Conference: Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the End of Empire

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London;

The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Uppsala;

The United Nations Association of the UK, Westminster Branch London

will hold a one-day conference on

Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the End of Empire

at the University of London Senate House on Friday 2 September 2011,
to mark the 50th anniversary of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s death.
[Convenors: Dr Mandy Banton and Dr Susan Williams]

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Programme

From 9.30 Tea/Coffee and Registration

9.45 Welcome and introduction

Professor Philip Murphy, Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies,
Dr Henning Melber, Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation
David Wardrop, Chairman, United Nations Association, Westminster Branch

10.00 Session I: Global Power Shifts (Chair: Dr Sarah Stockwell, Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Commonwealth History, King's College London)

Professor David Anderson, Professor of African Politics and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, ‘The Cold War in Africa’
Professor Wm. Roger Louis, CBE, Kerr Professor of English History and Culture and Director of British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, ‘Hammarskjöld, the United Nations, and the Middle East’
Dr Benjamin Zachariah, Reader in South Asian History, University of Sheffield, ‘The place of the United Nations in Indian foreign policy thinking’

11.30 Coffee

11.40 Session II: End of European Empires (Chair: David Wardrop, Chairman, UNA Westminster Branch

Dr Jean-Pierre Bat, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Centre d’étude des mondes africains (CEMAf), ‘De Gaulle, Algeria and Françafrique’
Dr Asahiko Hanzawa, Faculty of International Studies, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, ‘An invisible surrender: the United Nations and the end of the British empire’
Ludo De Witte, Brussels, author of De Moord op Lumumba, 1999 [published in English as The Assassination of Lumumba, 2001], ‘Belgium, the Congo, and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba’

1.10 Sandwich lunch

2.00 Session III: Sources (Chair: Dr Marion Wallace, African Curator, British Library)

Dr Edward Hampshire, Principal Records Specialist, Diplomatic and Colonial, The National Archives of the UK, ‘The British official record’
Declan Power, security and defence journalist, Dublin, ‘The use of oral history to uncover the voices of Irish peacekeepers in the Congo’
Hans Kristian Simensen, Gothenburg, Secretary to the Scandinavian Committee of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, ‘Ndola, 18 September: from witness statements to the official reports; more questions’

3.30 Tea

3.45 Session IV: The Legacy of Dag Hammarskjöld (Chair: Professor Philip Murphy, Institute of Commonwealth Studies)

Professor Manuel Fröhlich, Professor of Political Science, Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena, ‘The Hammarskjöld Tradition and Global Leadership’
Baron [Douglas] Hurd of Westwell, CH, CBE, PC, diplomat, historian and former British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, ‘The legacy of Dag Hammarskjöld’
Dr Henning Melber, Executive Director, Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Uppsala, ‘Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and Africa’

5.15 Reception