Introduction: preserving colonial difference?
While scholarship on the evolution of multilateralismFootnote 1 and international societyFootnote 2 has highlighted the post-war expansion of sovereign equality as a defining feature of international order and often equates post-war decolonization with the universalization of sovereign independence,Footnote 3 it has paid comparatively less attention to the institutional arrangements through which decolonization was governed. Former League of Nations mandate territories did not universally emerge as sovereign states, despite this being a theoretical possibility after World War II. Instead, many of these territories remained under United Nations (UN) auspices for more than a decade, even as local populations increasingly demanded independence and commitments to self-determination intensified. This raises a central question: how and why did the UN engage the colonial question at a moment when empire was increasingly framed as temporary, yet sovereignty, and access to it, remained unevenly distributed?
To address this, the article uses status as a lens for explaining not only how the UN Trusteeship System (TS) kept these hierarchies intact, but also why it gradually became dominated by colonial powers. Initially, the TS offered conditional openings for political participation under international oversight, such as visiting missions and petitions. Yet these openings were frequently undermined in practice by colonial administrations to maintain colonial difference through practices of status gatekeeping. Understanding this shift from promise to retrenchment requires analysing how maintaining the status quo shaped the evolving rules of order and ultimately re-established colonial hierarchies within a supposedly egalitarian multilateral setting. Drawing on multi-archival research, the article shows that post-war multilateral institutions did not simply inherit racialized imperial hierarchies but actively reproduced and recalibrated them in line with their own position within the emerging post-1945 order. The experience of the trusteeship territories shows that independence did not follow automatically from formal legal commitments to sovereignty but emerged through prolonged struggles spanning colonial administrations, metropolitan centres, and international institutions. This becomes evident in the cases of Cameroon and Togo under British and French trusteeship: Anticolonial actors, especially the ‘Union des Populations du Cameroun’ (UPC) and ‘Comité de l’Unité Togolaise’ (CUT), mobilized international norms in ways that repeatedly forced the Trusteeship Council (TC) to confront its contradictions.
Building on research on decolonization conflicts under UN auspicesFootnote 4 and metropolitan strategies,Footnote 5 the article shifts attention to international organizations,Footnote 6 where colonial diplomacy came into direct confrontation with anticolonial claims to sovereignty within the framework of the UN Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Within the TC, colonial difference was articulated through hierarchical classifications such as ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’, or ‘sovereign’ and ‘non-sovereign’, which ascribed racialized meanings to political competence and legitimacy to enable political domination and exclusion.Footnote 7 Rather than functioning solely as instruments of top-down imposition, these institutions operated as sites of contestation in which sovereignty, self-determination, and legitimacy were continuously negotiated.
Theoretically, the article contributes to International Relations (IR) debates on hierarchies and international organizations by foregrounding the imperial dimensions of status.Footnote 8 Recent scholarship has conceptualized status as relational and institutionally mediated rather than based on material power or legal authority,Footnote 9 with growing attention to the role of international institutions in reproducing hierarchical orders.Footnote 10 This literature has significantly advanced our understanding of status dynamics within international society, yet it has largely taken for granted the broader civilizational and developmental hierarchies through which access to status itself is structured. By analysing the UN TS, this article brings these hierarchies into view and shows how racialized status distinctions were institutionalized through seemingly participatory procedures, explaining both how imperial hierarchies were maintained and why colonial powers were invested in preserving their status.
While the article foregrounds the reproduction of racialized hierarchies, it also sheds light on the constrained forms of agency available to colonized actors seeking recognition within international institutions. Petitions, appeals to human rights, and engagements with UN visiting missions constituted attempts to articulate alternative status recognition and a voice within an institutional order. In this sense, the TS illuminates how hierarchies (or as Barros Leal FariasFootnote 11 frames it heterarchies) may be sustained within international organizations even and how they were contested. Despite its ostensibly pivotal role in shaping the UN’s approach to decolonization, the TS remains understudied in IR,Footnote 12 while existing scholarship has explored the imperial legacies of international organizations.Footnote 13
The remainder of the paper outlines the state of research on decolonization in multilateral organizations, outlines the theoretical framework and conceptual tools, presents the empirical analysis, and concludes with key findings and implications.
