Exploring, Overreaching, Giving Up: The UN and International Conflict Management in Kashmir, Congo, and East Pakistan

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Abstract

This essay examines the attempts of the United Nations (UN) to become an active force in Cold War politics. It explores three major moments of crisis that triggered UN involvement: Kashmir (1947–1949), Congo (1960–1965), and East Pakistan (1971). The essay demonstrates how in the Kashmir crisis, UN negotiators initially benefited from a malleable international environment and sincere support by both India and Pakistan to solve their territorial dispute. Yet as the UN explored its role as conflict “manager”, it soon faced the limits of both its power and its legitimacy in attempting to overcome national suspicion and the insistence on state sovereignty. In contrast to Kashmir, the Congo Crisis was a case of overreach. Under the lead of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, UN officials transformed an intervention to assist the Congolese government in ending Belgian interference to an overly ambitious exercise in state-building. The East Pakistan crisis reveals that the UN had by then given up on playing an active overt role in the political settlement of international crises. As millions of East Pakistanis, accused of separatism, fled a massive military crackdown by the West Pakistani government into neighbouring India, the UN confined its reaction to expressions of concern, offers of mediation, and provision of humanitarian aid. UN officials’ subsequent attempts to use humanitarian assistance and impartiality as a cover to achieve a covert solution deepened the crisis rather than contributing to solving it. The essay argues that by the early 1970s, the UN’s ambitious approach to international conflict management and foreign intervention had given way to a pragmatic focus on the “humanitarian” aspect. This adaptation by the UN to a difficult international environment in shying away from the overt pursuit of political solutions has had lasting consequences for the UN’s role in the international system.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages26
JournalInterventions
Early online date19 Jan 2025
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 19 Jan 2025

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Keywords

  • Cold War
  • Congo
  • East Pakistan
  • Kashmir
  • United Nations
  • conflict management
  • global governance

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