Description
Cold War history offers increasingly rich and detailed accounts of the creation of the United Nations and the potential and actual cooperation between Western powers and the Soviet Union that were soon overshadowed by decades of block confrontation. This paper seeks to develop the implications of this agenda for conceptual innovation in IR and peace and conflict studies, and particularly for the current geo-political moment in which contestation among geopolitical blocs appears to loom larger than since a long time. Drawing on security and conflict theory, and engaging with new literature on the history of decolonisation, the paper asks whether and how the increasing confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union after World War II still had a functional role in the governing and ordering of world politics, and particularly of decolonisation and the emergence of internationalised rule. Taking the case of the UN Trusteeship System, we examine debates from the Trusteeship Council to trace different modes of interaction between allied powers from the establishment of the Council after 1945. We show how, notwithstanding prevalent impressions of deadlock and escalation, conflict between imperial powers, especially (but not only) between the Soviet Union and United States, at times occurred in a mode of constructive or at least tacit bargaining for better solutions in international administration, and how significant these are in comparison to the already known zero-sum logics of great power politics of that era.
