Organizing Internationally: Georges Abi-Saab, the Congo Crisis and the Decolonization of the United Nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Why and how have ‘Third World’ international lawyers engaged with the law of international organizations? This article considers Georges Abi-Saab’s 1978 work The United Nations Operation in the Congo 1960–1964, an important but largely forgotten intervention in debates about the power and authority of the United Nations (UN) at the height of the post-World War II wave of decolonization. Fusing careful analysis of the legal rules and instruments that underwrote UN operations during the Congo crisis with a narrative reconstruction of the accompanying political and diplomatic negotiations, Abi-Saab’s book examines the organization’s involvement in the conflict following Congo’s formal independence from Belgium in June 1960, both during and after Dag Hammarskjöld’s tenure as UN Secretary-General. This article takes up Abi-Saab’s account of Hammarskjöld’s role in, and management of, the crisis. It demonstrates that Abi-Saab understood the Secretary-General’s office to be not only hedged in by significant ‘constitutional’ constraints on publicly justifiable action but also uniquely equipped to coordinate competing interests and facilitate collective action. It also demonstrates that this dual understanding of the Secretary-General – both ‘legalistic’ and overtly ‘political’ – informed Abi-Saab’s commitment to developing international law in and through international organizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".