Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
The chapter examines the establishment of the UN Secretariat and the administrative apparatus and norms of the UN. Trygve Lie chose to focus most of his attention and energy on the political role of the UN secretary-general and the questions of peace and security discussed by the Security Council. Yet to understand the process by which the UN Charter was transformed from paper to practice, the establishment of the UN Secretariat is also of crucial importance. The concept of an International Civil Service (ICS) was first developed at the founding of the League of Nations, before being adopted and adapted in the UN system. This was an area where Lie is frequently seen to have failed as he allowed the FBI onto UN premises to fingerprint and interview American staff members in response to the McCarthy process, seemingly in breach of the principle of the ICS’ independence. The chapter also discusses the process of establishing UN headquarters, where Lie played a central role in ensuring the UN settled permanently in New York.
The chapter examines secretary-general Trygve Lie’s most high-profile intervention for peace; a 1950 proposal for a peace plan to end the Cold War. The plan and its presentation was a key early example of the UN secretary-general’s role as an advocate or ‘norm entrepreneur’ for global issues. Lie employed all the tools at his disposal to promote his peace plan: public speeches, distributing a memorandum to the member states, and embarking on a widely publicized ‘peace tour’ to appeal directly to world leaders and public opinion to support his plan. Ultimately, Lie’s peace plan must be classified largely as a failure. Less than a month after Lie’s return to New York from his tour, the Korean War broke out, putting an end to Lie’s peace plan. Yet although the plan itself did not succeed in ending the Cold War, the episode further served to solidify the procedural norms underlying an expanded UN secretary-general role.
The chapter examines secretary-general Trygve Lie’s views of the Cold War and his attempts to use the UN as a forum to overcome tensions between the two sides. Lie sought to build bridges between East and West, and to ensure a central position for the UN in world affairs. During the Berlin Blockade of 1948–49, the secretary-general sought to use the UN to mediate between the Soviet Union and the US to avoid major conflict. At the outbreak of the Korean War Lie took the unprecedented step of speaking first at the Security Council meeting on 25 June 1950, urging the UN membership to come to the aid of South Korea. Although legal scholars agree this did not constitute invoking article 99, this should not detract from the fact that it represented another leap in the expansion of the UN secretary-general’s role.
The chapter examines the ‘first crisis’ the UN and its newly appointed secretary-general faced: the Iranian crisis of 1946. Frequently seen as the first crisis of the coming Cold War, the episode had lasting consequences for the role of the UN secretary-general. In April 1946 Trygve Lie decided to offer his opinion on the best way to proceed with the situation. Nothing in the existing rules explicitly permitted the UN secretary-general to take part in Security Council discussions, and the intervention therefore ‘fell like a bombshell’. Although the Security Council in this instance decided to disregard the secretary-general’s advice on the substantive matter of the Iranian crisis, the intervention led to a renegotiation of the Security Council’s rules of procedure to recognize the secretary-general’s right to participate in Council discussions. This represented the first expansion of the secretary-general’s role.
This book reviews the formative years of the United Nations (UN) under its first Secretary-General Trygve Lie.
This welcome appraisal shows how the foundations for an expanded secretary-general role were laid during this period, and that Lie’s contribution was greater than has later been acknowledged. The interplay of crisis decision-making, institutional constraints and the individuals involved thus built the foundations for the UN organization we know today.
Addressing important wider questions of IGO creation, governance and autonomy, this is an incisive account of how the UN moved from paper to practice under Lie.
The chapter examines the founding of the UN and earlier precedents for the office of UN secretary-general from the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization. The chapter establishes that although the text in the UN Charter is sparse, ambiguity and autonomy were incorporated in the text primarily through the inclusion of article 99. Furthermore, the drafting process as well as the election of the first secretary-general, revealed competing ideas about what the secretary-general should be, and some of these ideas pointed to a more political conception of the secretary-general’s role. The office was political by design, but it remained unclear precisely what such a political role would mean in practice. Thus the first holder of the office would have room for manoeuvre in exploring the role and seeking to push for a more expansive role conception.
Trygve Lie saw Palestine as the first major test for the UN organization, and this episode is the focus of the book’s third chapter. From the moment the UK asked the UN to help determine the future of the Palestine mandate, UN secretary-general Lie sought to guide the UN towards his preferred solution: the creation of an independent Jewish state, and avoidance of large-scale warfare. In the process, Lie further expanded the scope of the secretary-general’s role. Although UN member states did not necessarily follow the secretary-general’s advice, they accepted that he was allowed to give such advice, and that he had the right to push and prod behind the scenes to urge member states to act. Furthermore, Lie added a more public aspect to the secretary-general’s role during this period, as he used speeches and press conferences to seek the support of the public and to add pressure on state governments to act.
First, this chapter introduces the three case studies. They are the Lancaster House Treaties, which was established by France and Britain in 2010, the Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO), which was launched in 2009 by the Nordic countries, and the Central European Defence Cooperation (CEDC), which was created by six Central European countries in 2011. Second, the chapter explains the research on which the theoretical framework of this book was developed. In this regard, three rival explanations were tested using the method of pattern-matching, which means that the author generated predicted patterns regarding the studied phenomena and compared them to empirically based patterns.
