Protesting Peacekeeping: Making Visible Anti-Colonial Dissent in Past UN Missions

We are delighted to welcome Dr Margot Tudor as our first guest at the History Research Seminar this semester. Margot will be joining us on Tuesday 8 October, 4.15-5.30pm in The Diamond, workroom 3. She will be presenting a paper entitled 'Protesting peacekeeping: dissent and women activists across UN missions during mid-century decolonisation'.

Margot is a lecturer in the Department of International Politics at City, University of London and her work examines the colonial continuities of historical international interventions, specialising in UN peacekeeping missions. 

Protesting peacekeeping: dissent and women activists across UN missions during mid-century decolonisation
Whilst diplomatic negotiations in the New York Headquarters between member-state representatives and UN leadership have often dominated the limelight in diplomatic histories of decolonisation, host territories were also equally important – if not, more – sites for discussions on post-independence self-determination. This article recentres Global South populations and host territories in the history of the UN and decolonisation by drawing attention to three anti-UN protests across the formative peacekeeper missions as critical sites of peacekeeper/civilian interaction. Focusing on protests organised or heavily participated in by women activists and demonstrators in Palestine, Congo, and Cyprus, this article explores how, rather than formal spaces of political representation, these physical methods of dissent provided rare opportunities for women and other marginalised civilians to communicate their discontent with the UN mission and its plans for their territory. Connecting explicitly with past and parallel peacekeeping missions, some demonstrators used chants and signs to contextualise their demands within longer narratives of anticolonial dissent not only within their nation, but across the decolonising Global South. Decolonisation was a global struggle, and in spite of the UN’s efforts to silo these missions into discrete operations, host communities fought to make inter-mission patterns known to the world. Using UN official archival sources in combination with contemporary photographs and interviews with protesters, this article considers two key research questions: first, what do protests/demonstrations reveal about the host population’s – especially civilian women – perceptions of the UN mission and its intervention in their territory and other UN missions, and; secondly, what did the UN response – internal and external – to these protests reveal about how the mission staff perceived the population, their right to self-determination and democratic engagement, and the function of the peacekeeping project more broadly.