Colonialism, Decolonisation and Women's Liberation: The Geopolitics of Britain's Engagement in the UN Women's Rights Agenda 1950 - 1995

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My PhD, completed in 2020, examined the role of Britian's colonial legacy within women's rights conventions and international development frameworks at the UN. The research took a longitudinal approach to studying Foreign Office correspondence on the UN Commission on the Status of Women and UN debate summary records between 1950 and 1975. It found that colonial interests played a hugely significant role in Britian's approach to women's rights conventions in the 1950s and early 1960s. As a colonial power, Britain sought to maintain its empire by undermining the development of UN women's rights conventions or to limit their applicability in order to avoid the need to apply women's rights provisions in its colonies. This approach mirrored Britain's attempts to add 'colonial application clauses' to other UN human rights conventions at this time. Britain's negative role in the development of UN women's rights conventions, linked to a broader colonial conservatism, became institutionalised within the British Foreign Office and, in the 1960s, morphed into Britain stymieing proposed mechanisms around international development frameworks at the UN on women's rights. These research findings are significant in demonstrating that understanding the role of colonialism - and its lasting legacies within the Foreign Office - is essential to understanding the nature and level of support Britain was willing to provide to the UN women's rights agenda between 1950 and 1975, and to ascertain its role as a global player in this regard. I would like to add to this research in the postdoctoral fellowship to compare this more recent engagement by Britain with the UN Commission on the Status of Women, by looking at Britain's engagement with all four UN World Conferences on women in the later era of decolonisation. As part of my PhD I finished with an examination of Britian's engagement around international development at the first UN World Conference on women in 1975, but would explore this in greater detail alongside the following three conferences through to 1995. Through these case studies I would ask how Britain's understanding of women in development changed over time and what value it give the UN spaces on women's rights within these later moments. Taken together, this research as a whole would provide a critical assessment of the nature of colonialism and decolonisation as geopolitical factors in Britain's engagement in the UN Women's Rights Agenda from 1950 - 1995. Further, it will show how such factors played out in shaping the very contours of women's rights agenda itself at UN level.