Multilateral diplomacy is defined as the management of relations among three or more nation-states, both within and outside international organizations. The main value of multilateral diplomacy is its ability to reduce the complexity of international relations in everyday life, including traveling, sending mail and solving crimes across borders. It produces agreements that are much more practical and less costly than a web of bilateral arrangements between individual countries, and it sets common standards that enable collaboration among scientists, engineers and businesses around the world. In addition to formal international organizations, multilateral diplomacy is practiced in informal or ad hoc groups and coalitions. There are few things in multilateral diplomacy more important than who writes the rules, who sets the agenda, and who holds the pen during negotiations.

Chapter 5 argues that the UN peacekeepers’ efforts to install stability in Cyprus forged a political environment of stagnation, fostering an entrenchment of hostilities between the divided communities. Once on the ground, peacekeepers improvised and favoured palliative solutions, so as to establish stability as quickly as possible, establishing dependence on external sources of relief and increasing displaced populations’ vulnerability to political instrumentalisation. The mission also expanded armed peacekeeping functions to recruit a UNFICYP mediator. However, the Turkish government’s controversial response to the UN mediator’s report exposed the extent of the UN’s powerlessness in the face of member-state criticism. The repercussions of the second mediator’s report highlighted the stagnation of the Cyprus mission and ignited internal discussions about the damage of the mission’s presence and mandate. It also demonstrated the incompatibility of functioning as an active military participant on the ground whilst simultaneously leading diplomatic negotiations for the resolution of the conflict. By 1971, the UN leadership and contributing nations openly questioned the future role of the UN in international conflict response following the organisation’s experience in Cyprus.

Chapter 3 turns to the Congo crisis, examining the imperial continuities and neo-colonial character of the infrastructural support provided by the ONUC mission during the first phase of the intervention. This chapter establishes the obstructive and productive influences of the ongoing presence of Belgian capitalists and colonial officials on the UN mission. It also examines how the UN staff used the access of technical assistance projects, such as the radio station and airport, to control the political future of the nation. This chapter explores how UN officials’ recast their strategies of paternalistic rhetoric, cultural exceptionalism, and anticommunism as international expertise in security and peacebuilding. UN staff’s political interference in the Congolese constitutional crisis in September 1960 was the first in a series of ONUC crises that ignited international controversy and criticism of the UN leadership’s decision-making, damaging the organisation’s relationship with the Afro-Asian bloc and threatening the future of the UN peacekeeping project.

How did the concept of an international military become a popular diplomatic option in the twentieth century? Chapter 1 establishes how international organisations, such as the League of Nations and the UN, disrupted the state monopoly on war thus helping to pave the way towards the armed peacekeeping project. It traces post-war debates on the UN’s role in nuclear disarmament and examines the UN leadership’s experiments in intervening directly in conflict contexts. Inspired by the UN’s observer presence in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the first secretary-general, Trygve Lie, proposed the creation of a UN Guard to protect the organisation’s field-based staff. Although the UN Guard failed to achieve meaningful diplomatic support, the idea of an international force - organised, trained, and uniformed by the UN - demonstrated the UN leadership’s aspirations for the organisation to shift into militarism. The chapter concludes by examining the diplomatic negotiations and logistical construction of the UN Command in Korea, examining how the UN leadership’s efforts to involve the organisation in the field were limited during this period by US hegemony and logistical superiority.

The end of the ’spirit of Bandung’ in the late 1960s coincided with the passing and retirement of most of the key UN officials involved in the development of the peacekeeping project. By 1971, the Cold War obstructed the UN forums from authorising any new armed peacekeeping missions. Weaving together the contributions of previous chapters, the conclusion reiterates the how UN peacekeepers’ racial prejudices and technocratic logic perpetuated international hierarchies of power, colonial structures, and further suppressed the self-determination of peripheral or minority populations. It addresses the role of the UN peacekeeping missions in supporting - if not, openly enabling - the United States’ anticommunist aggression across the Global South during the decolonisation period. Rather than being passive in this process, however, this book has demonstrated how the UN officials agreed that anticommunism was a peacebuilding strategy for global security. Ultimately, peacekeepers’ unique role in the field shaped the formation of the post-colonial international order, embedding uneven hierarchies of race, expertise, and diplomatic power within newly independent nations and populations.

