Introduction

Gram-Skjoldager, Karen; Ikonomou, Haakon A.; Kahlert, and Torsten

doi:10.5040/9781350136687.ch-001

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The administrative size and scope of the United Nations (UN) system is often overlooked in both public administration and UN scholarship (Elmandjra, 1973). While this system has long been seen as originating in post-Second World War multilateralism, an increasing body of literature traces the roots of the UN civil service back to the League of Nations (Gram-Skjoldager et al, 2020), the first ‘great experiment in international administration’ (Ranshofen-Wertheimer, 1945), or even earlier (Reinalda, 2020). Today, the administrations of the UN system range from agency headquarters (HQs) in New York, Nairobi, Geneva or Vienna, to peacekeeping, humanitarian or development operations all across the globe, with total expenses reaching USD56 billion in 2019.…”

Section: The United Nations As a System Of International Bureaucraciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

Thorvaldsdottir

Patz

Eckhard

2021

International Review of Administrative Sciences

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Built on the administrative system of the League of Nations, since the Second World War, the United Nations has grown into a sizeable, complex and multilevel system of several dozen international bureaucracies. Outside of a brief period in the 1980s, and despite growing scholarship on international public administrations over the past two decades, there have been few publications in the International Review of Administrative Sciences on the evolution of the United Nations system and its many public administrations. The special issue ‘International Bureaucracy and the United Nations System’ aims to encourage renewed scholarly focus on this global level of public administration. This introduction makes the case for why studying the United Nations’ bureaucracies matters from a public administration perspective, takes stock of key literature and discusses how the seven articles contribute to key substantive and methodological advancements in studying the administrations of the United Nations system.

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Section: The United Nations As a System Of International Bureaucraciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

Thorvaldsdottir

Patz

Eckhard

2021

International Review of Administrative Sciences

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“…Instead, we find a predominance of Scandinavian officialsthree Norwegian and three Danish -of which three served as Director, covering 14 of the League's 26 years of existence. A first study of why this was the case 82 shows that the Secretariat deemed Danes and Norwegians as particularly suited to deal with the new and politically contested regimes of sovereignty and rights. 83 These included Mandates and Minorities where Great Powers and Continental Powers had vested and conflicting interests.…”

Section: The Secretariat As a Weak Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Sense of the League of Nations Secretariat – Historiographical and Conceptual Reflections on Early International Public Administration

Gram-Skjoldager

Ikonomou

2019

European History Quarterly

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This article reintroduces the League of Nations Secretariat as a fundamentally significant object of historical study. By drawing on key insights from three generations of historiography on the Secretariat, the authors explore how historians can use a Bourdieusian conceptual framework to study this first major international administrative body. Each generation of literature has emphasized one of three professional archetypes – the bureaucrat, the diplomat and the technocrat. Moving beyond these archetypes, and applying Antoine Vauchez's concept of ‘weak fields’ and the notions of import, brokering capacity and hybridity, we see how the professional templates that were being imported into the Secretariat were culturally specific (mainly to Britain and Northern Europe) and how they were merged and reinvented to secure the smooth running of a multilateral, multinational and multivalent organization given charge of a series of new functions, thus producing new, specific forms of expertise exclusive to the Secretariat. Accordingly, we capture both the complexities of what kind of professional cultures came to dominate the Secretariat and the novelty of some of the types of expertise it rested upon: an important step towards a deeper understanding of the characteristics and role of international public administration in international politics in the twentieth century.

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Introduction

Cited by 2 publications

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International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

Making Sense of the League of Nations Secretariat – Historiographical and Conceptual Reflections on Early International Public Administration

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