History Colloquium by Dr Alanna O’Malley, on 3 May

This presentation will deal with the main ideas of the recently published book: ‘The Diplomacy of Decolonisation, America, Britain and the United Nations during the Congo crisis 1960-1964.’ This book reinterprets the role of the UN during the Congo crisis from 1960 to 1964, presenting a multidimensional view of the organisation.

Speaker: Dr Alanna O’Malley, University of Leiden

When: Thursday 3 May, 18.00 – 20.00
Where: Spiegelzaal, GG80-82

Through an examination of the Anglo-American relationship, Alanna O’Malley’s work reveals how the UN helped position this event as a lightning rod in debates about how decolonisation interacted with the Cold War. By examining the ways in which the various dimensions of the UN came into play in Anglo-American considerations of how to handle the Congo crisis, the book reveals how the Congo debate reverberated in wider ideological struggles about how decolonisation evolved and what the role of the UN would be in managing this process. The UN became a central battle ground for ideas and visions of world order; as the newly-independent African and Asian states sought to redress the inequalities created by colonialism, the US and UK sought to maintain the status quo, while the Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld tried to reconcile these two contrasting views.

Dr. Alanna O’Malley is Lecturer in History at the University of Leiden. She is interested in the history of the United Nations, decolonization in Africa, Congo, the Cold War and internationalism. She has a B.A in English and History (2006) and an M.A. in the History of International Relations (2007) from University College Dublin. She completed her PhD at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence from 2007-2012. Between August 2017-February 2018 she was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the History Department of George Washington University in Washington D.C. She has previously been a Visiting Scholar at New York University in 2009, and in 2017 she was a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Fellow at the Laureate Research Programme in International History at the University of Sydney. In 2015 she won a research grant for her new project on ‘The United Nations and the Rise of the Global South, 1955-1981’ from the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

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