 1945, Global South actors have sought to redefine political dynamics and change normative practices through the UN to make global order more equitable. However, the histories of the organization are predominantly written from the Western perspective. This is despite the fact that since 1960, Global South actors have made up the majority of UN members and in the interceding years have played a formative role in expanding the competencies, agency and functions of the UN. In order to address this lacunae in the field, and to challenge the predominant Western perspective, it is essential to bring the myriad contributions of Global South actors into focus. By comparing and contrasting different interpretations and views of the UN from Global South perspectives, it will be possible to generate three major types of insights into the history of the UN and the evolution of global order across time and space.
Firstly, as Global South actors, both official state representatives but also numerous non-state organisations and activists proliferated, they developed the functions and institutions of the UN in line with their own priorities. The best example of this agency is the creation of the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964, an initiative led by Latin American states aimed at ameliorating the inequality of the global economy by improving the trade, investment and development opportunities of developing countries. In tracing their agency at the organisational and institutional level of the UN, it will be possible to understand how these actors changed the UN system and permanently altered its processes and mechanisms.
Secondly, in deepening understandings of how their agency worked, it will be possible to investigate not just how these actors challenged the liberal world order but also how they experienced and participated in this order. By looking at different forms of global order, and understanding how global order was perceived from different perspectives, it is evident that global order is far from a static system that has remained stable since 1945. Rather, it is clear that global order is constantly in flux, contested, resisted and debated not just on a North/South or East/West axis but also between the actors of the Global South. This enhances our understandings of how South-South relations evolved, including the creation of new hierarchies and processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Thirdly, analysing how Global South agency worked at the UN will generate deeper reflections about the ways in which the UN has historically functioned. Specifically, the selectivity bias at the heart of the UN, which exists in all international organisations, requires further probing. One of the most pressing questions for scholars is why some issues and actors gain prominence in this environment and others do not. Investigating the historical evolution of this process of inclusion and exclusion not only provides more empirical evidence on how the politics of the UN have changed over time, but also raises larger questions of what the consequences of this process were for order within the Global South itself. This is particularly relevant when considering questions of sovereignty and self-determination which have had lasting, and sometimes devastating consequences for peace and development especially in the Global South.
These are just some of the key issues that I will explore in my new research project with the rest of the INVISIHIST team based at Leiden University.[i] Here, I will reflect on some of the key concepts and ideas that we will develop with the aim of providing a new genealogy of the UN within the contextual frame of global history. It is hoped that this research will elucidate histories of the ordering role of institutions at a moment when global governance is in crisis and the liberal world order appears to be fragmenting. Its primary impact will be in decolonising the historiography by highlighting the historical agency of Global South actors, and transposing the importance of the organization in the longer history of the latter half of the twentieth century to provide a truly global history of the UN.
‘Who’ or ‘What’ is the Global South?
The term ‘Global South’ has recently received increasing attention from scholars seeking to understand the transition from the terms ‘Third World’ and ‘Developing World’ but also in trying to define and describe this rather amorphous group of actors.[ii] This research uses the term as a taxonomy which of course includes states but also an expansive range of actors including non-state organisations and individuals, and advocates of Global South causes who themselves were citizens of different countries or who were sometimes located in different geographical spaces. In mapping out this network, we seek to depart from politically-loaded, discriminatory and geographical identities which tend to obscure the scope and agency of different actors within the group. While there is considerable scholarship on the evolution of the ‘Third World’ and ‘Developing World’ as political identities, we take this as a departure point to understand what happened when these groups interacted with the UN, and how in the process, their role and identity changed.[iii] Far from a homogenous group which was united in its struggle for various forms of liberation, the Global South emerged as a set of disparate actors who sometimes worked together but sometimes worked at odds with each other to pursue a variety of different causes in the postcolonial world. We seek precisely to understand the transitions between the broken pathways, transnational networks, inter-regional contestations, transregional cooperation and consolidated nexuses that made comprised the evolution of the group vis-à-vis the UN. Not only will this diversify our understandings of the ‘bloc’ politics of the UN, which oversimplifies the politics of the organisation, but also generates new perspectives of the dynamics of the Global South and the organisation itself.
