Margot Tudor - Böcker

This history of colonial legacies in UN peacekeeping operations from 1945-1971 reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Margot Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together histories of humanitarianism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats sheds new light on the mechanisms through which sovereignty was negotiated and re-negotiated after 1945.

This history of colonial legacies in UN peacekeeping operations from 1945–1971 reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Margot Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together histories of humanitarianism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats sheds new light on the mechanisms through which sovereignty was negotiated and re-negotiated after 1945.

While interconnections between humanitarian actors and military operations are a pervasive feature of contemporary conflicts around the globe today, Military Humanitarianism challenges the idea that these interactions are a recent phenomenon. Instead, this volume offers an alternative interpretation to the traditional framing of military actors as a homogenous group and humanitarian actors as impartial intermediaries between armed groups and aid recipients. In tracing a longer lineage beyond the post–Cold War period and twenty-first century, Military Humanitarianism uncovers a deeper history of entanglement between "humanitarian" and "military" actors – supposedly distinct categories that have long been mutually constitutive. By examining the malleability of these concepts and bringing different contexts into conversation, both editors and contributors reveal the tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxes of defining "humanitarian" action in practice, particularly in contrast to military operations. As a result, Military Humanitarianism provides timely insight into the understanding and politics of humanitarian operations, on and beyond the battlefield. It asks not just what it means to "help" but who gets to – and why.Contributors: Cedric Cotter, Maria Cullen, Lewis Defrates, Bronwen Everill, Matilda Greig, Baher Ibrahim, Julia F. Irwin, Norman Joshua, Jonathan McCollum, Justine Meberg, Michelle Moyd, Daniel Palmieri, Elisabeth Piller, Lou Pingeot, Pietro Stefanini, and Jiayi Tao.