From empire to trusteeship: hierarchies and status in the UN
While the UN is often portrayed as an institution that helped shift norms around formal colonialism,Footnote 14 these bodies have faced increasing criticism as instruments of neocolonialism and racism.Footnote 15 Emerging scholarship highlights the agency, coordination, and contestation within the diverse coalition of countries often subsumed under the label Global South,Footnote 16 revealing the complexities and contradictions of this transformative era.Footnote 17 At the same time, historical studies on the imperial origins of the UNFootnote 18 show that international institutions were themselves part of colonial power structures and continued to carry them forward in transformed ways.Footnote 19
This ambivalence also shapes research on international administrationsFootnote 20 from the League of Nations Mandates to the TS: Studies on the Mandates show how colonial control was continued under the guise of international supervision.Footnote 21 Earlier contributions on the TS focused on organizational questionsFootnote 22 while later works emphasize colonial continuities, neocolonial dynamics, and postcolonial effects.Footnote 23 Comparative studies also show that international organizations developed closure mechanisms that induced violence.Footnote 24
These lines of research intersect with theoretical debates on empire, colonialism, and international hierarchies. Empire and colonialism are often conflated, but Go distinguishes between imperial and colonial forms of rule and shows how different modes of control transitioned into the formation of modern nation states.Footnote 25 The transition from empire to nation statesFootnote 26 invites critical reflection on how states, whether colonial or newly founded, managed changes in their status and whether hierarchies were truly dismantled or merely reconfigured.Footnote 27 This is where status research connects, which understands status as a relational, institutionally mediated, and access-ordering principle.Footnote 28 Status is rooted not in objective rankings, but in the collective and relational beliefs of others regarding a state’s rank on characteristics such as military power, economic strength, demographic weight, or diplomatic influence (especially for small statesFootnote 29),Footnote 30 with increasing attention to the role of international institutions and discursive practices in reproducing hierarchical orders.Footnote 31 As such, status-seeking is fundamentally about shaping perceptions of one’s rightful place in the international hierarchy and within ‘status communities’Footnote 32 and, thus, depends on explicit or implied hierarchiesFootnote 33 and social identities.Footnote 34
In interrogating the nature of these hierarchies after the foundation of the UN by using status as a lens so, the article engages two strands of hierarchy scholarship in IR:Footnote 35 one that conceptualizes hierarchy as global, structuring relations across levels and within societies,Footnote 36 and decolonial perspectives that locate hierarchical ordering in the ‘coloniality of power’.Footnote 37 Scholarship has long demonstrated how representations of the ‘other’ justified and sustained colonial rule.Footnote 38 As these works show, colonialism imposed hierarchies alongside the institutionalization of identities, including racial, ethnic, tribal, caste, and religious categories. Many works recognized racism as a core element of colonialism, essential for legitimizing unequal access to property and power.Footnote 39 Other research adds that colonial discourse portrayed the colonized as degenerate types, based on racial origin, to justify conquestFootnote 40 or to institutionalize specific ethnic identities, which persisted after independence.Footnote 41
Identities, classificatory schemes, and hierarchical systems codified during colonial rule remain embedded in global institutions, not only through colonial discourse but, more importantly, as status practices of colonial difference, as I use the term here, following Chatterjee.Footnote 42 As GoFootnote 43 points out, this does not assume a single form of racism, but rather multiple forms that were constantly renegotiated among colonial administrators. While meanings can shift across time and societies, Go shows that race might also carry multiple meanings within the same historical setting. Even within a single colonial empire, imperial agents might assign different racial meanings for different colonized groups or, as Go shows, they might construct varying meanings for the very same group. I use this understanding to examine how colonial difference, hierarchical classifications of the world into categories, such as ‘civilized/uncivilized’, ‘developed/underdeveloped’, and ‘sovereign /non-sovereign’, structured along racialized lines to enable domination,Footnote 44 was institutionalized through the TC.
