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Australia and the United Nations
Piccini, Jon Burke, Roland
Piccini, Jon
Burke, Roland
Author
Abstract
The story of Australia's engagement with the United Nations is often told via big personalities – H.V. Evatt as one of the organisation's ‘founding fathers’ – or key events, such as the signing of human rights treaties under the Whitlam government. Our chapter explores Australia's involvement from the perspective of lesser-known contributors: diplomats, development workers, women's activists and ordinary people. In so doing, we seek to understand how Australia has long influenced – or chosen to ignore – goings on at the United Nations. We assess the ways in which individual Australians have played significant roles in multilateral institutions, and the extent to which they exhibited any distinctively Australian disposition and orientation toward global governance, or indeed used the UN to offer critiques of Australian practice. Furthermore, we consider how these actors negotiated engagement in the face of increasingly prominent Australian violations, particularly in Indigenous policy and immigration. Moving from the macro to the micro, we thread these unacknowledged internationalists into the bigger story of treaties, conferences and speeches that have characterised Australia's often pained relationship with the international order.
Keywords
Australia, Area Studies, Humanities, Politics, International Relations, Social Sciences
Date
2022
Type
Book chapter
Journal
Book
Australia on the World Stage - History, Politics, and International Relations
Volume
Issue
Page Range
198-212
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
File Access
Controlled
Notes
© 2023 Roland Burke, Jon Piccini.