This chapter assesses the contributions of British UN staff to global security, peacekeeping, and civilian aid initiatives. The UN’s conflict and security work attracted much public attention between 1945 and 1970. While it achieved mixed success in mediating postwar global crises in Palestine, Kashmir, Korea, Egypt, and Congo, its missions performed important regional security work at the local level. UN operations in South Kasai during the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s are used as a case study. UN civil servants also provided security through technical governance and state-building initiatives. The chapter tracks this theme through studies of UN migration, population, and food projects; the relationship between UN development campaigns and late colonial planning paradigms; and British leadership in UN technical organizations.

This chapter evaluates the successes and failures of the world government movement after the Second World War. It focuses on the work of the World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government (WAPWG), which advocated a world parliament to ensure that postwar international governance represented the democratic wishes of the international body politic. The chapter assesses the WAPWG's place in the broader firmament of world government organizations and the wide but uneven support for the idea of a world parliament in both the British Conservative and Labour parties. It examines how world parliamentarians confronted nuclear proliferation, UN reform, Commonwealth relations, and Cold War politics. The WAPWG’s informal structure allowed its members to speak freely and to build an autonomous transnational movement. What world government advocates gained by being freed from institutional constraints, however, they lost in a lack of access to resources and the organizational scale that allowed UN staff to participate in large and lasting international initiatives.

Britons played a central role in creating the administrative architecture and normative foundations of the UN. This chapter examines the international lives of Britons who worked at the United Kingdom Mission to the UN and the UN Secretariat. It outlines the challenges of writing histories of international civil servants, as their professional lives are often absent from traditional archives. The chapter then presents case studies on British officials’ relations with the UN’s first two Secretaries-General (Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjöld), UN public diplomacy, the opportunities and obstacles British women faced working in the Secretariat, and the UN’s early recruitment strategies.

British voluntary and faith organizations were important components of the rapidly expanding “third sector” of civil society and non-governmental organizations in the post-1945 international system. Many postwar international volunteers had participated in relief efforts for displaced persons during the war. This included the Friends (Quakers) Ambulance Unit (FAU), which operated the Friends Post War Service (FPWS, 1946–48) and the Friends Ambulance Unit International Service (FAUIS, 1948–59). These organizations provided Quaker conscientious objectors with an alternate means of completing their National Service. This chapter evaluates the historical experiences of FPWS/FAUIS volunteers as examples of international service motivated by moral conviction and argues that FPWS/FAUIS relief work constituted a form of private international social governance.

This book presents a comparative study of the historical experiences of Britons who entered the international civil service between 1945 and 1970 with those who worked and volunteered in international non-governmental and civil society organizations. International service assumed two forms after the Second World War. One was the international civil service, much of which was concentrated in the United Nations (UN) family of international organizations. The other was international civil society, comprised of older voluntary organizations that expanded their activities after the war, and new transnational civil society organizations created between the 1940s and the 1970s. The book assesses the respective influence of Britons in these sectors on the post-1945 development of international public policy and on Britain’s transition from a great power to one that sought to position itself as a leading contributor to international governance and voluntary activism. It presents a comparative analysis of the personal histories of hundreds of Britons who represented Britain at the UN and worked in the UN Secretariat; served in UN humanitarian, development, and social governance institutions and missions; participated in the world government movement; volunteered in the Friends Postwar International Service; and lobbied for decolonization and anti-racism through the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

This chapter assesses the contributions of British UN staff to the organization's innovative global social governance initiatives between 1945 and 1970. The transnational governance of welfare, health, education, and other social issues of traditional domestic jurisdiction was a revolutionary element of postwar international governance. Colonial and imperial service in Africa and India, as well as Home Civil Service experiences, led many other Britons into UN agencies that worked in global social governance fields. These included child welfare, agricultural and educational aid, humanitarian aid, migrant and refugee relief, and freedom of expression. The British government’s Overseas Service Aid Scheme subsidized former colonial staff who wished to stay on in positions with new postcolonial state governments. This chapter evaluates the personal histories and contributions to global social governance of Britons who worked in postwar UN global social governance organizations and demonstrates how this work both contributed to postcolonial state-building and continued long-standing racial divisions.

The accelerated pace of decolonization by the 1950s led many Britons to engage with questions of colonial nationalism. The Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) was one of the largest postwar British civil society associations that addressed these questions. This chapter examines the MCF’s work as an international advocacy organization and a central node in transnational anti-colonial networks. It highlights similarities between the MCF and the initiatives pursued by some of the UN’s development agencies. It addresses the MCF's assistance to colonial nationalist movements in Africa, its role as an ally and supporter of African human rights activists, and its active role in identifying and combatting racism as a political and human rights problem at home in Britain.

This book presents a comparative study of the historical experiences of Britons who entered the international civil service between 1945 and 1970 with those who worked and volunteered in international non-governmental and civil society organizations. International service assumed two forms after the Second World War. One was the international civil service, much of which was concentrated in the United Nations (UN) family of international organizations. The other was international civil society, comprised of older voluntary organizations that expanded their activities after the war, and new transnational civil society organizations created between the 1940s and the 1970s. The book assesses the respective influence of Britons in these sectors on the post-1945 development of international public policy and on Britain’s transition from a great power to one that sought to position itself as a leading contributor to international governance and voluntary activism. It presents a comparative analysis of the personal histories of hundreds of Britons who represented Britain at the UN and worked in the UN Secretariat; served in UN humanitarian, development, and social governance institutions and missions; participated in the world government movement; volunteered in the Friends Postwar International Service; and lobbied for decolonization and anti-racism through the Movement for Colonial Freedom.