Translation at a distance: United Nations visiting missions and the making of international decolonization

1 Introduction

Even before its official founding, the United Nations was viewed as a means of ushering in the global end of colonial rule. Although not a top priority, the policy of international decolonization was part of both the preparatory conferences in Yalta and the founding conference in San Francisco in 1945. An important outcome of these conferences was the establishment of the Trusteeship System, which placed former League of Nations mandates under international supervision. At that time, however, the influence of the colonial powers remained significant. With Resolution 1514 in 1960, the United Nations then indisputably established itself as a central actor in decolonization efforts (United Nations, 1960). The growing number of former colonies, the resulting shift in the balance of power within the General Assembly, and the realization that unresolved colonial conflicts, such as the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) or the Congo Crisis (1960–1965), posed a direct threat to international peace and security, heralded a new phase of international decolonization, which ultimately contributed to the vast majority of former colonies gaining independence by the mid-1970s.

While early research largely overlooked the UN’s role in decolonization (Jensen and Fisher, 1990; Sankey, 1990; Luard, 1982, 1989), more recent studies have increasingly addressed the role of international organizations in this process (O’Sullivan, 2005; Kennedy, 2006; Mazower, 2009, 2012; Muschik, 2018, 2022a, 2022b; Raustiala, 2023). This article focuses, however, on the early days of international decolonization and examines how the young and initially rather insignificant organization managed to extend its influence beyond the diplomatic forums in New York into the territories whose administration it was tasked with overseeing. Focusing on the Trusteeship System, I argue that the UN’s mandate authorized the organization to act, but did not by itself make its authority operative in the territories. Rather, this authority had to be made credible and effective in continuous interaction with a wide range of actors, above all in the territories themselves. This production of authority was driven by a particular ambition that can be understood as the UN’s epistemic mandate, namely to evaluate progress in the territories not on the basis of reports submitted by administering powers, but on facts gathered by the UN itself.

This article traces how such facts came into being, and how they travelled from the periphery of the territories to the center where decisions were made, the Trusteeship Council at UN headquarters in New York. Drawing on actor-network theory, I show that this movement rested on two intertwined achievements. First, the UN had to align the interests of a heterogeneous set of actors, drawing administering powers, local authorities, and populations alike into supplying the very data on which its authority would come to rest. Second, this alignment of interests could not remain abstract, but required actors, and the objects that accompanied them, to be physically brought together and moved across considerable distances, an effort of assembling and mobilizing bodies in space that has received little attention in accounts of international decolonization, but that this article treats as central to how the UN generated knowledge through its missions. Taken together, these two achievements allowed the UN to position itself as an “obligatory passage point” (Callon, 1986), a position through which the diverse interests of the actors involved were channeled, and through which the UN acquired a new and distinct form of authority.

This argument is developed, in part, through the example of the very first visiting mission, sent to Western Samoa in 1947. This case is particularly instructive because it unsettles the assumption that authority simply flows from a pre-existing mandate. The mission that first brought the United Nations into a trust territory did not originate in an initiative of New York’s own, but in a petition submitted by Samoans themselves. Such an origin suggests that the concrete interactions between the UN and the territories deserve closer attention, since these interactions did not merely implement a policy of decolonization that was already settled, but reshaped that policy in the process. Having drawn out this point through the Samoan case, the article then moves beyond this single example toward a more general analysis of the visiting missions, adopting the translation-theoretical perspective of actor-network theory, to trace how the UN’s authority was produced across the broader practice of these missions.

This shift in focus also means moving beyond the frequently studied role of the UN as a diplomatic arena for decolonization and accountability (Terretta, 2012; Banivanua Mar, 2016; Pearson, 2017, 2020; Heiss, 2020) and turning instead to its concrete interactions with actors on the ground. The article draws primarily on research conducted at the UN Archives in New York, as well as on official documents of the UN Trusteeship System in particular on the visiting missions. These missions, whose institutional origins and workings I trace in what follows, were from the outset the central instrument through which this epistemic mandate, and the new form of authority it promised, was to be pursued.

In what follows, I first outline actor-network theory as a methodological framework before moving on to the historical analysis. The visiting missions, which I analyze below, played a central role in implementing the trusteeship between UN headquarters in New York and the territories. This implementation was a reciprocal process, as the insights gained on the ground reshaped the mandate the missions were supposed to carry out, since this mandate was not to be understood as fixed but rather as evolving through the network it set in motion. Drawing on Latour’s methodological principle of “following the actors” (Latour, 2005), I trace the physical journeys of these missions and how they were mobilized to produce data about the territories, showing how this making of facts generated the very authority this article sets out to explain.

2 The United Nations and decolonization: a networked perspective

In recent years, research has increasingly focused on the role of the United Nations in the decline of empires, not least on its Trusteeship System (Bonacker et al., 2018; Ketzmerick, 2019; Morgan, 2020; Lüdert et al., 2023; Muschik, 2022a; Distler and Heise, 2022; Heise, 2024; Ferns, 2025). However, the extent to which the UN served as a driving force behind decolonization—or whether it merely perpetuated colonialism in a new form—remains a matter of debate. While some studies highlight its role in exerting pressure on colonial powers and enshrining the right to self-determination (Muschik, 2018; Getachew, 2019), others take a skeptical stance and emphasize the gap between its anti-colonial rhetoric and the persistence of colonial influence (Morcillo Laiz and Schlichte, 2016; Tudor, 2023) and criticize its post-Cold War policies as neo-imperialist (Chopra, 2000; Zaum, 2011; Lemay-Hébert, 2015).

This article also draws on a broader research tradition that examines how international organizations establish and claim epistemic authority through the production of knowledge and practice-oriented measures on the ground, such as fact-finding missions, expert reports, and monitoring mechanisms (Haas, 1992; Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Bueger, 2015; Littoz-Monnet, 2018; Bonacker, 2022). This literature has recently turned its attention to the specific practice of international fact-finding missions, dispatched to establish credible facts about contentious situations, and has itself identified the visiting missions of the UN Trusteeship Council as an early example of such practices (Lesch, 2023: 4). Much of this scholarship, however, treats epistemic authority as something delegated to an organization and subsequently either recognized or contested by an external audience. This article builds on this body of literature, but shifts the emphasis from the recognition or contestation of an already-established authority to its making, i.e., to how connecting a heterogeneous set of actors and physically bringing people, documents, and objects together across considerable distances turned this network into an authoritative resource in the first place. Thus, this article is concerned with how knowledge emerges through the visiting missions as an “epistemic infrastructure” (Bueger, 2015, 7) in a location remote from the organization, how facts are constructed on the ground, and how they subsequently find their way into the administrative routines through which authority itself comes to be produced.

