In the current discourse about the 'crisis' of multilateralism it is frequently overlooked that the majority of world states, and thereby the majority of UN members, identify as Global South actors. This is a taxonomy encapsulates how shared agendas led to a sense of solidarity between peoples and states in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The term Global South, rather than Developing World or Third World, is employed in this project to capture both the state, non-state and regional actors who formed part of the movement.
The existing historiography of the UN is largely from the perspective of Western actors, and ignores or downplays the role of Global South actors. These histories enhance the image of the organisation as a passive entity and a vehicle for the interests of Western powers such as Britain, France and the United States (US). The liberal world order is presented here as the rules-based system led by the US since 1945 which established an unequal relationship between North and South. This has created the current situation where the UN is broadly misunderstood and the agency of Global South actors has been rendered largely invisible.
This project revealed and unraveled the invisible histories of the UN, transcending the dominant Western perspective to recover the historical agency of Global South actors. Our findings show that while the UN served to progress some issues, especially self-determination and economic sovereignty, new hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion were formed between postcolonial actors and the UN, which led to the replication of old biases, and the introduction of new systems of exclusion as Global South agency evolved. This demonstrated the complexity of decolonisation, which points to its limits as an emancipatory framework.
Why is it important for society?
Invisihist has produced the first truly global history of the biggest and most important international organisation in existence. This provides new histories about the objectives, policies and visions of the Global South members of the UN, revealing that considering their majority membership since 1960, they have been impactful in changing how the UN works, and inscribing their agency in the international system. This provides a more accurate impression of how the UN changed over time, what role non-Western members played in its evolution, and how this impacted both the functioning and utility of the UN which is a ground-breaking contribution to current debates about reform and renewal of the organisation.
The project exposed histories of states, peoples and issues that remained obscured due to the hierarchies of power and processes of inclusion and exclusion with which the UN functions. This reveals that the matrices of power of the UN dramatically impacted (and continue to impact) the evolution of South-South relations, as much as the long-acknowledged North-South axis. This means that our world cannot be explained by simple dichotomies of North-South or East-West relationships, but by a more complex and interwoven system of hierarchies, solidarities, regional and sub-national groupings, which ebbed and flowed through the UN over time.
What are the overall objectives?
The project traces the invisible history within and between the Global South and the UN, examining the successes and discontents of decolonisation, outlining new genealogies of issues that have been traditionally deemed as 'failures' and analyses the role of some lesser-known actors who continue to be disenfranchised by the evolution of South-South dynamics. Ultimately, it is shown that by using their collective role to shift the liberal world order, Global South actors performed a nuanced agency which produced its own order with positive and negative results.
