Revisiting the first United Nations peacekeeping intervention in Egypt and the Gaza Strip, 1956-1967: A Case of Imperial Multilateralism?

Linking social science research on United Nations peacekeeping with the historiography on inter-imperial and international security cooperation, this PhD dissertation aims to historicise the first UN intervention in extension of the imperial and inter-imperial security paradigms and specifically the British mandate of Palestine. Concretely, it connects a space-, network- and people-centred theoretical approach rooted in imperial frontier studies with a broad range of imperial and international historiography on the one hand and hitherto mostly unused UN records on the other. Firstly, the dissertation promotes an alternative reading of the history of the UN paradigm. Secondly, it finds that the UN intervention in many ways resembled the British Mandate regime and that its similar ways of engendering security for external projects also often translated into ‘local’ experiences of insecurity. Pulling the tread of the peacekeeping narrative, it suggests that the discipline of history offers timely theoretical and methodological tools for the interdisciplinary research on current interventions and state-building projects at a time the UN and other security organisations keep launching new projects in mostly former colonies with ever broader mandates.