For that I draw on actor-network theory (ANT). ANT focuses on the connections and networks between actors, a process often conceptualized as translation (Callon, 1980; Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005). Translation refers to how various human and non-human actors are linked and form stable connections that enable collective action. Within this framework, the capacity for action is not an inherent property of the actors but arises through their interconnectedness. Material objects, for example, can play a central role in establishing and stabilizing these networks by functioning as mediators that transform the actors involved. Latour’s work illustrates this across a variety of contexts, ranging from microscopes in laboratories that transform unstructured impressions into scientific data (Latour and Woolgar, 1986) to techniques of text production in legal systems that shape the drafting of judgments (Latour, 2010). It is this capacity to turn observation into (the production of) facts that will prove central to understanding what the visiting missions themselves accomplished.

In recent years, ANT has gained popularity both in International Relations and in International Political Sociology (Berger and Esguerra, 2017; Çapan et al., 2021; Çapan et al., 2026) in particular in researching the construction of facts and epistemic objects of international organisations which are not given, but are “dependent on the deliberations and interpretations of actors” (Bueger, 2015, 3; Knorr Cetina, 1999). It offers an alternative to the dominant diffusion model, which was critiqued by Latour. In his view, this model leads to observable outcomes being derived from given entities or conditions. From this diffusion-theoretical perspective, for example, the classic questions asked are how the international norm of collective self-determination has contributed to decolonization or how much power the United Nations has exercised in the decolonization process. Latour, by contrast, proposes examining in detail the process through which such power arises, rather than assuming that it can be understood as an isolated force that merely produces effects. In other words, ANT examines the process of producing such effects, which the diffusion model takes for granted. The focus thus shifts to the process of generating influence itself, that is, in the words of ANT, to the chaining of elements that connects the periphery of the territories with the center in New York where decisions were made. From this perspective, rather than taking the United Nations’ influence for granted, we can instead examine how it established the relationships and interactions that enabled it to exert influence in the first place.

Latour and Callon have contrasted the diffusion model with the model of translation, which allows us to analyze how what we observe as a fact actually is the result of a complex process of interactions and connections. In his famous study on the role of science in the development of fisheries policy, Callon (1986) identified the moments of translation that allow us to trace how scientists succeeded in shaping the process of policy development and establishing themselves as an authoritative voice representing different groups of actors. In what follows, I draw on this translation-theoretical perspective to show how the visiting missions established themselves as an instance of translation that mediated between the disparate realities of the territories and the diplomatic sphere in New York, and how, through this translation work, the United Nations, which organized and operated the missions, positioned itself as an actor exerting a specific form of influence on the process of decolonization.

For Callon, four aspects of translation constitute a process within which the interaction between various actors emerges and develops. Translation is thus understood not in a linguistic sense, but in a geometric sense, insofar as it consists, as Latour puts it, of moving actors to another location (Latour, 1987, 117) and thereby transforming them in the course of the process. In his study, Callon emphasises in particular the significance of the “obligatory passage point” (Callon, 1986: 6), through which an actor gains influence in the process of linking up with other actors by formulating the problem to be solved in such a way as to make himself indispensable to its resolution.

The second step involves interesting other actors in the shared cause, i.e., performing interessement. Callon points here to the devices that help bring actors into relation with one another and that enable them to participate in the problematization. “Interessement is the group of actions by which an entity (…) attempts to impose and stabilize the identity of the other actors it defines through its problematization. Different devices are used to implement these actions” (Callon, 1986, 8). If this is successful, this is not simply because divergent interests have been discovered to align, but because they have been modified, displaced, and translated into a common endeavour, actors’ aims are reshaped in the very process of being drawn together (Callon and Latour, 1981, 279). The next step of translation consists in enrolment. This concerns how the roles and identities of actors are negotiated, and thereby both deepened and modified. According to Callon, the distribution of roles can be understood as the result of multilateral negotiations through which the identity of the actors is determined and tested.

The fourth moment, mobilization, concerns the representation of actors who, in turn, speak and act on behalf of other actors. In this process, the representing actors function as a “unit of force” (Callon, 1986, 14) by forming alliances. Ultimately, the crucial point is that these moments of translation culminate in the emergence of a position, the obligatory passage point, from which one actor comes to represent an entire universe of heterogeneous actors. Here, representation is not to be understood in the sense of political representation, but rather as the result of portraying and rendering manageable an otherwise unmanageable complexity of realities. According to Callon, the various translations, which need not necessarily occur in strict sequence but can be understood as distinct moments describing the interconnectedness of the actors, exhibit a continuity “of displacements and transformations” (Callon, 1986, 18). Actors alter their positions and relationships and become part of a process that, “if it is successful, only voices speaking in unison are to be heard” (Callon, 1986, 19).

Each of these four moments, it is worth noting, presupposes not only a realignment of interests but also a literal displacement of actors and objects whether through physically relocating people, or through channeling written reports and data along specific administrative routes. It is this material and spatial dimension of translation, often left implicit in ANT’s more epistemologically oriented case studies, that the empirical analysis below foregrounds by tracing the actual journeys undertaken by the visiting missions. These various moments of translation thus help us understand how an actor-network emerges and how an actor within that network succeeds in establishing itself as an obligatory passage point. As I shall show, authority cannot be reduced to a formal position on this account. Even a formally conferred mandate is not something that precedes translation, but something that must itself be continuously carried by the interconnection and interaction of various actors in order to function as authority at all.

In what follows, I demonstrate how this translation-theoretical approach can be used to trace how the visiting missions came to collect data and channel it to the Council, so that it could serve as an authoritative source for decision making. The culmination of this process is the report submitted to the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly, a document that emerged from the complex interactions of the actors involved, yet claimed to represent the reality of the territories themselves. In Latours’ terminology, this process can also be understood as an act of “making,” as the production of facts that subsequently feed into the deliberations of the Trusteeship Council. By establishing themselves as the obligatory passage point through which knowledge about the territories had to flow, the visiting missions enabled the United Nations to exert a specific form of influence on the decolonization process, one that presupposed the UN’s formal authorization under the Charter but could not be reduced to it, resting instead on an epistemic and relational power that the missions’ work had to build upon that authorization (Latour, 1984). This power, I argue, finally arises from the translation of realities, their condensation, and their representation with one voice.

The empirical analysis draws on material held at the UN Archives and Records Management Section (UNARMS), specifically the records of the Trusteeship Division concerning the organization of the visiting missions. Where existing scholarship on the Trusteeship System has drawn primarily on the missions’ formal output, their reports and the verbatim records, this article instead focuses on a less examined aspect of the documents: the correspondence, budget forms, itineraries, and other documents intended to help the missions prepare for their tasks. While this material spans the life of the Trusteeship System and touches on many of its 41 missions, the article gives particular weight to the documentation surrounding the very first mission, to Western Samoa in 1947. I use this case not as a representative sample but as a generative one. Although it was not originally intended to be an inaugural mission, it is where many of the devices, routines, and roles later missions relied on were first developed.