To identify the key turning points in relationships, the project has been mapped out across a variety of dimensions, working of course at the international level of the UN and bilateral and multilateral relationships between states, but also crucially, the sub-national level. To understand how political dynamics and issues changed, it is essential to engage regional, provincial and local sources to understand the process of ‘internationalisation’ and its positive and negative consequences. This departs from the idea that everything is determined solely in New York and Geneva, but rather building on the angle developed by Susan Pedersen and others, demonstrates that much of the important work of international organisations happens on the ground, far from the ‘centres’ of power.[iv] In many ways, the project will provide decentred histories of the UN which will capture more accurately how the processes of inclusion and exclusion works, when it comes to how and why some issues gain international attention and prominence and others do not. By engaging different types of archives and personal papers, we aim to identify not just the main personalities and individuals but also shed light campaigns that have not ultimately had UN representation or those which have been deliberately concealed for reasons of political providence. This, we believe, is a more true and accurate reading of the operation of the UN, than simply reiterating an analytical narrative of success vs. failure.
What is ‘the UN’?
Another problem which pervades scholarship on the UN is the tendency to approach the organisation as a monolith in which the organs, departments and agencies are lumped together as a rather opaque structure. This approach is based on two false assumptions. This first assumes that the UN operates as a conjoined system of power whereby each of the various arms are working in tandem with, or are at least aware of what the other is doing. In reality, UN agencies and departments often compete with each other for funding and political support and sometimes inadvertently work at odds with one another. Secondly, taking ‘the UN’ as one entity assumes that the organisation develops a systematic approach to global challenges, which has led to criticism for its ‘imperial’ approach to some issues such as post-colonial state-building.[v] Both of these assumptions foreclose a critical analysis of the various overlapping and frankly chaotic diplomatic levels and mechanisms of the UN system which merits closer attention to detail. More research is required, for example, on how an issue moves between ECOSOC and the General Assembly committees, how field reports from UN agencies are used to develop best practices within the Secretariat, and how new committees and groups are formed to shepherd questions through the system.
This research project sets out to de-mystify some of these UN practices by focusing on three key issues across three levels of the institution. We examine various questions that emerge within the themes of decolonisation, specifically the quest for sovereignty and self-determination, economic sovereignty, specifically the creation of UNCTAD and the campaign for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and human rights, specifically the development of economic and social rights. As we trace how these issues evolved at the UN, we focus on three main levels: the relevant committees of the General Assembly, the role of experts and officials in the Secretariat, and the resulting debates in ECOSOC and the main General Assembly chamber. Developing the hypothesis that Global South actors shaped global order by changing the nature and structure of the UN, we examine key moments and turning points across these dimensions within the main themes, to show how they sought to develop the UN’s competencies, functions and agency, in the process challenging the traditional dominance of Western powers. In doing so, this research will demonstrate how the different levels of the UN have historically operated and been developed, elucidating the intricacies and messy bureaucracy of UN politics, to ultimately determine shifts in the normative environment and political dynamics.
Why an ‘invisible’ history?
It is important to define the term invisible for this research, to explain how it is employed as a concept rather than an adjective. We do not of course imply with the term ‘invisible’ that the history of the contributions of Global South actors to international order and the UN do not exist or have not been meaningful. Rather, we approach the term as a process, arguing that these contributions have been rendered invisible by the Western bias of the existing historiography, but also by the tendency to write this history in prescribed ways. From this perspective, Global South contributions are often viewed as having ‘failed’ or having had little impact. This group of actors are also often cast as the recipients, rather than the architects of the global system, and their agency is regarded as largely circumscribed. This research instead put the agency of these actors at the centre of the analysis, unravelling the invisible veil which has been cast over their contributions to recover their historical agency and evaluate how it worked. We argue that in fact by challenging the liberal world order, Global South actors performed a nuanced agency that produced its own order with positive and negative results. In this sense then, referring to the invisible histories of the UN, in fact points to one of the central challenges of this work, which is to investigate how and why the contribution of these traditionally marginalised actors, has been written out of mainstream histories.
How will this research inform existing understandings of the UN?
