Selective Responsibility in the United Nations

Katy Harsant

doi:10.5771/9781786610300

Summary

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.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2022
ISBN-Print: 978-1-78661-028-7
ISBN-Online: 978-1-78661-030-0
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 178
Product type: Book Titles

1. Dedication No access
2. Contents No access
3. Acknowledgements No access
4. Abbreviations No access
1. Postcolonialism, Neocolonialism and Sovereignty No access
2. Reading through History No access
3. Structure of the Book No access
1. A History of the United Nations No access
2. Academic Narratives of the United Nations No access
3. Sovereignty and International Law No access
4. Sovereignty and the League of Nations No access
5. From Sovereignty to Sovereign Equality No access
6. Sovereign Equality and Trusteeship No access
7. A Colonial History of the United Nations No access
1. President Wilson and the Paris Peace Conference No access
2. The League of Nations, Self-Determination and the Mandate System No access
3. The League against Imperialism No access
4. Universalism and Internationalism No access
1. The Colonial Question at San Francisco No access
2. Anti-Colonialism in San Francisco No access
3. Permanent Membership and Postcolonial Privilege No access
4. Power versus Responsibility No access
5. Sacrificing Sovereignty No access
6. From Mandates to Trusteeship No access
1. Discourses of Development No access
2. The Bandung Conference No access
3. Bandung and the Cold War No access
4. The Power of Bandung No access
1. The United Nations, Decolonisation and Independence No access
2. The Non-Aligned Movement No access
3. The Group of 77 No access
4. Bandung and the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership No access
5. After Bandung No access
1. Non-Intervention after the Second World War No access
2. Power Politics in the Cold War Period No access
3. Human Rights and Humanitarianism in the 1990s No access
4. ICISS and the Focus on Responsibility No access
5. Neocolonialism and Selective Responsibility No access
1. Selective Responsibility No access
2. International Relations, History and Eurocentrism No access
3. The United Nations in 2022 No access
1. Secondary Sources No access
2. Published Papers No access
3. Archival Documents No access
Index No access Pages 167 - 178