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Margot Tudor, Building states: the United Nations, development, and decolonization, 1945–1965, International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 5, September 2023, Pages 2154–2155, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad217
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Building states explores the technical policies and promises that the United Nations leadership and high-level development officials made during the post-Second World War wave of decolonization. Eva-Maria Muschik focuses on the day-to-day operations of the organization and successfully questions the role of UN Secretariat officials as impartial observers. In the process, Muschik demonstrates how the UN staff were influential political agents who shaped international sovereignty through technical assistance. Thus, the book makes an important addition to the literature on the UN and the wider international liberal order.
The book comprises six chapters that span the first 20 years of the organization (1945–65), and it provides a welcome alternative to the existing origin stories within UN scholarship. It includes an introduction to the international trusteeship and non-self-governing territories system within the UN; an assessment of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld's technocratic innovation; an analysis of the proposal for an International Administrative Service; and four empirical chapters on development interventions in different nations across the global South. Tracing the UN's technical operations and development projects through UN archival documents and official field-based reports and communications, these chapters examine the organization's interference in postwar Bolivia, Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Libya and Somalia. While Muschik contributes to the extensive historiographic attention paid recently to the UN's involvement in the Congo crisis of the early 1960s, her novel analysis of the UN's development assistance in the other countries is a core strength of the book (p. 250). The book exposes the ever-shifting policies, bureaucratic structures, financial anxieties and logistical pressures to which the UN international civil service was subject. Hence, Muschik takes readers behind the curtain of the UN bureaucracy, providing a unique insight into its internal logics, and exposes the frustrating working environment of the young organization, as it established its role on the global stage.