Analytically, Callon’s four moments of translation serve here not as a hypothesis to be tested against this material, nor as a fixed coding scheme, but as sensitizing concepts (Blumer, 1954) that organize the reading of the archive around the guiding question of how the UN’s authority in the decolonization process was produced. This mirrors ANT’s own self-understanding as a method for tracing associations, rather than an explanatory theory (Latour, 2005). Reading the archive through these four moments is thus meant less to verify Callon’s model than to render visible practices, of interessement, enrolment, and mobilization, that accounts of the Trusteeship System have so far left in the shadow of its diplomatic and legal history.

Thus, my focus is on tracing the general process by which the visiting missions established themselves as an obligatory passage point. Much more could be said about each of the four moments of translation, such as the concrete conflicts between administering powers and the United Nations regarding the composition of the missions, or the disputes over the representation of various groups within the territories. Even within this narrower focus, however, translation should not be mistaken for a symmetrical alignment of interests. Latour has been careful to distinguish the methodological symmetry of actor-network theory, which insists on describing powerful and powerless actors with the same analytical vocabulary, from any claim that actors are equally positioned to shape the outcome of their association (Latour, 2005). The translations traced below were staged on unequal ground. Administering powers controlled the resources, personnel, and access on which the missions depended, while colonial administrative experience was, as the Samoan case will show, itself a qualification for participating in the mission. Attending to translation, in other words, means attending not only to how actors were aligned around a shared task, but to whose categories prevailed in that alignment, and whose claims were attenuated, or omitted, in the process. For this article, I limit myself to the narrower question of how the United Nations managed, through the visiting missions—a central, albeit by no means exclusive, instrument of the Trusteeship Council system—to become an actor exerting a specific influence on decolonization, while trying, wherever the material allows, to keep this unequal ground in view.

This process of translation, I argue, gave rise to what can be empirically described as a dual delocalization, the very movement of facts announced above. On the one hand, diplomatic agreements and UN mandates were translated into on-the-ground assessments and data collection, thereby making the UN’s presence in the territories tangible. On the other hand, local realities—administrative practices, social norms, infrastructure, and the claims of diverse actors—were simultaneously translated into facts and made to travel, together with the missions themselves, from the periphery of the territories to the centre in New York, where they became visible and negotiable within the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly. The political-legal mandate for international oversight, as established in the UN Charter and subsequent treaties, did not merely precede this movement, but it was gradually reshaped by it. This dual movement challenges the traditional distinction between diplomatic negotiations and colonial administration, instead conceptualizing decolonization as an interconnected process within a single, linked world (Latour, 1999, 2010).

3 The visiting missions within the trusteeship system

The central forums for negotiating the end of imperial rule were the Trusteeship Council, the General Assembly (specifically its Fourth Committee and the Special Committee on Decolonization established in 1961), and the Ad Hoc Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories. Resolution 1514 of 1960 marked a turning point. It established a moral consensus against colonialism and strengthened the right to self-determination (Kay, 1967; Cassese, 1998). This undoubtedly also increased the pressure on the territories, which were administered by Mandatory Powers under the supervision of the United Nations as part of the Trusteeship System which was based on the contractual agreement between the UN and the administering powers to prepare the territories for independence. Nevertheless, the discourse on development often legitimized the continuation of colonial rule, as administering powers frequently portrayed their obligations—regarding welfare, social advancement, and political progress—as not yet sufficiently fulfilled, thereby delaying the release of territories from dependency. Debates surrounding the Trusteeship System therefore centered primarily on the question of developmental progress. The UN addressed this challenge by framing the issue in a way that ultimately proved successful, defining the mere possibility of impartially assessing progress in the colonies as a problem that could only be resolved through data collection by independent on-site investigations (UNARMS, 1947d). Out of this shift toward a more fact based evaluation of development, two mechanisms emerged, namely petitions from inhabitants of dependent territories and visiting missions tasked with generating knowledge about the territories. While petitions enabled local voices to reach the UN and articulate grievances regarding the policies of the administering power, visiting missions were of particular importance because they brought the UN directly into the territories. They transformed the Trusteeship System from a New York-based administrative body into a tangible presence, while simultaneously feeding insights back to New York, where the knowledge generated there significantly shaped debates in the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly. This marked a departure from the League of Nations, which, despite having introduced reporting requirements, struggled to maintain its independence from colonial powers (Pedersen, 2015). The San Francisco Conference (1945) established a two-tiered system. Former League of Nations mandates were placed under the Trusteeship Council, whereas other colonies were subject only to reporting obligations. Ultimately, 11 territories—seven in Africa and four in Oceania—were placed under trusteeship administration. The Trusteeship Council, composed of permanent members of the Security Council, the administering powers themselves, and a number of states with no administrative role, oversaw their administration. Nevertheless, the colonial powers retained considerable influence and insisted on participating in the planning and execution of visiting missions. Despite these limitations, the missions evolved into the UN’s most important instrument for knowledge production.

These missions, conducted at regular intervals (on average every 3 years), served to verify reports from colonial powers and assess progress in political, economic, social, and educational development. Their composition reflected a balance between administering and non-administering powers and often included experts such as anthropologists. Mission members were selected based on criteria of competence and integrity. All costs were borne by the UN, necessitating extensive administrative arrangements (e.g., per diems, allowances for additional clothing; UNARMS, 1947d).

The mandate for each mission was determined by the Trusteeship Council. Initial visits prioritized a general approach aimed at establishing contacts and examining administrative, legal, and social systems. The missions typically lasted three to four months, with members often splitting into smaller groups to cover as large an area as possible. Local personnel—secretaries, drivers, translators—were recruited from the territories themselves, usually under the auspices of the local administration (UNARMS, 1971). This reliance on local infrastructure and personnel underscores the material and social interconnections of the missions. Crucially, these visiting missions were the only mechanism through which the UN could gain independent insight into the territories’ state of development. It was precisely here that the previously outlined moments of translation took tangible form. Mission members, local staff, and UN officials were linked via questionnaires, reports, cameras, typewriters, and flying boats (UNARMS, 1947c) into a network capable of gathering data, drafting reports, and thereby rendering the territories representable within the Trusteeship Council. In this way, each of the 41 missions produced reports that were submitted to the Trusteeship Council and, in turn, served as the basis for the General Assembly’s debates and resolutions. To see how this process of translation actually unfolded on the ground, I now turn to the very first mission the Trusteeship Council ever sent out to Western Samoa in 1947.

4 The journey begins... in Western Samoa

To truly comprehend the United Nations’ involvement in the decolonization process and its integration with the territories it aimed to guide toward independence, it is imperative to heed Latour’s renowned dictum: “you have ‚to follow the actors themselves’, that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish” (Latour, 2005:12). Thus, let us embark on a journey to follow the actors in their pioneering expedition. Let us observe how they navigate the negotiations in Yalta and San Francisco, how they come to take on the responsibility of being what UN officials themselves liked to call the “eyes and ears of the world” (UNARMS, 1948, 1950, 1953, 1970).