This research will transform understandings of the UN by illuminating its varied histories, challenging the notion that there is a singular or a one-dimensional history of how the UN evolved and what its role has been in history. Crucially, it will depart from the predominantly Western perspective of the organisation and its activities, and instead investigate how it operated across various dimensions to both facilitate and inhibit the agency of Global South actors. It is hoped that in doing so, it will contribute towards existing historiography in two key ways. Firstly, it will show the role of Global South actors in committee debates, cooperating with officials and experts in the Secretariat and in the corridors and meeting rooms of the UN. This provides a different perspective of how the organisation has changed over time, and how it has been perceived in different ways by a host of state and non-state actors. This contributes to the recent resurgence of interest in the UN and the history of international organisations in general, inspired by the world of historians such as Pedersen and Glenda Sluga who have lured scholars back to the archives of the UN in New York and Geneva.
In taking a decentred approach to UN history, we examine how the UN was understood in different locations outside the Western world, with the aim of both re-inscribing its role in the history of internationalism while also investigating how different internationalisms and different views of the international system played out in practice. This goes beyond thinking about how actors ‘from below’ shape the international system, but actually highlights their substantive contributions at a variety of different levels over time. This also sheds light on how liberal internationalism was experienced, contested and sometimes subsumed with, thorough and at the UN which offers us a different view on how the ideology evolved through the latter half of the twentieth century. Rather than merely an instrument of this global order, from this perspective, the UN actually appears as the epicentre of the reckoning of Global South actors with the often harsh and illiberal reality of liberal internationalism.
Finally, in the neighbouring discipline of International Relations, it is hoped that this research will generate some fruitful exchanges. We will utilise the intellectual scaffold of theoretical approaches towards international organisations such as those developed by the UN Intellectual History Project led by Thomas G. Weiss.[vi] This is necessary to historicise and empiricise the question of how the agency of state and non-state actors and the officials and experts who work with international organisations actually played out. Especially insightful is the literature on norm creation and dissemination, which is crucially important in order to outline the process by which the actors of this project adapted and impacted the creation of new norms.[vii] Identifying and understanding how norms shifted at specific moments, and the political and ideational motivations around those instances will also provide a contribution to the theoretical literature which tends to take a more conceptual and abstract approach.
Conclusion
Overall, this new project aims to produce new critical histories of the UN by analysing the agency of Global South actors in altering the organisation and thereby challenging if not changing politics and practices in the areas of decolonisation, economic development and human rights. It seeks to reveal the invisible histories of the UN in two ways. Firstly it will produce a new image of the UN as both the facilitator and inhibitor of the ways in which Global South actors sought to challenge the dynamics and norms of the liberal world order. Secondly, it will show the as yet invisible histories of issues that the UN did not address and examine how the organization contributed to South-South dynamics by embracing some actors while excluding others. In the process we confront existing epistemologies by showing how global order has been historically contested within and between the Global South and the UN.
Notes
[i] The INVISIHIST team includes Dr. Lydia Waker, Yusra Abdullahi, Maha Ali and Felipe Colla de Amorim. Further information can be found here.
[ii] Siba Grovogu, “A Revolution Nonetheless: The Global South in International Relations,” The Global South 5, no. 1 (Spring 2011); Sebastian Haug, Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner and Gunther Maihold, “The ‘Global South’ in the study of world politics: examining a meta category,” Third World Quarterly 42, no. 9 (2021).
[iii] A selection includes, Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2008), Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations, A Possible History of the Global South (New York: Verso, 2012); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Christopher J. Lee (ed.) Making a World after Empire, The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010); Robert A. Mortimer, The Third World Coalition in International Politics (New York: Praeger, 1980).
[iv] Susan Pedersen, ‘Foreword: From the League of Nations to the United Nations,’ in Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley (eds.) The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations (Routledge: London, 2018), xii.
[v] Eva-Maria Muschik, “Managing the World: The United Nations, Decolonization and the Strange Triumph of State Sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s.” Journal of Global History 12, no.1 (March 2018), 122-144.
[vi] Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij and Thomas G. Weiss, UN Ideas that Changed the World (Bloomington, I.N: Indiana University Press, 2009).
[vii] Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,’ International Organisation 52 (1998): 887-917; Judith Goldstein and Robert O Keohane (eds.) Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change (Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1993).
