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Selective Responsibility in the United Nations

Colonial Histories and Critical Inquiry

Selective Responsibility in the United Nations cover

Selective Responsibility in the United Nations

Colonial Histories and Critical Inquiry

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Description

The United Nations claims to exist in order to maintain international peace and security, providing a space within which all states can work together. But why, then, does the UN invoke its responsibility to protect through humanitarian intervention in some instances but not others? Why is it that five states have the power to decide whether or not to intervene? This book challenges the dominant narrative of the UN as an institution of equality and progress by analyzing the colonial origins of the organization and revealing the unequal power relations it has perpetuated.

Harsant argues that the United Nations is unable to fulfill its claims around the protection of international peace and security due to its very structure and the privilege of certain states. Moreover, through a rigorous examination of the history of the UN and how those structures came to be, she argues that the privilege afforded to these states is the result of power relations established through the colonial encounter.

In order to understand the pressing contemporary issues of how the United Nations operates, particularly the Security Council, this book discusses issues of power and sovereignty by de-silencing the narratives of resistance and reconstructing a history of the United Nations that takes this colonial and anti-colonial relationship into account. This is a bold challenge to the eurocentrism that dominates International Relations discourse and a call to better understand the colonialism’s role in preserving the existing global order.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Selective Responsibility and Reading Through History
Postcolonialism, Neocolonialism and Sovereignty
Reading Through History
Structure of the Book
Chapter 1 - From Sovereignty to Sovereign Equality
A History of the United Nations
Academic Narratives of the United Nations
Sovereignty and International Law
Sovereignty and the League of Nations
From Sovereignty to Sovereign Equality
Sovereign Equality and Trusteeship
A Colonial History of the United Nations
Chapter 2 - Resistance to Imperialism and the Two Leagues
President Wilson and the Paris Peace Conference
The League of Nations, Self-Determination and the Mandate System
The League Against Imperialism
Universalism and Internationalism
Chapter 3 - The United Nations and Colonialism: Re-Narrating San Francisco
The Colonial Question at San Francisco
Anti-Colonialism at San Francisco
Permanent Membership and Postcolonial Privilege
Power vs. Responsibility
Sacrificing Sovereignty
From Mandate

Product details

Published Aug 31 2022
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 192
ISBN 9781786610287
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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