On 4 July 1947, a chartered flying boat landed off the coast of Samoa. The passengers were brought ashore in a rowing boat and welcomed by a large crowd. Banners read, among other things: “U.N.O. was established to preserve freedom and security of the world” (UNARMS, 1947a). The members of the first visiting mission of the Trusteeship Council had landed, at least most of them. Who were the representatives of the world organization sent by the Trusteeship Council to visit the Pacific island administered by New Zealand? The Trusteeship Council nominated Francis B. Sayre and Pierre Ryckmans to represent the administering powers. Sayre, accompanied by his wife, held previous positions as the US High Commissioner of the Philippines and foreign affairs advisor to King Vajiravudh of Siam. He represented the USA in the Council. Ryckmans, on the other hand, represented Belgium and had served as Governor-General of Belgian Congo from 1934 to 1946. Reflecting the typical composition of the Council and subsequent missions, both members possessed experience in colonial administration. This was not incidental. The mission’s claim to epistemic authority rested substantially on forms of expertise, colonial administrative experience among its members, anthropological knowledge oriented toward governance, that were themselves products of empire, even as the mission had been sent to investigate a petition demanding an end to precisely that kind of rule. Despite the norm calling for a balance of two members from non-administering powers, only one additional member was appointed for the mission: Mr. Eduardo Cruz-Coke, a Chilean politician and former Conservative presidential candidate, who also served as Minister of Public Health, Social Assistance, and Welfare (UNARMS, 1947e).

At that time, identifying individuals from states not considered colonial powers posed challenges. Additionally, besides China, Iraq, and Mexico, other countries withdrew their participation in the Council (Finkelstein, 1948, 271). The three diplomats were accompanied by Felix Keesing, a New Zealand professor of anthropology at Stanford University specializing in the South Pacific, tasked with providing essential background information. New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser also joined the mission. As per regulations for visiting missions, Secretariat members completed the team: Peter M. Anker, Assistant Director of the Trusteeship Division and a Norwegian diplomat with previous experience in the League of Nations, Jean de la Roche, the French Chief of the Visits Section of the Trusteeship Division, and Brazilian Cleantho de Paiva Leite, Political Affairs Officer of the Trusteeship Division. The sole woman on the team, reflecting the typical composition of missions, was stenographer Regina Respler.

What events unfolded to prompt members of the mission to embark from different corners of the globe—from New York, Santiago, and Brussels—on a journey spanning approximately 2 months to visit a small island in the Pacific, inhabited by roughly 70,000 people?

On 18 November 1946, representatives of the inhabitants of Western Samoa presented a petition to the administering power New Zealand in which they made three demands:

“On the basis of the sacred rights of self-government as upheld and defended by the British Commonwealth of Nations and, on the principles of the Atlantic Charter, we feel confident that our resolutions, as set out hereunder, will be granted: (1) We humbly beseech that Samoa be granted self-government. (2) We earnestly pray that New Zealand will see fit to act as Protector and Advisor to Samoa in-the same capacity as England is to Tonga. (3) we sincerely pray that the unnatural division of the islands of the Samoan Group enforced by the Three Powers [Germany, Great Britain, and the USA] in the past without the consent of the Samoans be left in abeyance until a meeting can be arranged between Eastern and Western Samoa” (UNARMS, 1947a). The New Zealand government forwarded the petition to the Trusteeship Council, which in its twenty-third meeting of its first session on 24 April 1947 decided to send a mission to Western Samoa “to investigate the petition dated 18 November 1946 of the Fautua, members of the Legislative Council, associate Judges, Faipiile and district representatives of Western Samoa that Western Samoa be granted self-government” (UNARMS, 1947b).

The petition prompted the New Zealand government to invite the Trusteeship Council to pay a visit. Sir Carl Berendsen, New Zealand’s representative on the Council, urged caution regarding any hasty decision on the petition, advocating instead for a thorough on-site investigation (Finkelstein, 1948, 269). This request laid the groundwork for the Council’s first mission. Initially, however, it was not planned as a standard visiting mission. Rather, its mandate prioritized fact-finding, aiming to gain a comprehensive understanding of the petition’s demands and the dynamics between the Samoan population and the New Zealand administration. In this move, the Samoans’ interest in self-government was not simply set aside, but translated, displaced into a rather different interest, that of the UN in assessing administrative progress, an interest the mission’s report would ultimately come to speak in the name of. Yet, the mission expanded its scope to assess local conditions and formulate recommendations for the administration’s future actions. The role originally assigned to it was thus not merely executed but negotiated and modified in practice, reflecting a form of engagement in which an actor redefines its own mandate through the very process of acting. This expansion effectively transformed the mission into a visiting mission, a development that the administrative authorities likely viewed with mixed feelings, given their general skepticism toward United Nations interference in their internal affairs.

The petition arose following consultations between the New Zealand government and representatives of the Samoan people regarding the draft trusteeship agreement. To ensure broad public participation, it was decided to convene a quasi-parliamentary assembly representing all segments of the population, including delegates from various districts, Samoan judges, and elected officials. The subsequent mission emerged from the outcomes of this assembly. It served as a political testament to historical grievances while simultaneously acknowledging New Zealand’s administrative efforts. It was this duality that prompted the Trusteeship Council to dispatch the mission. At the heart of the local poulation’s grievance lay the 1899 division of the archipelago among three powers—a partition that persists to this day, separating Samoa from American Samoa. This historical injustice found further expression in the Mau movement, which, beginning in the 1920s and backed by broad local support, campaigned vigorously for independence. However, the call to review this division posed a challenge for the Trusteeship Council, particularly because American Samoa did not fall under the jurisdiction of the Trusteeship System. Consequently, this aspect was largely overlooked. Instead, the mission focused on assessing the extent to which conditions for self-government had been met and identifying areas where New Zealand’s administrative efforts could be improved. Accompanied by local support staff—including translators and cooks—the UN delegation undertook an expedition lasting nearly 2 months across the 2,800-square-kilometer archipelago. During their journey, they made a three-day side trip to Tonga, prompted by the petition’s mention of the island as an example of effective (British) administration. This effectiveness was largely due to Britain’s approach of allowing Tonga a high degree of self-rule, with only a single imperial governor serving as an advisor to the local government. This detour likely underscored the mission’s significance to the petitioners.

The mission began its inquiry in the capital, Apia, meeting with the Fautua—descendants of royal families who served as advisors to the New Zealand administrator—as well as with missionaries and European residents. Subsequently, the members traveled to remote areas, focusing particularly on the coastal regions of the two main islands, Upolu and Savai’i. Their travel was slow and arduous due to the poor state of the road network outside the capital. For shorter distances, they often relied on boats and taxis—a challenge compounded by the sweltering heat. Accommodation frequently consisted of huts rented from local residents.

