A Quest to be Global: The League of Nations Health Organization and Inter-Colonial Regional Governing Agendas of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine 1910–25

The League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) (1921–46) was intended as a global organisation. This article examines the expansion of its operations into Asia in its initial period. The article draws attention to a regional governance attempt by the Far Eastern Association of Tropical Medicine (FEATM) (1910–38) in 1910–23 and examines the moment when the LNHO co-opted this attempt in its quest to become global, opening a space where the inter-colonialism of the FEATM became one significant layer of the internationalism of the LNHO. The article seeks to show the crucial role Japanese public-health experts played in this convergence and also suggests that region-specific issues, raised by experts in Asia, became constitutive elements in revising the International Sanitary Convention.     

The road to normalization: The importance of the United Arab Emirates' neoliberal foreign policy in the normalization with Israel: 2004–2020

The article discusses the question of why and how the normalization between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel took place and managed to evolve into a peace agreement. It offers an additional explanation to the neorealists' scholarly and commonly accepted argument: that it was only the behavior of the revisionist state of Iran that was the motive for signing the peace agreement between the two states. Furthermore, the article argues that the normalization of relations began in 2004 and could have materialized owing to the UAE's neoliberal foreign policy of focusing on soft power cooperation. It suggests the UAE's internal interests of status, stability, and empowerment, which were incorporated in the Vision 2021 plan, were translated into a foreign policy of international cooperation rather than one of military involvement and alliances. The UAE's long-term strategy reveals a dual neorealist and neoliberal foreign policy with a tendency toward the latter. The neoliberal foreign policy of soft power cooperation attracted the UAE to Israel and, through these shared interests, built trust and eventually led to normalization between the two states. The study covers three periods of the UAE's foreign policy strategy during the development of the normalization process. It begins with the tension between the neoliberal and neorealist strategies from 2004 to 2009, then looks at the increase in tensions between 2010 and 2018, and ends with the focus on the neoliberal foreign policy strategy in 2019–2020.     

Brokering a Buffer State: Afghan Neutrality and American Diplomacy, 1973–1979

This article argues that during the 1970s, the United States Department of State and other US officials sought to promote and maintain Afghan political neutrality as a means of Soviet containment in Central Asia. This piece follows the evolution of this diplomatic model through the 1970s, how it interacted with various Afghan regimes and ultimately became an impediment on the imagination of US officials in predicting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.     

Australia and the 1947 United Nations Consular Commission to Indonesia

ABSTRACT

The Netherlands’ colonial empire was a source of wealth, pride and prestige, being seen by some as an essential element of Dutch identity and the key to the Netherlands’ status as a European power. The most prized of the empire’s components was Indonesia. When nationalists declared the independence of the Republic of Indonesia on 17 August 1945, Dutch colonialists refused to take it seriously, but they soon discovered that the Indonesians were willing to fight for their newly-declared freedom. They also found that international opinion, especially as expressed in the new United Nations (UN), defended the Republic’s right to exist. Australia has been acknowledged as an important contributor to international recognition of Indonesian independence through its actions in the UN Security Council and its membership of the UN Committee of Good Offices (CGO). This article, however, focuses on a lesser-known part of the story: Australia’s role in the UN Consular Commission, established at the same time as the CGO. Although the Commission was active for only a short period in late 1947, it deserves recognition on a number of counts: for its pioneering work in UN peacekeeping; as an early example of Australian diplomacy in its region; and for how an examination of its activities, and the responses of the Dutch, the Indonesians and others, can be useful for understanding the course of the Indonesian independence struggle in the years that followed.     

Sex Trafficking to the Federated Malay States 1920–1940: From Migration for Prostitution to Victim or Criminal?

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the relationships between the colonial government in the Federated Malay States (FMS), international social movement organisations, the League of Nations and sex trafficking. While there is considerable scholarship on social movement organisations and the League of Nations, far less is known about the links between internationalism, colonialism and sex trafficking.

After the First World War, trafficking became the focus of social movement organisations and the League of Nations, but colonial regulation of prostitution and tolerated brothels complicated international responses to trafficking. Colonial administrators saw prostitution as an essential service, whereas feminist and international social movement organisations saw prostitution as an impetus for trafficking. This article engages with newspaper reports, colonial correspondence and Chinese petitions, archival material from social movement organisations, and reports by the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene, the League of Nations and the Chinese Secretariat to extend the literature on the historiography of trafficking and the British Empire.