Description
This paper re-assesses the role the UN played in the early years of the Kashmir conflict. It addresses the puzzle of why the UN plan for a plebiscite failed, even though it had the agreement of both the Indian and the Pakistani governments and the support of the great powers. The paper argues that we need to place the Kashmir conflict in the wider historical context of a tectonic shift in the international order in the late 1940s and early 1950s. That era represented a brief period of experimentation, when hopes and ambitions for the UN were still high, issues of state sovereignty and self-determination in flux, and conflicts such as Kashmir seemed resolvable. Yet, in the process, UN officials learned that a growing lack of trust in the organisation’s effectiveness and legitimacy as global arbiter undermined the peace process, eventually bringing efforts at conflict resolution to a standstill. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the broader implications of the UN’s role in Kashmir for an international history of conflict management, international order, and global governance. It also presents some tentative ‘lessons’ we might learn from this early phase of UN conflict management.