During their travels through the provinces, the mission was accompanied by New Zealand officials, local authorities, and representatives of Western Samoan chiefs. Acting on the advice of the New Zealand administration, the mission presented gifts to local chiefs at each stop—a gesture made possible by the transport of the gifts they had brought with them. Upon returning to New York, the mission convened to discuss its findings; however, Eduardo Cruz-Coke was absent, having to attend to urgent matters in Chile. The mission’s report, submitted to the Trusteeship Council a month later in September 1947, was discussed at a meeting on November 20.

Notably, the report contained several far-reaching recommendations that arguably went beyond the expectations of the administering power. These included proposals to grant the indigenous population the power to initiate legislation and to ensure a Samoan majority within the Legislative Council. This discrepancy illustrates that the process involved was not merely the transmission of a pre-existing mandate, but a transformative act. The mission‘s report not only provided information on Western Samoa but also articulated a new set of benchmarks against which the administration would subsequently be measured. Some of these benchmarks appear to have shaped policy even before the report itself existed. Two days before the mission’s departure from Apia, and while its members were still meeting informally with both Samoan leaders and New Zealand officials, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced in Parliament a set of constitutional proposals, among them a Legislature with a guaranteed Samoan majority, that the mission’s own report, finalized only weeks later in New York, would note with “very great satisfaction” to be “in line with the recommendations contained in this report” (New Zealand, 1947, 55). It is clear from the mission’s own report that the level of agreement was so high because, as the report states, the members made it their task to “facilitate direct contacts between New Zealand representatives and Samoan leader by keeping both parties informed of the general trend of the Mission’s thinking” (New Zealand, 1947, 55). The obligatory passage point, in other words, operated here before it was ever written down. That New Zealand’s Samoa Amendment Act, assented to on 25 November 1947, then reorganized the Legislative Assembly along just these lines, and that the 1953 visiting mission would credit this Act with having granted “a considerable degree of self-government to the Samoans” (United Nations, 1953a, 3), only extends a chain of translation that had already been set in motion during the mission’s stay in Apia. At the same time, the report advocated for New Zealand to retain control over key state functions and finances. The report was well received by the Council—a positive reception that was not consistently replicated in subsequent years.

The 1947 mission to Western Samoa was followed by four further missions at intervals of two to 3 years, culminating in Western Samoa gaining independence in 1962 and becoming the first independent state in Polynesia. New Zealand, which had held the administrative mandate since 1929—initially under the League of Nations and subsequently under the United Nations—relinquished its powers.

In many respects, the 1947 mission paved the way for the Trusteeship Council’s experiment and was viewed positively by both the Council and the Department of Trusteeship. Council President Francis Sayre expressed his conviction regarding the system’s potential role within the United Nations, stating: “I should like to conclude these very brief remarks by saying that, as a result of the many conversations I have held and the press and radio coverage of our work, I am more convinced than ever that the Trusteeship System can play a far-reaching and highly significant role in the important work of the United Nations” (UNARMS, 1947f). Although originally conceived as a purely fact-finding mission, and initially characterized by an imbalance between administering and non-administering powers, it laid the groundwork for the subsequent regular visiting missions to the territories. The missions that followed, starting with Tanganyika (1948), Cameroon (1949), Togo (1949), and Ruanda-Urundi (1950), followed a similar pattern to the first, although internal evaluations led to adjustments, particularly regarding administrative procedures.

What this founding case suggests, however, is not simply that the Trusteeship System proved workable, but that its authority took a form quite different from what a diffusion-theoretical perspective would lead us to expect, namely that UN influence flows from a decision made in New York and is then merely carried out. Here, it was a petition from Samoa that set the mission in motion in the first place, and it was the mission itself, once underway, that went on to redefine the very mandate it had been given. If authority was not simply given from the outset, it is the process itself, the concrete interactions through which the UN and the territories became linked, that calls for closer examination. The following section examines this process in more detail using the translational lens of ANT.

5 Translating the territories

How, then, could a petition signed by around 40 Western Samoans set in motion complex administrative mechanisms that led nearly a dozen individuals from various parts of the world to travel to the island? What processes were involved in mobilizing diplomats, government officials, translators, cooks, pilots, and drivers to assess social conditions in the territories, document their findings, and present reports in New York? What chain of events enabled these small traveling groups to make the United Nations present within the territories while simultaneously making the territories representable within the United Nations?

To answer these questions, I now follow the actors through the successive moments of translation—problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilization—by which a petition from a small Pacific island came to be integrated into the fabric of international decolonization, and by which, more generally, the Charter mandate to oversee administering powers was translated into a web of interactions in which the visiting missions emerged as an obligatory passage point. As I argue, doing so reveals how the facts on which the UN’s authority came to rest were themselves produced.

Everything seems to trace back to the Trusteeship Council’s decision to dispatch a visiting mission. Yet even this decision is closely linked to other resolutions and interactions—such as the negotiations regarding the Trusteeship System at the Yalta Conference and the founding conference in San Francisco in 1945 (Couzigou, 2015). During these deliberations, the question of the structure and functioning of the Trusteeship System was deferred until the final stage, as the positions of anti-colonial powers and colonial powers regarding the handling of the colonial issue diverged widely. Ultimately, however, the concept of visiting missions was incorporated into the Charter.

Subsequently, the Trusteeship Department of the UN Secretariat took the initiative to plan regular missions and formulated general guidelines for visiting missions. These serve to operationalize the broad description found in the Charter (UNARMS, 1947d). These guidelines establish the framework for the missions’ agendas and mandate the examination of—and reporting on—various aspects, such as the participation of the population in governmental and administrative affairs, economic conditions, educational facilities, and the healthcare system.

In doing so, the General Terms transformed the initial framing of the issue—namely, the assertion that development could only be assessed through independent investigation—into a concrete epistemic program. They defined what constituted relevant evidence of progress and the procedures by which such evidence was to be gathered. This reinforced the status of the visiting missions as an obligatory passage point. They became such a passage point because everything the mission learned on the ground—including their interactions with the administering powers—had to pass through this entity before ultimately being distilled into the report submitted to the Council. It was not the numerous other channels of information, but rather this report, that spoke with authority regarding the territory’s development. Yet, a passage point anchored merely on paper remains precarious. As the following sections demonstrate, the missions first had to be equipped with the necessary resources and a genuine interest in their task; the roles of the actors they encountered had to be negotiated and stabilized; and the resulting diversity of voices had to be synthesized into a single account before the obligatory passage point could truly function as such in practice. This diversity encompasses, for instance, the local population’s interest, most explicitly voiced in petitions like that from Samoa, typically framed in terms of self-determination, or, at the very least, demands for tangible improvements in welfare and governance. Administering powers, by contrast, had an interest in retaining control over their territories and limiting outside interference in what they regarded as internal affairs. Council members were divided along similar lines, with administering powers seeking to protect their prerogatives, and non-administering members pushing for a more assertive exercise of UN oversight. What the visiting missions accomplished, as the following sections show, was their translation into a single, shared task, that of collecting facts about developmental progress.

