What can historic UN deliberations teach us about the roots of today’s global conflicts and inequalities? In this blog, Philipp Lottholz shares a new text analysis dataset that traces Cold War contestations over colonialism, development, and independence in the UN Trusteeship Council, offering fresh insights into the making of global order.
Understanding today’s rapidly shifting world marked by ever-escalating war, violence and genocide requires us to have a deep grasp of the histories, cultures and societies that shape geopolitical actors. Historical approaches by scholars in International Relations (IR) can offer important contributions and insights on today’s political events. However, in-depth historical research still faces challenges. One of the biggest barriers is mustering the resources and time needed to access archives, and process immense volumes of material in comprehensive and rigorous ways.
What Does the Dataset Reveal?
Established in 1947, the Trusteeship Council was a key UN body that managed the transition of territories from colonial rule to self-governance. The Trusteeship Council was suspended in 1994, but its discussions still offer a window into the geopolitical debates of the post–World War II era.
Our new data set “Contesting UN Trusteeship”, sheds light on the processes of contestation negotiation and compromise between the major powers within the Trusteeship Council. These include the Western Allied Powers (the United States, United Kingdom and France) alongside Australia, Belgium, Italy and New Zealand. These countries frequently clashed with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union) which, as a newly emerging geopolitical contender, had played a central role in shaping the founding process and architecture of the UN.
The Trusteeship Council was responsible for administering eleven so-called “Trust Territories”. These were the former colonies of Germany, Italy and Japan including smaller archipelagos like Nauru and the Pacific Islands and contained largely African entities preceding today’s Cameroon or Tanzania (a full list is included at the end of the article).
This data covers a wide range of territories, many of which have since become independent and economically and geopolitically significant. Many of the countries built from these territories have also experienced large scale conflict, political tension, economic weakness and dependency rooted in their histories of trusteeship and external governance.
Power Struggles and Governance in the Trusteeship Council
The debates reveal the power struggles underlying the UN’s early governance structures. These discussions can help us trace the emergence of a shared language and uncover a set of understandings between the two dominant geopolitical blocs in the Cold War, particularly around the questions of international administration and governance arrangements. While much research on the Cold War period has examined the UN General Assembly with its spectacular high stakes-controversies and confrontations between the US and the Soviet Union, this new dataset shifts attention to a less examined UN body.
Unlike the General Assembly, the Trusteeship Council operated beyond this façade of Cold War tensions and confrontation. It was still accountable to the General Assembly, and although less visible it still registered interest from public or international press and representatives of UN delegations. This publicity gave the Trusteeship Council sufficient importance and exposure for all involved countries to invest efforts to argue and defend their positions and wider geopolitical interests.
We explore the main insights that emerged from analysing these debates—especially how countries communicated threats, managed disagreements, and navigated conflict inside the Trusteeship Council.
These patterns shed new light on some of the biggest issues debated at the time, from the legacies of colonialism to the push for independence and competing ideas about development in territories across the Global South.
Building the dataset
The dataset was developed using an iterative quantitative and qualitative content analysis supported by the text analysis software MaxQDA. Together with three student assistants, Emma Fahr, Karoline Möller and Grigori Lifchits, we worked through multiple rounds of coding with feedback loops and adjustments in the coding tree. The work was completed in three overarching steps.
In the first step, the team defined codes inspired by existing literature on conflict and threat communication in international politics. This drew on securitisation theory from the ‘Copenhagen School’ approach, which we have developed further.
Based on speech act theory developed by the philosopher, John Langshaw Austin, securitisation analyses focuses on how powerful actors such as governments identify a particular phenomenon as an existential threat and legitimise the use of extraordinary measures to combat it. The team focused on looking for terms like ‘threat’, ‘threaten’, and more intuitive ones like ‘aggress/ion’ and ‘attack’ to examine discussions of conflict as markers of escalating violence or conflict in the Trusteeship Council debates.
These terms formed the basis of the first coding cluster of “Security and Securitisation”. A “coding cluster” is a set of speech acts that are alike in some way. By examining real conversations you can group together speech acts that work similarly.
