Challenging the Liberal Order from Within:
The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South - INVISIHIST

The main aim of INVISIHIST is to reveal and unravel the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. The research will investigate how the UN has both facilitated and limited their role in shaping global order from 1945-1981.

Research aim

Even though two-thirds of UN member states belong to the Global South, our histories of the UN are from the western perspective. The EU-funded INVISIHIST project will provide pioneering new histories of the UN, highlighting the agency and effects of Global South actors in changing the UN. This will produce a new decolonised genealogy of the organisation and a global history of Global South actors over time. It will examine archives across the Global South and reveal invisible histories of the UN in the period between 1945 and 1981. The project will consider the Global South actors’ impact concerning decolonisation, economic development and human rights, follow the ways they challenged the liberal world order and analyse how this led to hierarchies of power, inclusion and exclusion within and between the UN and the Global South.

Research description

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. Yet, histories of the organization are predominantly from the Western perspective. Challenging this view, this research will make a ground-breaking contribution to the field, providing a new genealogy of the UN within the contextual frame of global history in order to investigate how Global South actors shaped global order.

It will bring together different perspectives of the UN from archives across the Global South, revealing currently invisible histories of the organization by examining how it was developed by Global South actors between 1945-1981. The project has 3 closely related objectives:

1. To examine how actors from the Global South changed the UN by developing its functions in the areas of decolonization, economic development and human rights;

2. To trace the ways in which Global South actors challenged the liberal world order as they pursued these rights;

3. To analyze why Global South agency at the UN led to the promotion of some issues and actors and excluded others and ask what the consequences were for order within the Global South.

For more, please visit the university-linked webpage, here.

Asia and the UN, by Maha Ali

The project explores the role of Asian actors at the UN in historically shaping global political discourse, and taking into account the extent to which these states have played a part in altering the discourse on ‘human rights’ and 'development' at the UN. While considering the role of Asian states at multilateral forums, instances of south-south cooperation have emerged, demonstrating a quest for political, social and economic rights and freedoms, a political position against colonialism and imperialism, and a refusal of both economic subordination and socio-cultural suppression. This project explores Global South-centric narratives, contributing towards more inclusive and robust policies at the UN, with research on constitutionality, regional political dynamics, and international obligations to reveal the degree of role these elements have played in shaping international politics and foreign policy for the Asian States in question, whereby recovering historical agency of the global south, which has so far been presented through a diluted narrative at the UN.

African Activism at the UN, by Yusra Abdullahi

The project contributes to the study of international history through its analysis of Pan-Africanism as a worldview that significantly impacted international order and global politics. The project purports that the UN as a Western-founded organization, despite its commitment to the decolonization of the Global South, both advertently and inadvertently, maintained international liberal order. By analysing the inversions that occur when emancipatory discourses are held in spaces of political asymmetry, the project will bring to the fore the contribution and exercise of (Pan-)African agency across UN bodies, committees, and agendas by highlighting the myriad of ways this agency was both influential at times and suppressed at other times, as a spirited African community formed within the UN realm.

Latin America and the UN, by Felipe Colla de Amorim

Clashing Latin American projects for economic sovereignty in the post-war global order, investigates Latin America's clashing projects for sovereignty and economic independence in post-World War II global order. In doing so, this research is set to offer a different, more nuanced, perspective on the standard tale of the intellectual, economic, and political movements that emerged from the state-led developmentalist propositions of UN’s CEPAL in the late 1940s which gained traction with UNCTAD’s G77 in the 1960s, and reached its peak when the NIEO was launched in 1973. By focusing on the clashing positions — both through diplomatic channels at the United Nations system and non-state actors beyond them —, this research intends to explore how Latin American actors navigated between three different dimensions (global, regional, and domestic levels) — in which these projects for economic sovereignty were both being defended and attacked.

Did you know our Global Orders podcast is available to listen to on Spotify? You can check it out by clicking on the icon above.

Back in the autumn of 2022, the INVISIHIST project coordinated a conference at Leiden University called "Making and Breaking: Global Order in the 20th Century." Twenty-three scholars from all over the world presented their research on Global South engagements at the UN and with the Liberal International Order more broadly.

The aim of this podcast mini-series "Global Orders" is to showcase some of the exciting conversations that we had over the several days of our 2022 conference. In each episode, one of our three PhD students will pick out a thematic strand that they thought was particularly exciting or signal something new and important in the historical scholarship.

Along the way, we'll also hear more about how this relates to the research that we are conducting here through the INVISIHIST project at Leiden University. Click the Spotify icon to find out more.

Below you can find recent conference-related papers from the INVISIHIST team and its affiliated researchers:

2023: Maha's paper from the Owada Chair conference held in Tokyo

2023: Ali's papers following seminars at Sciences-Po and Leiden University

2023/2024: Yusra's papers from conferences in Cologne, Padua, Florence,

as well as her chapter in the Program on African Social Research

2023: Sarah's write-up of the joint research workshop in Florence

The 2024 Invisible Histories lecture series is well underway!

On 8 February, the first instalment of the new year took off with Dr Steven Jensen, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Dr Jensen’s lecture analysed the historical evolution of social and economic human rights, their importance for global (in)equality to determine how these issues are linked through the United Nations.

On 22nd February, our lecture series welcomed Alessandro Iandolo, a lecturer at University College London. The event was held in collaboration with the Cold War Research Network between Utrecht University, University of Amsterdam, and Leiden University. Alessandro’s lecture explored his acclaimed recent book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell University Press, 2022). The talk discussed Alessandro's book in which he examines the USSR's involvement in West Africa during the 1950s and 1960s as aid donor, trade partner, and political inspiration for the first post-independence governments in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali.

On Thursday, 14th March we had the pleasure of hosting Dr Mark Jones, Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, whose lecture explored the demise of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democracy. Since the late 2010s, the term “Weimar conditions” or “Weimarer Verhältnisse,” has been increasingly used as a metaphor for the global crisis facing contemporary liberal democracy. For some, the term is reassuring: thinking about the details of the collapse of Germany’s first democracy is an appealing reminder that the contemporary world does not face conditions identical to those of the Weimar Republic. In this talk, historian Mark Jones challenged this narrative of reassurance. Exploring the parallels and echoes that exist between Weimar’s demise and the current global polycrisis, the talk focused upon ‘Weimar subjectivities’ and the loss of three kinds of power: the power of the imperial subject; the power of the male subject; and the power of the knowing subject.

On Thursday, April 25th, INVISIHIST welcomed Dr Rebecca Adami, a Professor at Stockholm University to Leiden University to take part in the next instalment of our lecture series. Dr Adami specialises in critical human rights theory through counternarratives, and studies on intersectionality. She is the recipient of the Bertha Lutz Award 2022 for the highest quality public writing and research on women in diplomacy. Her lecture explored some of the controversies of women’s rights at the founding of the United Nations that are still being lobbied by women today. Archival photos of the founding female figures of the UN will be on display thanks to UN Photo and the UN Communications Office. She is co-editor of Women and the UN: A New History of Women’s International Human Rights (2022) and author of Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2019).

You can find photos of these events by clicking on the 'Social Media' tab above!

Challenging the Liberal Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South - INVISIHIST

Challenging the Liberal Order from Within:
The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South - INVISIHIST