School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies is pleased to invite you to the following seminar as part of its series for 2023/2024:

Speaker: Dr Margot Tudor, Historian, Lecturer in Foreign Policy and Security (City, University of London)

Chair & Discussant: Dr Maggie Dwyer, Lecturer in African Studies and International Development (CAS), Co-Director of the Centre for Security Research (CeSeR), University of Edinburgh

Organised by the Centre of African Studies and co-badged by CeSeR, University of Edinburgh

Taking a critical approach to military power and humanitarian authority in a historical context, this paper examines the structural and cultural motivations for wrongdoing in a UN peacekeeping mission context, Opération des Nations Unies au Congo or ONUC, (1960-1964). I use oral interviews, state and institutional archives, and newspaper records to piece together a fragmentary history of humanitarian criminality on the ground.

Focusing on international field-based leadership, I trace how colonial legacies of racial anxieties and stereotypes fostered humanitarian abuses and exploitative interactions with civilians in the field as well as minimising responsibility for the culpable party. This paper also examines the officials’ problem-solving justifications for their actions and draws attention to how they framed their transgressions – and the institutional (in)action – in the aftermath. These justifications help reveal the racist stereotypes used to abdicate international humanitarians from criminal responsibility in Global South spaces – in their own minds and in their colleagues’, thus fostering a culture of impunity within the mid-level leadership of international humanitarian and diplomatic communities.

The humanitarian officials’ misconduct and their justifications for their decisions reveal the pervasiveness of western humanitarians’ belief in different standards of behaviour in (post)colonial conflict spaces than in their home countries, thus perpetuating and entrenching the colonial idea that international staff were forced – or ‘corrupted’ – into ‘uncivilised’ behaviour whilst abroad in order to do their jobs. 

When: Wednesday 8th November 2023 (3:30pm - 5pm GMT)

Where: Please join us at Chrystal Macmillan Building, Seminar Room 1

To attend this event: Please register on Eventbrite

Speaker Biography:

Dr Margot Tudor  is a historian of international interventions and humanitarianism and a lecturer in Foreign Policy and Security at City, University of Lonon. Her first book, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats: United Nations Peacekeeping and the Reinvention of Colonialism, 1945-1971, was published as part of the 'Human Rights in History' series by Cambridge University Press in 2023. She won the BISA Michael Nicolson Thesis Prize in 2021 and her article, 'Gatekeepers to Decolonisation', won the ISA History Section's Merze Tate Award in 2022.