This chapter addresses a former practice where international civil servants of certain UN organisations, who were not satisfied with the decisions rendered by the administrative tribunal dealing with their employment matters, were able to have these decisions re-examined by the Court. These proceedings drew much attention to the access and procedural inclusion of individuals before the World Court. It argues that the Court was indeed the incorrect forum for wronged UN staff members seeking redress due to its own Statute barring access to individuals and therefore entailing a permanent inequality of the parties. However, it argues that while the Court was handling such disputes, there were ways to adjust its procedural mechanisms to further bridge the inequality between the parties.

In December 1946 the General Assembly requested that the Economic and Social Council prepare a draft genocide convention with a view to its adoption at the 1947 session of the Assembly. The Secretariat prepared a draft convention with the assistance of three experts in international criminal law, Raphael Lemkin, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres and Vespasian Pella. However, the Economic and Social Council did not complete consultations with Member States in 1947. In early 1948, the Council established an Ad Hoc Committee composed of representatives of several Member States which prepared a revised draft. This draft was then revised and adopted by the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly in December 1948. The Assembly also adopted resolutions calling for consideration of the establishment of an international criminal court and for the extension of the Convention to colonies. The Convention entered into force in January 1951 after the threshold of twenty ratifications or accessions had been achieved.

The demise of the League of Nations did not lead to the end of colonial membership at international organisations. Chapter Six examines how the League’s legacy of colonial membership continued under the United Nations. Despite not being fully independent, the Indian National Congress would appoint India’s delegation at the first General Assembly in 1946, resulting in a very different international personality. No longer constrained and gagged by British appointees and the imperial conference, India would aggressively pursue its longstanding grievances against South Africa, destroying the ideal of inter se, and effectively ending the British ideal of colonial membership at international organisations. Instead, this chapter reveals how the end of the legacy of colonial membership went beyond the British Empire, and was replicated by the Soviet Union in the accession of Soviet Belorussia and Ukraine. Neither of these member states would become independent until 1991.

Article VIII of the Genocide Convention contemplates the role of organs of the United Nations in the implementation and enforcement of the Convention. There are many examples of States raising charges of genocide before the General Assembly and the Security Council. However, these bodies have onlyr rarely agreed to characterize acts as genocidal. In 1994, very controversially the Security Council resisted describing the unfolding genocide in Rwanda by its proper name. In 2004 the Secretary General established the position of Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Genocide, including the scope fo the Convention, has also been considered by the Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, the Ad Hoc Group of Experts on apartheid, the Commission on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council.

Genocide is sometimes called the ’crime of crimes’. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, then declared an international crime by the United Nations General Assembly. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted. As the first human rights treaty of modern times, it constituted a significant intrusion into what had previously been a matter exclusively of domestic concern. This explains the narrow definition of the crime of genocide. It requires proof of an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Only a half century after its adoption did the Genocide Convention take on real significance with inter-State cases being filed at the International Court of Justice and many prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Convention requires that States Parties punish genocide but they are also required to prevent it, even when it takes place outside their own territory. More than 150 States have ratified the Genocide Convention. Genocide is also prohibited under customary international law. It is generally agreed that the duty to punish genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens).

The post-First World War minorities treaties regime was an initial attempt by international law to address the rights of national and ethnic minorities. Its shorcomings prompted Raphael Lemkin, in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, to propose a new category of international crime that he named genocide. The International Military Tribunal prosecuted acts of genocide using the category of crimes against humanity. Several of the defendants were convicted of acts aimed at destruction of Europe’s Jewish population. However, crimes against humanity were confined to acts associated with aggressive war. At the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, a resolution on genocide was proposed in order to address the peacetime atrocities that were neglected in the Nuremberg judgment. The resolution recognized genocide as an international crime and called for preparation of a convention.

