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Series Editors’ Foreword It is surprising that there is no comprehensive history of the United Nations family of organizations. True, a few of the UN funds and specialized agencies have or are in the process of writing their institutional histories. But this is a mostly recent endeavor and, indeed, it is no more than should be expected of all public organizations, especially internationally accountable ones, along with enhanced efforts to organize their archives so that independent researchers can also document and analyze dispassionately their efforts and achievements. All this is an essential part of the record of international governance. Faced with this major omission—which has substantial implications for the academic and policy literatures—we decided to undertake the task of beginning to write an intellectual history; that is, a history of the ideas launched or nurtured by the United Nations.Observers should not be put off by what may strike them as puffed-up billing.The working assumption behind this effort is straightforward : ideas and concepts are a main driving force in human progress, and they arguably have been one of the most important contributions of the world organization. The United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP) was launched in 1999 as an independent research effort based in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, with a liaison office in Geneva.We are grateful for the enthusiastic backing from the Secretary-General and other staff, as well as from scholars and analysts and governments. We are also extremely appreciative for the generosity of the governments of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, Norway , Switzerland,and the Republic and Canton of Geneva, as well as of the Ford, Rockefeller,and MacArthur Foundations,the Carnegie Corporation of NewYork, and the Dag Hammarskjöld and UN Foundations. This support ensures total intellectual and financial independence. Details of this and other aspects of the project can be found on our Web site: www.unhistory.org. xiii Series Editors’ Foreword xiv The work of the UN can be divided into two broad categories: economic and social development, on the one hand, and peace and security, on the other. The UNIHP is committed to produce fourteen volumes on major themes in the first arena and a further three volumes if sufficient resources can be mobilized focused on the latter. All these volumes are being published in a series by Indiana University Press. In addition, the Project has completed an oral history collection of some seventy-three lengthy interviews of persons who have played major roles in launching and nurturing UN ideas—and sometimes in hindering them! Extracts from these interviews was published in 2005 as UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice.1 Authors of the Project’s various volumes, including this one,have drawn on these interviews to highlight substantive points made in their texts.Full transcripts of the oral histories will also be disseminated in electronic form at the end of the Project to facilitate work by other researchers and interested persons worldwide. There is no single way to organize research, and certainly not for such an ambitious project as this one. This UN history has been structured by topics— ranging from trade and finance to human rights, from transnational corporations to development assistance, from regional perspectives to sustainability.We have selected world-class experts for each topic, and the argument in all of the volumes is the responsibility of the authors whose names appear on the cover. Each have been given freedom and responsibility to organize their own digging, analysis, and presentation. Guidance from ourselves as the project directors as well as from peer review groups is provided to ensure accuracy and fairness in depicting where the ideas came from, how they were developed and disseminated within the UN system, and what happened afterward.We trust that future analyses will build upon our series and go beyond.Our intellectual history project is the first, not the last, installment in depicting the history of the UN’s contributions to ideas. Women, Development, and the UN is the seventh volume in the series—and in some respects the most broad-ranging. This is because Devaki Jain, with strong encouragement from us as editors of the UNIHP series, goes far beyond narrow boundaries in exploring the topic of women and gender.As the title makes clear, she traces through the many different ways in which women have enriched the UN: by the...

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