This epistemic mandate was reflected in the terminology used to describe the mission’s task across various documents: “investigation,” “inspection,” or “inquiry” (see for instance UNARMS, 1947a). The mission derived its authority largely from this mandate, which in turn required specific expertise from its members—such as colonial administrative experience among representatives of the administering powers, or academic qualifications among the experts whose inclusion underscored the mission’s epistemic character. Subsequently, the Trusteeship Council translated the General Terms into specific terms of reference for each mission. These directives established the mission’s precise mandate, designated its members, and outlined specific tasks that typically includes reporting on the state of development and receiving petitions. Furthermore, the directives frequently referenced previous missions, tasking the current mission with evaluating the implementation of earlier recommendations. In this way, the directives established continuity among the missions and created an enduring link between the Council and the territories, a link that was further consolidated and sustained by each subsequent mission.

At the same time, the appointment of mission members—as outlined in the directives—was preceded by a series of diplomatic interactions. The Secretary-General, acting through the Trusteeship Division, issued invitations that were received by the diplomatic missions of UN member states and generally met with a positive response. This exchange of diplomatic communications—combined with the Council’s decisive action—ultimately led to the formation of the mission. This can be viewed as an initial step, still strictly confined to the diplomatic sphere, toward engaging other actors in the joint undertaking. However, as the following sections demonstrate, this circle of interested actors would expand significantly, coming to encompass not only diplomats but also administering powers, local personnel, and the local population.

5.1 Equipping and interesting the Mission’s actors

Tracing this expansion allows to see two intertwined achievements: the alignment of actors’ interests, and the physical assembling and moving of people and objects across considerable distances. Both were already at work before a mission departed, in the process through which it was equipped. This involved a process of interessement whereby mission members, administering powers, and local personnel alike were drawn into their designated roles and empowered to engage with the problematization. This preparation encompassed various facets, two of which I wish to highlight, namely its epistemic dimension and its dimension of care.

The epistemic aspect ensured that mission members were well-prepared for their task and equipped with comprehensive information regarding the territories and local conditions. They received background reports shedding light on historical, cultural, geographical, and socio-economic aspects, among others. In addition, they were provided with newspaper clippings announcing the mission, as well as reports on the United Nations sourced from local publications and newspapers (UNARMS, 1957). The information material also included biographical profiles of individual representatives, details on the political landscape—including political parties—and maps of the territory. Furthermore, information regarding United Nations initiatives and projects (such as those led by its subsidiary bodies) was made available. Early encouragement to collaborate with the United Nations research department likely influenced this aspect. Finally, mission members received all relevant UN documents as well as the itinerary coordinated with the administering power.

Regarding the dimension of care, the focus lay on addressing the risks associated with the journey and providing members with the information and resources needed to prepare for the challenges ahead. This included information regarding the weather—such as extreme heat and humidity—and appropriate protective measures, as well as various medications (e.g., for malaria prophylaxis, diarrhea, fever reduction, and pain relief). Specific preparations were provided to the members and the mission as a whole, or their procurement was recommended. These included sleeping aids, motion sickness medication, powdered supplements, and laxatives. As part of the preparations, reading the brochure “Health in the Tropics: Hints for Newcomers,” issued by the UN Medical Service, was recommended (UNARMS, 1968). The Medical Service also assisted with the necessary vaccinations. Furthermore, instructions were provided on how to deal with injuries such as snakebites or heat rash.

One topic repeatedly discussed between mission members and the UN administration—specifically the UN Field Service—was the question of clothing. This involved two aspects. The first concerned clothing suitable for travel, particularly for coping with extreme heat. Recommendations included long, white, easy-to-wash garments and straw hats—advice that, as photographs and film footage reveal, was evidently not consistently followed. The second aspect concerned appropriate attire. In this regard, mission members were familiarized with local traditions and customs (“White shoes are generally not worn, even though there are no local prejudices against them,” UNARMS, 1957), as well as how to appear in suitable evening wear at receptions despite the challenging weather conditions: “Evening dress consists, where required, of either dinner jackets made of lightweight worsted (Tropical Worsted) or short, tailless jackets combined with a cummerbund and black trousers. Soft, pleated shirts with turndown collars are the most popular and are accepted everywhere” (UNARMS, 1957). Members received an allowance for the purchase of appropriate clothing, the amount of which was the subject of repeated disputes over the years. To determine the allowance amount, the Field Operation Service had compiled a list that included, among other items, 12 pairs of white socks, 6 sets of underwear, 4 pairs of khaki shorts, and two pairs of shoes. This was accompanied by the observation that, naturally, it could not be ruled out that some of these items might continue to be used for private purposes after the return (UNARMS, 1964). Equipped in this manner, the mission members found themselves in their assigned roles as observers and interpreters of the territories they were to visit.

Yet interessement was not confined to the mission’s own members. Administering powers and local staff, too, had to be interested and drawn into the shared undertaking before the mission could set out. Preparation for the visiting mission thus unfolded across multiple dimensions. It involved not only preparing the members, as discussed above, but also organizing the mission itself and arranging the logistics of travel in ways that drew administering powers and local staff into the undertaking. Even before the inaugural journey, the visiting mission initiative necessitated a suite of bureaucratic procedures, calculative practices, and organizational links.

If the focus so far has been on the alignment of interests, what follows makes visible the second achievement, which is the practices of assembling people, documents, and objects, and moving them across considerable distances. Primarily, interactions generate results condensed into bureaucratic and calculative chains, activating and connecting the appropriate resources and actors. For instance, the intricate process of securing flight tickets involves coordination between the UN field service, travel agencies, mission members, local administrations, and administrative authorities, a coordination that quite literally set bodies in motion, drawing each of these actors into the shared logistics of the mission. A meticulously updated travel plan, circulated among departments and locations, serves as a communication tool to relay planning statuses and initiate processes. Beyond travelers, numerous other personnel require coordination, facilitated by the evolving travel plan. Telegrams setting out the current status of the planning triggered further bookings, the search for translators, the recruitment of cooks, the hiring of accommodation, the dissemination of information to local people and their representatives, and the dispatch of invitation cards, themselves a device through which local representatives and administrations were drawn, in advance, into their intended role as hosts. In addition to logistical mobilization, meticulous regulations concerning budgeting and costs served as further devices of interessement, this time binding UN staff and mission members into a shared financial undertaking. Prior to the inaugural journey, forms were devised to draft and apply for an overall budget for a visiting mission. International decolonization, in essence, entailed prudent fiscal management of the world organization’s budget. A plethora of forms and rulebooks were meticulously crafted to ensure that the visiting mission experiment remained manageable. These documents not only guided the mission’s actions but also facilitated the acknowledgment and recording of expenses.

