The Diplomacy of Decolonisation

The Congo Crisis of 1960-64 exploded tensions between newly independent countries and their former colonisers and changed the way America, Britain and the UN approached the process of decolonisation.Often seen as a Cold War proxy conflict, Alanna O'Malley demonstrates that the Crisis was in fact a multi-dimensional confrontation demonstrating the potential of and the limitations to UN agency and Afro-Asian solidarity. The UN mission became a battleground for competing ideas and visions of the world order as newly independent African and Asian states sought to redress the inequalities created by colonialism, the US and UK sought to maintain the status quo, and UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld tried to reconcile these two contrasting views, before dying in a plane crash in 1961. Lucid, deeply researched and vividly written, this book shows how attempts to direct the UN mission led to the creation of permanent mechanisms at the UN through which the Afro-Asian bloc shaped the course and the pace of decolonisation and gave new impetus to a Third World critique of imperial internationalism.