This article considers how an established international organization with responsibility for programs of pure and applied science adapts its organizational format and purposes to newly defined tasks. It examines the institutional response of IOC (the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission) to the specification of new obligations in the environmental field as stipulated by the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and as developed by the Environmental Program that the Conference established. Its main theme is the place of specialized knowledge, and the role of experts at the various stages of policy formation, within national governments and international forums. In analyzing the adaptation of IOC through expert and non-expert activities, our aim is to determine whether new programs and initiatives are fiUed to the existing framework, or produce new structures and institutional arrangements.

Its operation in the Congo has developed into a crucial test of the United Nationsframework for international collaboration. Under the authority of a Security Council mandate the United Nations has assumed an unprecedented range of military and civil responsibilities. To discharge these responsibilities, an executive agent (United Nations Organization in the Congo, ONUC) has been created under the direct supervision of the Secretary General. Within a month of its initiation, the Congo operation became the focus of a virulent stream of criticism from the Soviet bloc and other Member governments; it was soon evident that not only ONUC was under attack, but also the concept of a United Nations executive agent, the independence of the Secretariat, and die institution of die Secretary-General.

The author's first connection with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came on the 16th of December, 1950. It was at a time when the world situation seemed to be deteriorating rapidly. The Chinese had just entered the war in Korea and the Council of NATO was to meet in Brussels on December 18th to consider urgent action to strengthen and organize defenses against aggression, should it occur in Europe.

This special issue of International Organization looks back on the first fifty years, and especially the last thirty, of this journal. As former editors, we were asked by the editorial board in 1996 to create a special fiftieth anniversary issue. In good academic style, the thought came late and the issue is tardy: you will notice that this is volume 52 of International Organization (founded in 1947). Like many a graduate student over these decades, we hope that the quality of our product will compensate for our long-standing “incomplete.”

Colonial warfare has been a frequent and bloody feature of international relations, yet most studies of wartime civilian victimization focus on either interstate or civil wars. In this article I argue that ignoring colonial violence has distorted our understanding of state-directed violence against civilians in wartime. I introduce a new theory of colonial violence, which focuses on the distinctive strategic, normative, and institutional incentives that colonial powers have to harm civilians. To assess this theory, I introduce and analyze a new data set of 193 cases of colonial war from 1816 to 2003. Using a variety of measures of civilian harm, I find that colonial wars are especially brutal. Three-quarters of states in colonial wars targeted civilians, for example, compared to less than a third of states in interstate wars. But some colonial wars are harder on civilians than others. Colonial powers are more likely to harm civilians when their indigenous adversaries employ guerrilla tactics, when their indigenous adversaries come from a different perceived racial background, and when the colonial state relies on settlers or indigenous intermediaries to help compensate for its relative weakness. By ignoring colonial violence in world politics, we misunderstand the scale and scope of state-directed violence against civilians and miss an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the causes of this brutality.

The signing of the ANZUS Pact represented a confluence of attitudes. Australia and New Zealand were disturbed at the liberal Japanese peace treaty, while the United States wanted the treaty to go through with as little opposition as possible. All three countries were afraid of the march of communism in the Far East. The ANZUS Treaty made the Japanese peace settlement palatable to the Pacific Dominions, and at the same time it improved the channels of military cooperation in the Pacific. The significance of ANZUS lay as much in what it did not say as in its formal provisions; the United Kingdom was not included in ANZUS, and its absence gave rise to an extended debate in several countries. There were objections from certain Australian and New Zealand political leaders, and in the United Kingdom the Conservatives lamented “exclusion” while the Labor government declared “… it would not have been unwelcome to us if we had been included in the proposed pact”.

The sixth meeting of the International Telegraph Consultative Committee was held in Brussels from May 10 to 27, 1948, the first meeting of the committee since 1936. C. Caenepenne, head of the Belgian delegation, was elected chairman of the conference, and E. C. Smith, head of the South African delegation, was elected vice-chairman. Committee reports presented to the conference included studies of the quality of transmission, standardization of telegraphic devices, relays, and general telegraphic and telephonic problems. Organizational matters for the interim period between meetings of the committee were discussed and a budget accepted. The seventh meeting of the Consultative Committee was scheduled for 1951 in the Netherlands.

The fifth South Pacific Conference was held at Utulei village, near Pago Pago, American Samoa, on July 18–27, 1962, under the chairmanship of Mr. Kowles A. Ryerson, Senior Commissioner for the United States on the South Pacific Commission. Topics discussed by the standing committees and in the preliminary sessions of the Conference mainly related to economic and social development and health. Subjects included methods of training Pacific islanders in business methods and practices ways of improving the quality and marketing of agricultural produce and of developing marketing efficiency, the changing role of women in the region, the importance of organized adult eduction schemes, and ways of obtaining a reasonable balance between social advancement and economic development in the South Pacific region. Delegates also reviewed the work of the South Pacific Commission since the last Conference was held in 1959.