Taken together, these perspectives direct attention to international institutions as sites where global hierarchies shaped by colonial power are translated into differentiated forms of membership, participation, and recognition. Membership in multilateral ‘clubs’,Footnote 45 such as the UN, has often been treated as an end in itself rather than as a conditional mode of participation through which responsibilities, rights, and recognition are unevenly distributed: First, that the UN’s implicit and explicit hierarchies emerged along imperial lines, as shown by the ways colonial powers used status-gatekeeping practices, such as undermining the right to petition; and second, that the UN managed the transition from colonialism to multilateralism in ways that not only preserved but also rearticulated different racialized hierarchies within its institutional framework, but also in local contexts, reflecting heterarchies as described by Barros Leal Farias.Footnote 46 In doing so, the article explains both how these hierarchies were produced and why they were actively maintained, namely, to safeguard the status of the former colonial powers. Rather than posing a binary of imperial tool versus emancipatory space, the article interrogates how the UN, in different historical situations, could serve contradictory purposes, enabling both the reproduction of empire and limited openings for anticolonial contestation.
To understand how these hierarchies were maintained and legitimized status as a structuring force is used as a lens. Status is, thus, perceptual and a relational judgment shaped by how actors evaluate a state’s legitimacy, development, or civilizational standing.Footnote 47 Crucially for this article, status is also racialized and its evaluative criteria are historically rooted in colonial ideologies that ascribe competence, value, and political maturity along racialized lines. This article, therefore, highlights how racialized status distinctions were not merely inherited from empire but actively institutionalized through the procedural and discursive practices of the TC and traces how colonial difference was embedded in organizational routines, classificatory schemes, and evaluative practices, which generated enduring status dissatisfaction and frustration. Accordingly, the article empirically describes dynamics of status gatekeeping by colonial powers, who sought to preserve their superior standing by policing access to the category of ‘civilized’ political actors; status recognition sought by anticolonial actors, who aimed to have their sovereign equality and political maturity acknowledged within international society; and status attainment pursued by the USSR, which used anti-imperial interventions to claim great-power authority and moral leadership vis-à-vis Western colonial states. These dynamics illuminate why actors were driven by status anxieties in these contexts.
Operationalization
This analysis is based on archival research,Footnote 48 as well as secondary literature and memoirs.Footnote 49 It examines the Cameroons under French and British rule France and Britain, a territory that, like Togo, was among the few divided between two administering powers (for both: UN ARMS A/RES/63 (I) of 13 December 1946). Both Cameroon and Togo were German colonies until the First World War. Following Germany’s defeat, their territories were partitioned between Britain and France and placed under League of Nations mandate.Footnote 50 This unique configuration provides insight into how colonial difference was simultaneously institutionalized and contested within the trusteeship framework, culminating in anticolonial frustration that ultimately erupted into violence. At the same time, sampling of petitions, meeting minutes, and related documentation from other trusteeship territories reveals that many of the dynamics observed in the cases were not unique but echoed across the system, albeit with varying intensities. Cameroon featured prominently in UN debates during the trusteeship era, as its transition to independence was marked by violent conflict that claimed tens of thousands of lives in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote 51 Although Togo experienced less overt violence, it operated as a structural twin case: anticolonial mobilization was equally pronounced as shown elsewhere,Footnote 52 and in both settings, such mobilization provoked extensive repression.
The empirical section proceeds in three steps and systematically traces the invocation, reaffirmation, and re-articulation of constitutive status differences: First, (a) it examines the TC design and its institutional promises. Second, (b) it analyses the practices of status gatekeeping and status recognition in annual reports, visiting missions, petition reviews, and questionnaires. Third, (c) it investigates TC deliberations and shows how the reframing of colonial difference reveals gradual semantic shifts that reflect heterarchical status orders in which actors sought to secure or contest status attainment.
