Whilst diplomatic negotiations in the New York Headquarters between member-state representatives and UN leadership have often dominated the limelight in diplomatic histories of decolonisation, host territories were also equally important – if not, more – sites for discussions on post-independence self-determination. This article recentres Global South populations and host territories in the history of the UN and decolonisation by drawing attention to three anti-UN protests across the formative peacekeeper missions as critical sites of peacekeeper/civilian interaction. Focusing on protests organised or heavily participated in by women activists and demonstrators in Palestine, Congo, and Cyprus, this article explores how, rather than formal spaces of political representation, these physical methods of dissent provided rare opportunities for women and other marginalised civilians to communicate their discontent with the UN mission and its plans for their territory. Connecting explicitly with past and parallel peacekeeping missions, some demonstrators used chants and signs contextualise their demands within longer narratives of anticolonial dissent not only within their nation, but across the decolonising Global South. Decolonisation was a global struggle, and in spite of the UN’s efforts to silo these missions into discrete operations, host communities fought to make inter-mission patterns known to the world. Using UN official archival sources in combination with contemporary photographs and interviews with protesters, this article considers two key research questions: first, what do protests/demonstrations reveal about the host population’s – especially civilian women – perceptions of the UN mission and its intervention in their territory and other UN missions, and; secondly, what did the UN response – internal and external – to these protests reveal about how the mission staff perceived the population, their right to self-determination and democratic engagement, and the function of the peacekeeping project more broadly.

As the number of man-made satellites in space grew during the period from the late 1950s to the 1990s, so did the number of independent states on the African continent. Building on recent histories that alert us to the dynamics of colonialism and decolonisation in the history of space technologies (Sarah Nelson, Asif Siddiqi, Jennifer Barton), this paper will examine pan-African initiatives in fields of satellite application. Organisations like the Pan African Telecommunications Union, the African Remote Sensing Council, and the Pan African Development Information System were created during these decades with an internationalist agenda, ‘launching Africa into the space age’, in the words of Luc-Adolphe Tiao, then budding science journalist and future president of Burkina Faso.

Studies of technical and scientific cooperation across national borders have frequently revised common assumptions about how internationalism works – most obviously between Cold War East and West. Following this lead, I would like to use the cases mentioned above to think about how pan-African technical internationalists sought to gain leverage in the global order through top-down, state-level organisations. Like contemporaneous UN organisations, much scholarship since has framed the African continent as recipient of technology and of scientific expertise, but pan-African cooperation in satellite applications – an archetypically ‘high-tech’ field – suggest other dynamics at play, from competitive internationalism to techno-utopian internationalism, helping us to see how African states co-produced the space age.

Aid for refugee students was an early area of concern for international student organisations and other protagonists of student internationalism, as reflected in various humanitarian endeavours during the interwar period. This paper highlights a particular development, namely the way in which the figure of the ‘refugee student’ was increasingly construed in global terms from the 1960s onwards. Whereas earlier relief efforts had focused on displaced students from specific European countries – for instance Germany after the National Socialists’ rise to power in 1933 and Hungary after the crushing of the 1956 uprising – by the early 1960s, African students became the focus of manifold efforts by various student organisations, for instance by the newly established International University Exchange Fund (IUEF). The paper uses the records of international student organisations and national refugee aid organisations, showing how support for refugee students allows us to trace activist engagement with the making of a post-colonial world but also evolving conceptions of political asylum.

In 1972, Idi Amin expelled all of Uganda’s ethnically South Asia population, who were then resettled across the globe. While the largest numbers went to the UK, India and Canada, countries like Sweden and Australia opened their doors to smaller numbers. Deciding how and where the Ugandan Asians would be permitted to flee to, and where they may rebuild lives after Uganda, however, was not a matter of sovereign compassion or international instruments and agencies kicking in. Rather than top-down diplomatic agreements and straightforward sovereign interpretations of migration and citizenship law, the Ugandan Asians’ predicament reveals multiple other forms of internationalism and international actors. While familiar actors like the state and agencies like the UNHCR, and the category of the ‘refugee’ are part of this story, so too is the individual agency of expellees challenging forced solutions, whether in defence of their right to family or to contest an inequity in the application of the very idea of the ‘refugee’. This paper will thus use the case to introduce some ways to think of international actors as decolonisation forced a global reckoning with diasporas that did not easily meet the criteria of belonging in the nation-state-based international order.