Colonial Vestiges on the Map: A Rhetorical History of Development Cartography at the United Nations during Post-War Decolonization

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-198
Author(s):  
Timothy Barney
Polar Record ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naohiro Nakamura

ABSTRACTThis commentary reviews Maruyama's article ‘Japan's post-war Ainu policy: why the Japanese Government has not recognised Ainu indigenous rights?’ (Maruyama 2013a), published in this journal. Maruyama criticises the government for its reluctance to enact a new Ainu law to guarantee indigenous rights, even after Japan's ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). However, in actuality, the government is searching for the foundation of new Ainu policies in the existing legal frameworks and trying to guarantee some elements of indigenous rights. Japan's case suggests the possibility of realising indigenous rights without the enactment of a specific law.


Comma ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2019 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Gelfand

Seventy-five years ago (1945), the United Nations (UN) was founded in San Francisco by 50 nations. There, a small archives unit served to assemble the first records of the organization; this was the first iteration of today’s Archives and Records Management Section (ARMS). Throughout its history, the fortunes of the UN Archives have waxed and waned, while its role has continuously evolved. Trying to carve out a place for itself within the largest international organization in the world, its physical and administrative structures have undergone profound changes, as has its mission, number of staff, the type of records it holds and its users. This paper examines significant events in the development of the UN Archives, the challenges it has faced and what may be learned from them.


Diplomatica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-199
Author(s):  
Nicholas J. Cull

Abstract This essay considers the phenomenon of British local authorities mobilizing to oppose the policies of apartheid in post-war South Africa. Activities include boycott, divestment, twinning agreements, media campaigns, and re-naming/memorialization. The activity is placed in the context of a transnational anti-apartheid network overseen by the United Nations organization. The campaign is shown to be inversely related the level of national government activity and especially associated with opposition to Margaret Thatcher and her government.


Author(s):  
Georgia Lindsay

After over a decade of reports, designs, and public outreach, the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco was dedicated in 1976. Using historical documents such as government reports, design guidelines, letters, meeting minutes, and newspaper articles from archives, I argue that while the construction of the UN Plaza has failed to completely transform the social and economic life of the area, it succeeds in creating a genuinely public space. The history of the UN Plaza can serve both as a cautionary tale for those interested in changing property values purely through changing design, and as a standard of success in making a space used by a true cross-section of urban society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-108
Author(s):  
Charles Dorn

In 1975, the United Nations, under the auspices of its Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Environment Program (UNEP), established the International Environmental Education Program (IEEP). For two decades, IEEP aimed to accomplish goals ascribed to it by UNESCO member states and fostered communication across the international community through Connect, the UNESCO-UNEP environmental education newsletter. After reviewing UNESCO’s early involvement with the environment, this study examines IEEP’s development, beginning with its conceptual grounding in the 1968 UNESCO Biosphere Conference. It examines the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, moves on to the UNESCO-UNEP 1975 Belgrade Workshop, and continues with the world’s first intergovernmental conference dedicated to environmental education held in Tbilisi in 1977. The paper then uses Connect to trace changes in the form and content of environmental education. Across two decades, environmental education shifted from providing instruction about nature protection and natural resource conservation to fostering an environmental ethic through a problems-based, interdisciplinary study of the ecology of the total environment to adopting the concept of sustainable development. IEEP ultimately met with mixed success. Yet it was the primary United Nations program assigned the task of creating and implementing environmental education globally and thus offers a particularly useful lens through which to analyze changes in the international community’s understanding of the concept of the environment over time.


Author(s):  
Samrita Sinha ◽  

According to John Quintero, “The decolonisation agenda championed by the United Nations is not based exclusively on independence. It is the exercise of the human right of self-determination, rather than independence per se, that the United Nations has continued to push for.” Situated within ontologies of the human right of self-determination, this paper will focus on an analysis of The Legends of Pensam by Mamang Dai, a writer hailing from the Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, to explore the strategies of decolonisation by which she revitalizes her tribe’s cultural enunciations. The project of decolonisation is predicated on the understanding that colonialism has not only displaced communities but also brought about an erasure of their epistemologies. Consequently, one of its major agenda is to recuperate displaced epistemic positions of such communities. In the context of Northeast India, the history of colonial rule and governance has had long lasting political repercussions which has resulted not only in a culture of impunity and secessionist violence but has also led to the reductive homogeneous construction of the Northeast as conflict ridden. In the contemporary context, the polyethnic, socio-cultural fabric of the Northeast borderlands foregrounds it as an evolving post-colonial geopolitical imaginary. In the light of this, the objective of this paper is to arrive at the ramifications of employing autoethnography as a narrative regime by which Mamang Dai reaffirms the Adi community’s epistemic agency and reclaims the human right towards a cultural self-determination.


2013 ◽  
pp. 667-681
Author(s):  
Bojan Milisavljevic

The paper deals with the issue of the diplomatic protection in international law and its development through the history of the international community. In this sense, the author investigates the practice of states regarding the application of diplomatic protection and the steps taken by the International Law Commission of the United Nations on the codification of this area. In 2004 International Law Commission adopted at first reading a full set of draft articles. In this paper is presented judicial practice, especially of the International Court of Justice, in the field of diplomatic protection in order to evaluate whether the approach of the Court to diplomatic protection has become more human-rights oriented in the last few years. Author presents the development of customary law rules relating to diplomatic protection and its transition into a whole system of rules through the work of the International Law Commission. In this sense, these are the basic stages in the codification of rules on diplomatic protection and the United Nations contribution to the protection of the rights of foreign nationals. This article points the development of universal and regional mechanisms to protect human rights and highlights the impact of those mechanisms on traditional measures of diplomatic protection.


2017 ◽  
pp. 34-76
Author(s):  
John Allphin Moore ◽  
Jerry Pubantz

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