Women and the UN: A New History of Women's International Human Rights

This book provides a critical history of influential women in the United Nations and seeks to inspire empowerment with role models from bygone eras.

The women whose voices this book presents helped shape UN conventions, declarations, and policies with relevance to the international human rights of women throughout the world today. From the founding of the UN up until the Latin American feminist movements that pushed for gender equality in the UN Charter, and the Security Council Resolutions on the role of women in peace and conflict, the volume reflects on how women delegates from different parts of the world have negotiated and disagreed on human rights issues related to gender within the UN throughout time. In doing so it sheds new light on how these hidden historical narratives enrich theoretical studies in international relations and global agency today. In view of contemporary feminist and postmodern critiques of the origin of human rights, uncovering women's history of the United Nations from both Southern and Western perspectives allows us to consider questions of feminism and agency in international relations afresh.

With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners of law, diplomacy, history, and development studies, and brought together by a theoretical commentary by the Editors, Women and the UN will appeal to anyone whose research covers human rights, gender equality, international development, or the history of civil society.

The Open Access version of this book, available at

http: //www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003036708, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Rebecca Adami is Associate Professor at the Department of Education, Stockholm University and Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies). She specializes in critical human rights theory through counternarratives, and studies on intersectionality, cosmopolitanism and childism. Author of the book Women and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2018 a UN photo exhibit "Women Who Shaped the Universal Declaration" based on the book was exhibited at the United Nations in New York by Secretary General Ant?nio Guterres and first Latin American female President of the General Assembly Mar?a Fernanda Espinosa Garc?s, now available online.

Dan Plesch is Professor of Diplomacy and Strategy at SOAS University of London. His books include, The Beauty Queen's Guide to World Peace, Human Rights After Hitler and America, Hitler and the UN. His research focuses on strategies for preventing global war and emphasises a restorative archeology of knowledge of the effective peacemaking work in the 1940s.