- In what ways did the United Nations end up rebuilding what the League of Nations failed to achieve?
United Nations
The international organization founded after World War II.
- What habits of multilateral deliberation did the League of Nations pass on to its successor organization?
- Why did the 1921 committee choose to split the Peace Prize between a politician and a scholar?
- What post-war institutions eventually drew on Angell's idea that interdependence deters conflict?
- How did Cecil's League of Nations thinking carry over into the United Nations' design?
- What role did Cordell Hull play in the planning that led to the founding of the United Nations?
- Why did Hull believe that lowering trade barriers was a moral policy, not just an economic one?
- How long did Hull serve as Secretary of State, and why is that tenure notable?
- What kind of cross-border work did John Mott do through the YMCA and World Student Christian Federation?
- How did Ralph Bunche negotiate the 1949 Arab-Israeli armistice agreements on Rhodes?
- What happened to Bunche's predecessor as UN mediator, and how did that shape his role?
- What irony did Bunche face as the first person of African descent to win the Peace Prize?
- Why did Bunche turn down the offer to become Under Secretary of State?
- What was Léon Jouhaux's central argument connecting labor rights to international peace?
- What lasting protections did the International Labour Organization establish for workers?
- How did Lester Pearson's United Nations Emergency Force let combatants withdraw without losing face?
- In what ways did the UNEF model become a template for later peacekeeping missions?
- What other major political achievement did Pearson pursue after winning the Peace Prize?
- How did Dag Hammarskjöld expand the operational role of the United Nations Secretary-General beyond what member states originally intended?
- What was Hammarskjöld trying to negotiate in Northern Rhodesia when his plane crashed near Ndola in September 1961?
- Why do the circumstances of the Ndola crash remain disputed despite multiple investigations?
- Why was Hammarskjöld's award only the second posthumous Nobel Peace Prize in the prize's history?
- Why was the International Labour Organization founded as part of a peace settlement?
- What kinds of international labour standards did the ILO establish in its first fifty years?
- Why did the Nobel Committee choose the ILO's fiftieth anniversary to award the Peace Prize?
- What is the structural paradox at the heart of UN peacekeeping's mandate to be neutral, invited, and lightly armed?
- When did the UN deploy its first armed peacekeeping force, and what conflict prompted it?
- Which peacekeeping missions was the UN running simultaneously by 1988?
- What is the Responsibility to Protect doctrine that Kofi Annan championed as UN Secretary-General?
- Why were the Millennium Development Goals designed around measurable targets rather than aspirational language?
- Why did the 2001 Peace Prize go jointly to Kofi Annan and the United Nations as an institution?
- Why was the European Union awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012?
- Why did the timing of the award, during the sovereign-debt crisis, strike many as ironic?
- What did the European Union do with its prize money?
- Why was the World Food Programme originally created as a temporary three-year experiment?