A comprehensive array of forms endowed the visiting mission with administrative regulations and instruments for implementation. For instance, the visiting mission to New Guinea in 1968 was supplied with no fewer than 16 such forms and rulebooks by the UN Field Service (UNARMS, 1968). These included disbursement vouchers, shipping authorizations, staff rules, compensation forms for loss of personal effects, regulations governing payment of travel expenses and subsistence allowances, as well as provisional rules governing compensation to committee members. Delivered to the destination via air freight, these documents were indispensable in ensuring the mission’s operational efficiency and financial accountability.

These rules in turn often gave rise to conflicts between the members of the mission and the UN administration. These related to the calculation of daily allowances and the underlying rules, but also to the fact that different rules and allowances were applied to different members of the mission. Mission chairmen in particular repeatedly told the administration that this led to embarrassing situations while travelling. The question of why no first class reservations had been made had to be clarified again and again. This in turn led to correspondence between the United Nations and the travel agencies and airlines in order to localize responsibility. It often turned out that either there was no first class and that there were not enough seats available, so that the members then had to split up into different classes (UNARMS, 1964).

Taken together, the background reports, health precautions, clothing allowances, forms, and travel arrangements discussed above constitute the devices through which the visiting mission was interested and equipped. They not only aligned the interests of mission members, administering powers, and UN staff, but also assembled and set them in motion, long before the mission had even set foot in the territories. Once underway, however, the mission encountered a far wider range of actors—local authorities, populations, missionaries—whose roles were not yet fixed by any prior device, but had still to be negotiated in practice.

5.2 Negotiating the mission’s roles

The visiting missions did not merely travel, they were themselves transformed in the process. Enrolment, in Callon’s sense, concerns how the roles and identities of actors are negotiated and stabilized through concrete interaction. What the mission’s journey reveals is that this negotiation did not only concern the local actors the mission encountered, but the mission members themselves. Depending on the situation and the objects at hand, mission members oscillated between a diplomatic and an inspecting role, an oscillation orchestrated not by the mandate alone, but by a heterogeneous array of objects, from microphones and banners to notepads and soil samples.

Upon arrival, the initial meetings were typically arranged in the capital, initially with representatives of the administering power in the territories. Here, and in the public receptions that followed, the mission first assumed the diplomatic pole of this oscillation, received and honored as representatives of the United Nations. The mission was often greeted by a sizable crowd bearing banners directly addressing the United Nations. As the journey unfolded, various types of meetings alternated, each staging a different role for the mission through the presence of different objects.

Public meetings often featured musical instruments and performances by local residents, accompanied by speeches from various representatives, including the mission itself, which required microphones and stages to be set up. Banners displayed demands and greeted the mission warmly. Mission members often sat in open huts, sometimes elevated on platforms to observe the performances, while the local population gathered around them, often in informal clusters. Ceremonial gestures included the exchange of gifts, handshakes with selected local representatives, and the wearing of traditional jewelry. Another form of public meeting involved arranging chairs outdoors for representatives and mission members, with the interested population gathered around them, facilitating roundtable discussions in full view of the public (United Nations, 1956). Throughout, the mission was cast and confirmed in this diplomatic role.

Meetings with representatives of the administering power, local administrations, and authorities still carried a diplomatic tone, even as discussions here already began to shift toward gathering information on the state of development. The staff from the General Secretariat of the Mission, for instance, likely took notes during some of these meetings. Additionally, documents containing petitions were presented, an action authorized by Article 87 of the United Nations Charter and the Rules of Procedure of the Trusteeship Council, which designated the visiting mission as the conduit for messages from the territories. Through these encounters, the roles of the various local actors were negotiated and stabilized in turn. Administrative officials became interlocutors on questions of governance, local authorities such as the Fautua were enrolled as advisors and informants, and the population at large was enrolled in the position of petitioners (Finkelstein, 1948, 272; United Nations, 1953b). These roles did not emerge from the mandate alone, but from the concrete interactions the mission conducted on the ground. It was in visits to institutions—schools, hospitals, offices of public administration—that the mission’s own role shifted most visibly. The film and photographic documentation of the missions reveal how the interactions of the mission change as they move from place to place. The members’ gazes and body language shift from that of observers to that of inspectors in schools, hospitals and public institutions, particularly when technical equipment is being demonstrated or conversations with clients—pupils or patients, for example—take place. Equipment, locations and also the roles of those present transform the mission from a diplomatic and ceremonial one into one focused on data collection (United Nations, 1947).

Objects, then, did not merely frame interactions, they actively redistributed roles, shifting the mission between its diplomatic and its inspecting register depending on what was at hand and what task lay ahead. The timely distribution of invitation cards before the mission’s arrival at a new location, for instance, was crucial in cueing a diplomatic register, as longer stays typically commenced with a reception involving the exchange of gifts. Recognizing that an excessive number of such receptions could crowd out the inspecting role on which the gathering of information depended, some missions advocated for stricter limits on their duration and frequency.

Beyond redistributing roles, objects also played a crucial part in recording the impressions gathered in this inspecting mode, summarizing and abstracting them, and gradually transforming them into sentences that adhere to the standards of administrative language. What the visiting mission needed for this were inscription devices, defined by Latour and Woolgar as any “item of apparatus or particular configuration of such items which can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is directly usable by one of the members of the office space” (Latour and Woolgar, 1986, 51). It relied on various such devices to facilitate this transformation: the pen, notepad, and typewriter, along with rules for report writing, document storage guidelines, staplers, and correction tapes (UNARMS, 1964). These tools converted the mission’s observations and conversations into actionable data about the territories’ developmental status, translating verbal exchanges and firsthand experience into the quantifiable information on which any assessment of a territory’s progress towards self-governance would depend. The task of the visiting mission was to perceive accurately and translate those perceptions into appropriate language. It turned hospitals and other physical realities into symbols of development, translating tangible observations into data that could bear witness to a territory’s progress towards independence, and thereby converting a developmental process into something like a measurable distance towards independence.

However, the diverse impressions gathered by a dozen individuals during their travels first had to be consolidated into a single, coherent report before they could speak with authority in New York. This required a dedicated production process, comprising internal meetings during the journey and a significant investment of time after their return to finalize the report through extensive drafting phases. It also required the right personnel—such as translators and a stenographer, whose notes likely provided the raw material from which the other mission members compiled the report.

It was through these interim meetings and the final post-return evaluation—specifically the synthesis of notes and documents into one comprehensive report—that the authority of the United Nations was solidified. This report omits many of the events and individuals encountered during the journey, employing instead the requisite bureaucratic language. This constitutes a moment of mobilization, in which the multiplicity of voices encountered on the ground, including petitioners, chiefs, missionaries, and administrators, is condensed into a single authoritative report that henceforth speaks on their behalf. In other words, the report does not merely summarize what the mission observed. It renders the territory representable and negotiable within the Trusteeship Council. In doing so, it positions the mission, and, through it, the United Nations, as the legitimate mouthpiece for a reality they themselves helped to construct. Yet the report stands as the definitive document. This translation of local realities into bureaucratic language depersonalizes them, rendering otherwise unmanageable complexity representable and actionable in a form the Council could utilize. The mission carried with it the essential elements required to bring this transformation process to a close.