The UN General Assembly, a body including representatives of all UN member governments, serves as the primary forum for defining a better world order through peaceful change. It has endorsed programs of peaceful change at all levels of ambition at different times and on different issues. Much of its activity has focused on the minimalist goal of averting or ending particular wars. On other issues, most notably decolonization, national economic development, and adding environmental concerns to the intergovernmental agenda, it has contributed to incremental change in the states system. Yet the limits on what governments would endorse became clear on issues such as human rights where changes would affect domestic political orders. The end of the Cold War and related domestic-level political changes provided the context for higher ambition, which peaked in 2005 when the General Assembly endorsed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs offered a vision of deep peace in which universal respect for human rights, human development, and human security prevail within ecologically sustainable societies. Yet the subsequent spread of authoritarian rule within states and increased geopolitical tensions between major states have reinforced governments’ traditional approaches to states system, reducing the ambition of programs for peaceful change.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of great powers’ efforts to manage their relations, foster international orders, and promote processes of peaceful change in international relations through the use of international organizations since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The focus is on the mechanisms and dynamics of balances of power, concert, and collective security, as reflected in the practices of IOs, including diplomatic congresses and conferences of the nineteenth century, the League of Nations, and the United Nations since 1945. The main research question remains: Under which conditions do great powers use international organizations to promote processes of peaceful change in international relations? The relevant conditions include: a stable and agreed systemic distribution of power among the great powers; a certain degree of normative consensus among them; and a minimal agreement upon the “rules of the game” in the management of international relations. Among the findings drawn from the historical record, we can conclude that great powers tend to be status quo-oriented, and that IOs might thrive, prosper, and affect the behavior of great powers when the three basic conditions are in place.

United Nations (UN) peace missions are meant to foster peace. However, slim progress has been observed in the states in which they have been recently deployed. If peace misions are effective in alleviating the suffering of the population on many fronts, the puzzle remains: To what extent are UN peace missions powerful instruments of peaceful change, given the persistent political coups and ensuing protests and violence in the receiving countries despite their presence? In this chapter, a constructivist, multilevel analytical approach is used to discuss how peace missions factor in peaceful change. A three-fold argument is made: While it can be demonstrated that UN peace missions are powerful instruments of peaceful change at the international level all the while mitigating crises on a regional basis, they do little to prevent/alleviate the continuation of violence at the national level. Using the examples of Sudan, Mali, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cyprus, this chapter examines how UN peace missions are instruments of change, yet their peaceful effect depends on whether one takes into account the national, regional, or international level factors.

The UN’s human trafficking protocol is the linchpin of the global antislavery governance network. It drew on a series of early twentieth-century international treaties directed at the problem of ‘white slavery’ – European women being procured to work as prostitutes. Designed to accommodate disagreements over the relationship between prostitution and human trafficking, the protocol’s definition of human trafficking produced legal instability. The chapter traces the expansion of human trafficking policy from a state-centred focus on using the criminal law to target international sex traffickers to include an ensemble of private and public actors who advocate supply chain transparency legislation and bans on the importation goods made with forced labour. Concentrating on UN-related organisations and the US government, it investigates this shift and its implications for how unfree labour is governed. The chapter demonstrates how the legal assemblage of jurisdiction kept highly gendered governance strategies from clashing.

Chapter 1 introduces the argument, summarises the findings, and describes the conceptual framework applied throughout the book to analyse UN mediation as a gendered-colonial institution. It begins by noting the slow progress of the WPS Agenda in UN mediation, which the scholarly literature has not adequately addressed. It also stakes out the significance of WPS in UN mediation for the realisation of women's right to political participation, the advancement of gender equality in post-conflict contexts, and the diffusion of international approaches to gender-sensitive mediation from the UN to other organisations. The next section discusses how UN mediation can be analysed as an institution and identifies the key concepts and techniques used in parsing its gendered institutional logics. It also argues for using decolonial concepts of gender in studying the UN. Next, the chapter describes the interpretive research design and considers the ethical and practical implications of this approach. Last, the chapter concludes with an overview of each chapter.

Chapter 2 provides background on the WPS Agenda and UN mediation. It first discusses the politics of the WPS Agenda in the UN by focusing on three main dynamics: how UN actors articulate what the WPS Agenda is, how the UN's mediation architecture has adopted the Agenda, and how actors within the UN resist the Agenda, both passively and actively. It then provides an overview of the UN's mediation role and how it is institutionalised. The chapter illustrates the different forms UN mediation can take by describing three processes that come up throughout the book: the Great Lakes of Africa (which deals with the national and regional dimensions of the conflict in the DR Congo), Syria, and Yemen. This chapter is especially useful for readers who may not be familiar with the WPS Agenda in the UN system and/or UN mediation.