The existence of regional arrangements rests on two assumptions: First, the recognition that world unity, based on a common way of life and common values, is still very distant; and second, the increasingly inescapable conviction that, in our time, the great majority of national states are political and economic units illequipped to develop fully and even survive on solely national bases. Politically, most states have lost ground in a world which has had its centers of power radically diminished in the course of a generation. Economically, they are units too small to develop fully their natural resources and overcome their poverty unless they work together. The modern world needs to create regional units as a bridge between the isolated national state and a sufficiently integrated world collectivity of the future.

At an extraordinary session of the Assembly of the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO), held on January 10, 1963, the appointment of Mr. Jean Roullier (France) as Secretary-General was approved.

The Trusteeship Council held its 30th session comprising its 1203rd–1224th meetings from May 29 to June 26, 1963. At the 1203rd meeting Mr. Barnes (Liberia) was elected President of the Council and Mr. Corner (New Zealand) was elected Vice President.

On July 10, 1950 the Interim Committee of the General Assembly met to consider the following items: 1) the report of the Subcommittee on International Cooperation in the Political Field; 2) the report of the United Nations Commission for Eritrea; and 3) the study of procedure to delimit the boundaries of the former Italian Colonies. Before these matters could be discussed, however, the committee had to elect a new vice-chairman as Abdur Rahim Khan (Pakistan) had submitted his resignation from that position following his appointment as representative of Pakistan on the United Nations Advisory Council for Libya.

The Soviet attack on the United Nations during the Fifteenth General Assembly, along with the Congo operation, has served to dramatize the emergence of the World Organization as a far-flung administrative instrumentality. Initially organized primarily to manage meetings and to provide clearing-house functions, the UN Secretariat has progressively taken on a wide variety of “action research” projects both in New York and in the regional economic commissions. More important still, it has become engaged in a complex congeries of field programs which now absorb roughly half the time of its professional personnel. Not only does it help to plan economic, social, and technical programs of increasing magnitude, but it undertakes to implement such programs around the globe—often in cooperation with one or more of the specialized agencies. Certain of these programs, e.g., the Special Fund and OPEX (Operational, Executive, and Administrative Personnel), owe their design in large part to ideas originating within the UN bureaucracy: spurred by the Secretary-General's leadership the staff has dared to improvise and to innovate as the political climate has permitted.

Weighted voting at the UN has been suggested for various reasons: (1) to overcome the problems of the mini-states now being admitted, with one vote just as the very large states have; (2) to prevent voting in the General Assembly from swinging any further in the anti-West, anti-Israel direction; (3) to satisfy the requirements of democratic justice: i.e., “one person-one vote,” not “one nation-one vote”; and, (4) to reflect more realistically the distribution of power among nations.

The sixteenth session of the Trusteeship Council was held at UN Headquarters from v June 8 to July 22, 1955. At the opening meeting Mason Sears (United States) was elected president and Max Dorsinville (Haiti) vice-president. An agenda of 20 items was adopted by the Council, which devoted the greater part of the session to examination of the annual reports on the administration of the trust territories of Somaliland, the Pacific Islands, Western Samoa, New Guinea and Nauru. The Council also made arrangements for visiting missions for 1955, and dealt with a number of questions referred to it by the General Assembly. Before concluding its sixteenth session, the Council adopted the report of the Secretary-General on credentials, and elected R. M. Urquía (El Salvador) temporary president for the fifth special session of the Council, which was to be held at UN Headquarters in October or November, 1955 for the purpose of considering the special report of the 1955 visiting mission to the trust territories of Togoland under British administration and Togoland under French administration.

Probably no other organ of the United Nations concerned with economic affairs has been so closely dependent on the current temper of east-west relations as the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE). The paralyzing effect of the cold war on ECE was such tiiat its activities, as distinct from its membership, have become truly all-European only within the last three years. To outline this development and reflect upon the present character of east-west cooperation within ECE is die concern of this article. But first a few words about die character of the organization itself, for its constitution is a poor guide.

The 41st (Maritime) session of the International Labor Conference was held in Geneva from April 29 to May 14, 1958, under the presidency of Mr. I. Kawasaki (Japanese government delegate). It was attended by 370 delegates, advisers, and observers, representing the governments, shipowners, and seafarers of 46 member countries. The Conference took note of reports from its credentials committee, declaring that the objections lodged against the nomination of the Chinese delegation and the Indian workers' delegation were irreceivable.

International economic organizations once identified as Western have evolved in some cases to the extent that their survival depends importantly on forging symbiotic links with Third and Fourth World clients. Such national governments often derive net gains from membership in those organizations, for example, the World Bank. These gains may be as much political as economic. Thus the Government of India, influential in World Bank policy generally, has used Bank agricultural projects to overcome states' resistance to central priorities. Mobilizing domestic political resources is an important dimension of membership in the international economy. Where this occurs, it argues for a view of the governments of poor countries as active, rather than passive, and as agents of domestic social transformation.