2024/07/18 by Alanna O’Malley, Lydia Walker · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Global Peace and Security Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtae008
openalex publication_date 2024/07/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/23
The United Nations (UN) continues to confront global crises that threaten its survival and test the durability of the‘ liberal international order’. Challenges to global organization, arising from war and humanitarian catastrophe, led to the creation of the UN as a set of bureaucratic institutions and as a system of international order after the Second World War.1 However, writing the UN’s history from that departure point has skewed analyses of both the potential and the limits of the institution and therefore, foreclosed opportunities to find a path towards reinvention. What is required is a new starting point for understanding the UN that can foreground long-obscured narratives of its divergent histories, especially the ways in which individuals and communities in regions that we now call the Global South shaped the institution. Drawing focus to these actors and examining their activities at the UN opens up fresh perspectives on the organization beyond a forum for power politics. As historically disenfranchised Global South actors grappled with their international role, the UN both facilitated and limited their opportunities for engagement, thereby shaping global order.