This chapter focuses on the recent (re)turn to history in scholarship of international relations (IR) on international law. We argue that two interrelated trends explain this development. The first is primarily internal to the field, where historically sensitive approaches have gained ground over the past thirty years. The second is external and the result of IR scholars’ productive engagement with debates in other fields, including global history, intellectual history and legal history. Although the new historical IR work on international law remains heavily indebted to histories produced outside the confines of the discipline, IR scholars at the vanguard of this movement are increasingly comfortable with writing histories themselves. New IR historical accounts have thus emerged, spanning broad subjects of international society, order and transformation, as well as specific areas of international law, including human rights, humanitarian law and international organisations. We review the history of the disciplinary divide between IR and legal history, outline how IR theoretical approaches have made use of history, highlight some of the thematic areas of the new IR historical work, and lay out possible future research directions.

This chapter narrates a history of the history of international law as a species of European historical jurisprudence born of the nineteenth century. It connects this historical jurisprudence with a wider atmosphere of historicism and its intellectual antecedents and descendents, including (but not limited to) so-called ‘progress narratives’. It argues that the history of international law in this specific sense largely vanished after the Second World War, and the history of international law underwent two distinct rebirths: as part of the anti-colonial legal arguments repudiating the colonial structures and presuppositions of international legal thought, and as part of a critique of a renewed historicism and civilisational progressivism between 1989 and the present. But the second revival of the history of international law coincided with emergent histories of empire, international history, histories of international political thought and global history. The result is an exploding field of scholarship with objects and subjects of many kinds connected to the international and the global and their laws, institutions and practices.

This chapter offers an historical grounding in interwar international relations. It tracks and analyses the progress of international relations in the period between World War I (1914–18) and World War II (1939–45), both of which are rightly seen as two major and formative conflicts in international history and indeed for the study of International Relations. It is sometimes assumed that the two World Wars were primarily European affairs, at least in their origins, and reflected the persistence of European predominance in a fast-changing world. Yet these were truly global and globalising wars, as reflected in their causes, courses and consequences, the technologies they employed and the ideas they helped generate. The period in between the wars was a turbulent and unstable one. It foreshadowed European decline and witnessed the rise of the United States, the challenge of the Soviet Union and the Far East and, more gradually, of peoples around the world subject to imperial rule – in short, the interwar period provided the foundations for the international system that developed over the following decades. Many of its contours are still visible today.

Much like the dissolving international order confronting us, the concept of an international order is neither easily graspable nor predetermined, but it has provoked a range of theories and methods often depending on the international disciplines – law, politics, history. That said, while international relations scholars – whose own craft can be traced back to 1919 – became the proponents of its importance, historians in general have tended to avoid the term ‘international order’. Why have historians not directly and systematically engaged with the past of international order, or even the idea that it has a past? This afterword considers this question in the context of the significance of historical understanding of more commonly (and implicitly) studied national orders, and how historical interest in the international has significantly shifted over the last century.

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.

This conclusion elaborates three implications of the arguments of this book. First, it argues that the importance of exchange diplomacy in Sino-American rapprochement demonstrates the limits of Henry Kissinger’s understanding of rapprochement as dictated by geostrategic maneuvering and high-level diplomacy. We need, this conclusion posits, a more holistic account of Sino-American diplomacy to fully explain the development of that relationship through the 1970s. Second, this conclusion argues that the interconnection between Sino-American exchange and high diplomacy offers a case study of the value in connecting transnational and diplomatic history – an insight that has implications for both fields. Third and finally, the conclusion reflects on the lessons we can draw from the US-China exchange relationship of the 1970s in understanding the prospects for Sino-American cooperation in the twenty-first century.

This introduction outlines the central argument of this book: diplomacy via cultural and scientific exchange was critically important to the changing relationship between the societies and governments of China and the United States between 1969 and 1978. This argument challenges the established account of Sino-American relations in this period: as determined by summit diplomacy between the top leaders in Washington and Beijing. Instead, this book reveals how a far broader and more diverse cast of Chinese and Americans—athletes, musicians, scientists, and many others—played a central role in the Sino-American rapprochement of the 1970s. Transnational societal contacts were interactively connected to high diplomacy between the US and Chinese governments and these two tracks of Sino-American diplomacy were mutually constitutive. This introduction places this argument in the context of the historiography of US-China relations and provides a sense of the scale and nature of Sino-American cultural and scientific exchange in this period.