This second volume from the United Nations Intellectual History Project surveys the history of the UN's regional commissions and the ideas they have developed over the last 40 years. Each essay is devoted to one of the five regional commissions-Europe, Asia and the Far East, Latin America, Africa, and Western Asia-and how it has approached its mission of assessing the condition of regional economies and making prognoses about future conditions. The essays describe how each commission has added local perspectives to global debates over economic development and brought an authentic regional...

Good data, Michael Ward argues, serve to enhance a perception about life as well as to deepen an understanding of reality. This history of the UN's role in fostering international statistics in the postwar period demonstrates how statistics have shaped our understanding of the world. Drawing on well over 40 years of experience working as a statistician and economist in more than two dozen countries around the world, Ward traces the evolution of statistical ideas and how they have responded to the needs of policy while unraveling the question of why certain data were considered important...

UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice is at once a history of the ideas and realities of international development, from the classical economists to the recent emphasis on human rights, and a history of the UN's role in shaping and implementing development paradigms over the last half century. The authors, all prominent in the field of development studies, argue that the UN's founding document, the UN Charter, is infused with the human values and human concerns that are at the center of the UN's thinking on economic and human development today. In the intervening period,...

Against the backdrop of a 20-year revolt against free trade orthodoxy by economists inside the UN and their impact on policy discussions since the 1960s, the authors show how the UN both nurtured and inhibited creative and novel intellectual contributions to the trade and development debate. Presenting a stirring account of the main UN actors in this debate, The UN and Global Political Economy focuses on the accomplishments and struggles of UN economists and the role played by such UN agencies as the Department of Economic (and Social) Affairs, the United Nations Commission on Trade and...

"The authors have cajoled, intrigued, or reassured their 73 'voices' into telling a fascinating story of the UN and its institutions, which is also a story of 73 individual lives, of women and men... with their own complicated histories of emigration and education, family relationships and professional choices, hopes and successes." --from the Foreword by Emma Rothschild

"Far from being a distant bureaucracy, the UN is composed of individuals who are reshaped by vital experiences. UN Voices gives international civil servants human faces and shows how ideas drive the grand experiment....

"Devaki Jain opens the doors of the United Nations and shows how it has changed the female half of the world--and vice versa. Women, Development, and the UN is a book that every global citizen, government leader, journalist, academic, and self-respecting woman should read." --Gloria Steinem

"Devaki Jain's book nurtures your optimism in this terrible war-torn decade by describing how women succeeded in empowering both themselves and the United Nations to work toward a global leadership inspired by human dignity." --Fatema Mernissi

In Women, Development, and the UN,...

How did the individual human being become the focus of the contemporary discourse on security? What was the role of the United Nations in "securing" the individual? What are the payoffs and costs of this extension of the concept? Neil MacFarlane and Yuen Foong Khong tackle these questions by analyzing historical and contemporary debates about what is to be secured. From Westphalia through the 19th century, the state's claim to be the object of security was sustainable because it offered its subjects some measure of protection. The state's ability to provide security for its citizens came...

Human rights activists Roger Normand and Sarah Zaidi provide a broad political history of the emergence and development of the human rights movement in the 20th century through the crucible of the United Nations, focusing on the hopes and expectations, concrete power struggles, national rivalries, and bureaucratic politics that molded the international system of human rights law. The book emphasizes the period before and after the creation of the UN, when human rights ideas and proposals were shaped and transformed by the hard-edged realities of power politics and bureaucratic imperatives....

The concept of preventive diplomacy has captivated the United Nations since it was first articulated by Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold a half-century ago. Successive generations of diplomats and statesmen have invested in the idea that diplomatic efforts might be able to head off international conflicts and disasters. Dramatic successes, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, contrast with dramatic failures, such as the inability of UN efforts to halt the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this careful study, distinguished former UN civil servant Bertrand G. Ramcharan traces the history...