International governance is contested. Whether in the form of direct interventions, externally supported peacebuilding, or international administrations, these modes of governance within international organizations are shaped and overlaid by the ideas and practices of international politics as exercised by powerful states. Great powers’ attempts at worldmaking, emerging in competition, but also cooperation with their adversaries within international institutions, play a formative role in shaping international governance. Turning toward the predecessor of international peacebuilding and neo-trusteeship from the 1990s onwards, the United Nations Trusteeship System, this article asks how the dispute between Western powers and their main rival at the United Nations, the Soviet Union, shaped the process of decolonization and international governance via trusteeship—the earliest form of multilateral governance after World War II. The Trusteeship System as a communicative arena was a formative site of hegemonic worldmaking, where rival powers co-produced concepts and understandings of international governance that continue to shape post-colonial and post-conflict governance today. Drawing on a new, comprehensive dataset of Trusteeship Council session protocols (1947–1965), we analyze the discourse on decolonization and visions of international order through a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative frequency analysis and qualitative coding. Western and Soviet delegations sought to legitimize their competing understandings of governance before global and national audiences, revealing patterns of confrontation and limited cooperation, as newly independent and non-Trustee states entered the debates. These interdependent visions of trusteeship—including the two key focal areas of economic and institutional development of Trust Territories—shaped templates for later international governance and peacebuilding practices.
Lottholz et al. (Fri,) studied this question.