Tracing Cooperation and Conflict
In a second step, we looked at direct or obvious references to both cooperation and conflict in discussions between the two major geopolitical blocs and their UN delegations. These were assembled in a second cluster of code segments that we termed “Cooperation and Conflict”. These findings confirmed a central assumption that, despite the broader Cold War rivalry, within the Trusteeship Council, there were also instances of dialogue and cooperation between the Soviet Union and Western powers.
This combined approach allowed us to map not only moments of high tension but also the quieter forms of interaction that shaped how international governance was discussed and practiced during this formative period.
We then shifted focus from how conflict and threats were communicated to what the debates were actually about and what topics and issues were discussed.
To do this, my colleagues read through the coded segments from the first stage and mapped out the main topics and agenda items in the discussions that took place within sessions across the analysis period from 1947 to 1965.
The clusters of words were analysed with a simple word search function which generated a high number of coded segments. As a result of the analysis, four thematic clusters were defined:
- Coloniality
- Self-Determination
- Development
- Independence
A helpful tool for unpacking the search results within the clusters was the creation of word clouds. The MaxQDA software allowed us to visualise the most frequently used terms in any set of search results or documents.
The most important terms identified through this process were then traced back across the session protocols. This helped reconstruct the discussions in which these ideas appeared and shed light on the arguments and narratives surrounding them.
Soviet Challenges to Western Colonial Authority in the Trusteeship Council
The first cluster of words around “Coloniality”, captured the Soviet delegations’ attempts to call out Western colonialism and the controversies that followed.
The Soviet Union was particularly interested in Administering Authorities (AA). These were administrative bodies set up by the Western allies within Trust Territories to govern their affairs. The AAs’ main mission was to prepare Trust Territories for independence in all relevant areas of society, especially in political affairs, economic and wider societal development. The discussions of AAs’ annual reports were the main place where the Soviet delegation would levy criticism at these bodies, at the governments behind them and at the Trusteeship System as a whole.
These criticisms, increasingly shared by a number of other countries, were promptly answered and rebutted during the Sessions. Delegates from the Administering Authorities would dismiss most Soviet charges as incorrect or completely baseless. They would then also accuse the Soviet Union of engaging in various forms of destructive and insulting conduct. This commentary we included in a separate cluster of words as “Criticism”, as we wanted to trace these forms of communication in more detail. Western delegations would also highlight what they viewed as the Soviet Union’s own pursuit of colonial and imperial interests in its own territory and wider zone of influence in Eastern Europe and beyond.
Soviet efforts to criticise the Western Allies were often marked by ambivalence given the Soviet Union’s own imperial interests and its own racialised narratives of presumed superiority and condescension toward Third World nations.
However, this does not diminish the fact that issues such as racial discrimination and the exclusion of Trust Territories’ indigenous populations were raised by the Soviet Union delegation. That these concerns were voiced and directed at the authorities responsible remains an important feature of the Soviet contribution to the Trusteeship Council debates.
In this sense, the Trusteeship Council can be seen as an important diplomatic arena which inevitably contributed to the process that led to the 1961 UN resolution 1514 known as the “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”. Initially proposed by the Soviet Union and eventually accepted in a version proposed by a United States initiative, this resolution is widely seen as a watershed moment within the global process of decolonisation in the twentieth century.
Development and the Politics of Progress
The second, and closely related, thematic cluster is that of “Development”. This area brings together discussions among Trusteeship Council members about economic development and on specific aspects of the Trust Territories’ different economic sectors. These covered a broad range of activities including fisheries, agriculture and food production, to mineral extraction, and the processing and exportation of other raw materials.
Interestingly, development was the topic where there was most agreement between the Soviet and Western delegations. Critiques from the Soviet and other delegations on the slow or lack of development in Trust Territories were generally received constructively. For example, New Zealand’s Special Representative Nucker (full name not provided in historical documents) pledged that his Administering Authorities were ‘earnestly endeavouring to build up the economy’ of the Pacific Islands (Trusteeship Council 1960, 26th Session, p. 115). The US delegate equally assured that his ‘Government took its responsibility towards the [Pacific Islands] Territory most seriously and considered suggestions and criticisms directed to it equally seriously’ (Trusteeship Council 1964, 31st Session, p. 75).