A closer look reveals that the report was not merely a commissioned document. Rather, it set in motion a vast array of interactions, entanglements, and complications, creating a network through which the United Nations became what it is often tacitly assumed to have been, an actor in the process of decolonization.

Moreover, this process of translation did not end with the submission of the report, nor, in the Samoan case, did it begin there. As the previous section has shown, the mission’s presence and its informal exchanges with both Samoan and New Zealand representatives had already set translation in motion before any report existed. The obligatory passage point, in other words, could operate before it was ever written down, and not only through the document that eventually condensed these exchanges. The written report, submitted weeks after the mission departed, then set in motion a further, more formal chain of translations, from the report to the Council’s recommendations to the administering power, and from those recommendations to the administering power’s own response, most visibly in the periodic reports it was subsequently required to submit, and which had, in turn, to engage with the mission’s findings and recommendations, a link that later terms of reference made explicit by directing successor missions to take the reports of their predecessors into account, and that successor missions then enacted by measuring what they found against what had been observed before. The Samoan case, as we have seen, suggests that this chain of translations could reach further still, into changed administrative and constitutional practice.

This specific cycle came full circle with the mission’s return to New York. What enabled the United Nations to incorporate the impact of events in the territories into its own deliberations, and, conversely, to assert its mandate on the ground, was an empirically grounded link connecting the territories to the diplomatic discourse in New York, drawing distant subjects together within a single world. Only through the equipping and motivating of mission members, the negotiation and stabilization of the roles of those they encountered, and the consolidation of a multitude of voices into a single one did the visiting mission actually reach the position of an obligatory passage point. While the administering powers also reported to the Council through other channels, only the mission’s report derived its authority from the fact that it had channeled and interconnected the voices of administrators, petitioners, and local authorities alike.

Rather than taking the visiting mission’s authority for granted and examining how it was exercised, this article has shown how that authority came into being in the first place. Whilst the UN’s formal mandate made this process possible, it did not, in itself, render the mission’s account of the territories credible or actionable. This had to emerge from the very process that placed diplomats, administrative authorities and the local communities encountered along the way in the roles necessary to produce a report that could speak with one voice.

6 Conclusion

This article aimed to examine the mechanisms of international decolonization, focusing on how the United Nations evolved into a significant actor in this process through its visiting missions. Rather than viewing international decolonization merely as the outcome of diplomatic negotiations or external pressure, this article proposed a different approach. It drew on the concept of translation to understand how the UN acquired a specific form of authority through these missions, that emerged from the linking of people, objects, and practices across various locations.

By following the actors involved, I traced how the visiting missions, entrusted with an epistemic mandate to investigate, inspect, and report on conditions in the territories, established themselves as an obligatory passage point through which knowledge about the respective territories inevitably had to pass. This occurred through a sequence of translation steps: a problematization that made an independent on-site assessment essential; an interessement that equipped and mobilized the missions using a wide range of instruments, from background reports to health protocols; an enrolment that negotiated and stabilized the roles of administrative officials, local authorities, and the population, and, mediated by objects like a pen or a microphone, allowed mission members themselves to shift between diplomatic and supervisory roles; and, finally, a mobilization that consolidated the multiplicity of voices encountered on the ground into a single, authoritative report. Running through all four moments was a second, more literal achievement that this article has sought to bring into view, namely the physical work of assembling people, documents, and objects, and moving them across considerable distances, from the territories to the center in New York where decisions were made. Without this practical labor of travel and transport, no amount of aligning interests could have produced an authoritative account of the territories. It constitutes what Bueger has describes as an “epistemic infrastructure that brings together different sites” (Bueger, 2015, 7). Taken together, these processes reveal a dual delocalization, in which international mandates were translated into concrete practices of knowledge production, while local realities were simultaneously transformed into international negotiations within UN bodies.

Much of the existing literature addresses the question of whether the UN actually played a decisive role in ending colonial rule or whether the Trusteeship System merely perpetuated colonial domination under a different name. Important as this debate may be, it often overlooks a more fundamental question: how did the UN manage to exert influence in the first place? The translation-theoretical perspective developed here offers a way to answer this question more precisely. It suggests that the formal authority granted to the United Nations under the Charter, and the epistemic mandate assigned to the visiting missions under Article 87, provided a necessary, and itself historically contingent, condition for the UN’s involvement in decolonization. This mandate, however, had to be continuously translated into something credible and operative through the missions’ work of fieldwork, material arrangement, and the subsequent uptake of their reports. This achievement, in turn, was not equally shared. The same translations that produced the UN’s authority also determined, often along colonial lines, whose evidence, categories, and demands would register in the final account, and whose would be attenuated or omitted in the process. Making the UN an actor in decolonization, in this sense, also meant reproducing, even as it sometimes challenged, the inequalities of voice that colonial rule had already established.

While the developments traced here formally conclude with the end of the Trusteeship System, the final visiting mission took place in Palau in 1993, and the Trusteeship Council has been inactive since 1994, the mechanism of translation reconstructed in this article did not disappear along with it. The visiting missions examined here have themselves been read as an early example of UN field missions beyond peacekeeping (Lesch, 2023: 4), a lineage that extends, more recently, to international fact-finding missions and to the UN’s peacebuilding agenda. A crucial difference, however, lies in the temporality of this presence. Rather than sending missions at intervals of 2 or 3 years, as the Trusteeship System did, contemporary peacebuilding operations tend to establish a continuous UN presence on the ground, one that performs this work of translation not periodically, but as an ongoing practice.

This article began with the case of Western Samoa. It might be something of an exaggeration to view the 1947 petition from Samoa as the origin of everything that followed. Yet, as the article aimed to show, one should certainly not make the mistake of viewing UN practice solely from the perspective of headquarters. Examined under a microscope, individual, ostensibly sovereign decisions reveal themselves to be a multitude of interwoven interactions. This perspective brings into view actors who are easily overlooked when decolonization is told as a story of diplomats and resolutions. Stenographers, pilots, typewriters, recording devices, and the logistical efforts required to mobilize missions were as much threads in this fabric as the delegates who negotiated in New York. Taking such actors seriously, not as mere background detail but as participants in the making of decolonization, shifts attention away from a narrow focus on diplomatic actors and towards the far more heterogeneous set of actors, human and non-human alike, through which international decolonization was actually accomplished.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Nadine Ansorg, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

Reviewed by: Aidan Huang, Tsinghua University, China

Aline Larroyed, Dublin City University Library, Ireland