Reimagining the World: A New History of the United Nations and its Possible Futures - Thant Myint-U
Especially since the invasion of Ukraine, there’s a tendency to assume that the United Nations will return to a sort of Cold War era paralysis. This is a fundamental misreading of history. The U.N. was actually at its most dynamic at the very height of the Cold War, over the 1950s and 1960s, driven by new leadership from the recently decolonized nations of Africa and Asia. This course will focus on four episodes in the history of the U.N. - the Congo crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the Six Day War - as well as the two principal agendas of the new ‘Third World’: the fight against racism and the fight for a fairer and more equal international economy. The course will use little-known and previously classified material from the U.N. and other archives, ask why this period of U.N. dynamism has been almost entirely forgotten, and explore ways in which a different telling of the U.N.’s Cold War history might lead to new ideas about the future of multilateralism today.