Even if some of these statements were momentary and performative, these points of agreements reflected a broader shared belief across both blocs: that modern, and especially industrial, development was an important precondition for political independence.
Development framed through an extractive logic was seen as a necessary step for countries to gain sustainable and genuine independence. However, it was often only partly achieved and frequently constrained. Western corporations, trade networks, and ongoing political interference often maintained economic dominance and limited the autonomy of trust territories. This was particularly apparent in the West African states of Cameroon and Togoland who were integrated into the French economic cooperation zone, or in the continued influence of mineral extractive companies from East Africa to Pacific Islands like Nauru.These tensions made development one of the most contentious issues debated within the Trusteeship Council.
Debating Independence and Self-Determination
The final two clusters of “Independence” and “Self-Determination” capture the very heart of the Trusteeship Council’s work. Similar to the discussions around “Development”, the Soviet Union and Western powers were broadly in agreement that the Trust Territories should be independent. But they disagreed often over the ‘when?’ and ‘how?’ of independence.
“Self-Determination” was the largest cluster, with 6,076 segments or word references related to the term. Western powers insisted that ‘self-determination should precede full self-government or independence and the people should freely be given the opportunity to choose or to reject self-government or independence’ (Trusteeship Council 1956, 17th Session, p. 120). The Soviet Union and many Third World countries opposed this and demanded for clear timelines for Trust Territories’ attainment of independence. They argued that ‘there could be no really good government without self-government’ and that ‘the only yardstick’ to measure or judge Administering Authorities was how quickly and what actions they took ‘advance the people along the road to complete independence’ (Trusteeship Council 1954b, 14th Session, p. 51).
The disagreements on timelines often took a harsh tone, leading to heated exchanges and sometimes absurd rhetorical turns. Nevertheless, despite the tensions, there were moments of convergence between the two blocs. For example, Soviet delegates agreed with Western assessments that the tribal ruling system in Somaliland ‘is incompatible with the progressive political development of the inhabitants […] towards self-government and independence’ (Trusteeship Council 1954a, 13th Session, p. 71).
A historicised understanding of international administrations
These insights show the enormous potential and value of looking back and examining the Trusteeship Council debates more closely to better understand the evolution of international order. They open up a valuable window onto how ideas about global governance, development, sovereignty, self-determination, and the management of difference, were negotiated long before they became central to international administrations. In many ways, different issue-based principles that shaped Trusteeship governance appear to have laid groundwork for later forms of international administrations.
Understanding these early debates helps us see the roots of later UN missions in Namibia (1989-90) and the UN Administrations in Timor-Leste (1999-2002) and in Kosovo (1999-present) where similar questions around economic models, political participation, and the limits of external authority reappeared. At the same time, these cases reveal the need to rethink standard approaches, particularly the prevalence of free market policies and or the reliance on ethnicity-based models of democratic participation. This historical perspective encourages us to think more critically about what “support,” “transition,” and “self-government” really mean in practice, and how they might be imagined differently.
As this project develops, the team would welcome comments and suggestions on the initiative and on how best to situate UN Trusteeship governance within broader debates and questions around global order in the past and in present-day settings.
More detailed insights on the data set, such as exported Code Segments, can be obtained upon request from Philipp Lottholz at lottholz@staff.uni-marburg.de. This analysis is part of the Subproject B05 “Securitization and Desecuritization in International Trusteeship Administrations” of the Collaborative Research Centre “Dynamics of Security”, funded by the German Research Council (DFG). Special thanks go to Aidan Gnoth for untiring support in building the dataset and to Grigori Lifchits for assisting with the text publication.
About Philipp Lottholz
Philipp Lottholz is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio “Dynamics of Security” and the Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps-University of Marburg. His research interests lie at the intersection of peace, conflict and security studies and include histories of the Cold War, colonialism, decolonization and of liberal thought. His monograph Post-Liberal Statebuilding in Central Asia was published by Bristol University Press. Philipp is a Books Review Editor for Central Asian Survey.