This book models the impact of UN peacekeeping missions, exploring the variety of diplomatic, geopolitical, and legal functions played by the international UN officials whilst deployed to violent conflicts across the Global South. By adopting a comparative approach to the first armed peacekeeping missions – United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) deployed in Egypt, Opération des Nations Unies (ONUC) in Congo, United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) in West Papua, and United Nations Peacekeeping Force (UNFICYP) in Cyprus – each chapter traces how organisational interests and racial prejudices shifted from mission to mission, unearthing the granular colonial continuities perpetuated by the field-based staff. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, this book transcends UN headquarters-centred approaches that currently dominate the historiography of international organisations to access the role of mid-level peacekeeping bureaucrats in shaping the post-colonial international order. In doing so, this book traces unexplored continuities between late colonial administrations and the dramatic rise in peacekeeping missions from the late twentieth century onwards. This book illuminates these patterns and ruptures in peacekeeping practices during the formative years of UN peacekeeping and highlights the multifaceted functions played by mid-level UN bureaucrats in shaping the formation of the post-colonial international order.

Chapter 4 highlights the long shadow of the Congo mission on the UN’s new operations in West Papua as the organisation weathered financial and reputational crisis throughout 1962. The UN leadership, seeking reputational repair, negotiated a peacekeeping mission to monitor the transfer of West Papua from Dutch administration to Indonesian annexation. Once on the ground, the mission administration actively delegitimised and dismissed Papuans’ political activism and rejection of Indonesian annexation. The UN staff prioritised the stable transfer of the territory over the human rights of the population, choosing to perpetuate and affirm colonial characterisations of the Papuan population as intellectually inferior and politically disconnected. This chapter challenges scholarship that has argued that the UN was manipulated by Indonesian or American governments and was passive in this process of Papuan re-colonisation. Instead, it establishes how the UN peacekeepers were motivated by organisational interests of stability and an embedded racial prejudice, serving to ‘other’ the Papuan population and suffocate Papuan activists’ demands for independence.

Chapter 2 offers a new perspective on the evolution of the first armed peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), during a period of geopolitical transformation within the UN Security Council and General Assembly as a number of newly independent nations joined the organisation as member-states. It explores the expansion of the Afro-Asian bloc’s voting weight and the heightened diplomatic engagement of middle-sized states, such as India and Canada, as involvement in peacekeeping became a source of political power within the UN’s international forums. Once on the ground, the UNEF mission shifted international perceptions of the organisation from a simply deliberative forum to an active military participant. Reflecting on this shift in the field, mid-level peacekeepers and participating troops began to cultivate a distinctive peacekeeper identity through a mission magazine, underpinned by their Orientalist understandings of their space of deployment and the liberal cosmopolitan ideals of the UN Charter.

Chapter 23 shows how in the wake of the Ruhr crisis a further transformation of European and transatlantic politics was initiated, which led to significant reforms of the Versailles system and the construction of a more sustainable Atlantic peace system in the mid-1920s. It brings out that this system came to be premised on the watershed settlements of the London reparations conference of 1924 and the Locarno security pact of 1925. And it argues that what made these advances possible were constructive learning processes both on the part of the victors and on the part of the vanquished of the Great War. It highlights that these processes gave rise to the formation of a novel European concert, which began to integrate Weimar Germany in a reconfigured Atlantic order, supported by an informal American hegemon, that began to stabilise not only western but also eastern Europe.

Now that more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that, while some borders have disappeared, new fronts have appeared as well. And, rather than a “new world order,” a familiar antagonism between Russia and the West is once again asserting itself. Among the central points of dispute is the question of whether the West offered Moscow assurances in 1989-90 in the form of a NATO non-expansion guarantee. Diverging interpretations of this crucial development continue to hinder international understanding and dialogue. In this chapter, Sarotte draws on elements of her historical research into archives in six countries to present evidence on what actually transpired, and to discuss the following questions: To what extent do current challenges for European security policy still have roots in the decisions and commitments of the powers involved in the process of German reunification thirty years ago? How did the Clinton administration come to support full Article 5 NATO enlargement rather than NATO’s Partnership for Peace? And what can we learn from those events to address the challenges of today?

Informal modes of cooperation such as transgovernmental networks (TGNs) and informal international governmental organizations (IIGOs) have been proliferating rapidly at the international level. Most efforts to explain the rise of these arrangements as complements to or substitutes for formal international governmental organizations (FIGOs) have focused on the demand side of when states prefer to create and use informal over formal institutions. Here attention shifts to the supply side and how changing transportation and communication technologies have made new forms of cooperative arrangements possible. While these changes have facilitated the rise of both TGNs and IIGOs, the chapter focuses in particular on how they enable the combination of TGNs and IIGOs to work together. The “Hierarchy plus Networks” (HpN) model shows how quicker transportation possibilities for diplomats coupled with the instantaneous exchange of email messages and of attached documents make it much more feasible for state leaders to cooperate directly. Internationally, this allows states to (sometimes) bypass traditional FIGOs; domestically, it enables concentration of power close to executive leadership while (sometimes) bypassing foreign policy ministries in favor of direct international engagement among line departments. The chapter examines the emergence of the Proliferation Security Initiative to illustrate the argument.