The TS and its status hierarchies
The establishment of the TS as an institutional promise
When the UN was founded in 1945, large parts of the world were still under colonial rule, and the organization’s role in the processes of decolonization remained undecided.Footnote 53 Under these conditions, the organization’s subcommittees gradually became a forum for debating the future of empires throughout the 1950s.Footnote 54 The concept of international supervision emerged during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where U.S. President Woodrow Wilson proposed the Mandate System under the League of Nations.Footnote 55 Rooted in racist and paternalistic ideologies, the system portrayed colonized peoples as ‘backward’ and unprepared for self-rule, justifying continued colonial rule under the pretence of gradual development. Colonial powers claimed to uphold a ‘sacred trust of civilization’ while retaining control over the territories.Footnote 56 The Mandate System stipulated that territories taken from defeated powers in World War I would not be annexed but instead administered by victorious powers under international oversight until their eventual status was determined.Footnote 57 This system became increasingly contested after World War II as the defeat of Nazi Germany, heightened expectations for decolonization, reinforcing claims that colonial rule was similarly oppressive and illegitimate.Footnote 58
After early agreements among the Allied powers, more concrete plans for the TS were developed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and later at the San Francisco Conference.Footnote 59 At Yalta, two categories of territories were distinguished: those already under League of Nations mandates, which would transition to UN trusteeship, and the majority of colonies, categorized as ‘non-self-governing territories’ (NSGTs) and left outside the formal trusteeship framework.Footnote 60 By 1945, only 12 League of Nations mandates were still in existence: Nauru, New Guinea, Ruanda-Urundi, Togoland (under French and British administration), Cameroon (under French and British administration), the Pacific Islands (including the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas), Western Samoa, Tanganyika, Palestine, and South West Africa (now Namibia). While these mandates transitioned into UN trust territories, South Africa refused to bring South West Africa into the TS, defying international pressure.Footnote 61
The conference in San Francisco, which finalized the UN Charter, became a key site for the development of the TS. The Conference saw intensified public pressure to address colonialism, with over 1,500 civil society representatives participating, including 173 organizations officially registered with the U.S. State Department.Footnote 62 Among these were African American organizations advocating for an end to colonial rule, underscoring the growing global demand for decolonization. This pressure influenced the final structure of the TS, which reflected a tenuous balance between colonial interests and anticolonial movements as the system granted limited privileges to trusteeship inhabitants.
At the first session of the TC, Trygve Lie enthusiastically proclaimed: ‘I would emphasize that the International Trusteeship System is no mere prolongation of the Mandates System under the League of Nations. It is a new system of international supervision. Its scope is wider, its powers broader, and its potentialities far greater than those of the Mandates System.’Footnote 63 The reforms Lie referred to include both continuities and innovations: While the right of inhabitants of Trust Territories to submit petitions built on practices already established under the League of Nations mandate system,Footnote 64 the introduction of regular visiting missions represented a new institutionalized mechanism of international supervision. Furthermore, the TS marked a departure from the paternalistic tradition of labelling colonial populations as ‘uncivilized’ or belonging to inferior races and cultures. Instead, the Charter adopted more neutral and inclusive phrasing, emphasizing ‘political, economic, social, and educational advancement’, ‘progressive development’, and ‘equal treatment’. It also explicitly acknowledged the ‘freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’. In addition to the League’s mandate system, the UN Charter codified principles of colonial governance in the Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories. Signed by all member states, it affirmed self-government as the final objective of trusteeship. In doing so, it nominally framed imperial rule as both temporary and finite, which has been often seen as the most normatively promising feature of the TS.
The TC was one of the UN’s principal organs, operating alongside the Fourth Committee, which dealt with decolonization and trusteeship issues within the General Assembly framework. Initially, the system included 9 governing territories and 11 mandated overseeing powers, meeting regularly in the TC, typically twice a year in January and June.Footnote 65 According to the UN Charter, the TC was designed to balance the interests of administering and non-administering states. Its composition included (1) all UN member states responsible for trust territories (Australia, France, Britain, Belgium, New Zealand, and the US), (2) two non-administering permanent members of the Security Council (Soviet Union and China), and (3) four non-administering members, which were elected by the General Assembly for renewable three-year terms, to ensure equal representation between the two groups. The TC established different mechanisms for information gathering: As the primary one, annual reports submitted by the mandate powers, detailing the trust territories’ political, economic, social, and educational development. These were supplemented by questionnaires and periodic fact-finding missions conducted in the territories and reviewing oral and written petitions.
Practices of colonial difference: gatekeeping and claims to status recognition
British and French politicians took the potential threat of anticolonialism at the UN very seriouslyFootnote 66 and saw in the UN a forum for global debates and discussions about colonialism that could ultimately contribute to empire’s undoing. This concern shaped France’s early hesitation concerning the TS; even when the TC was created, it achieved a unique position for the French territories.Footnote 67 In following, Secretary-General Trygve Lie, who emphasized in his first address, ‘In the day-to-day functioning of the System, the Trusteeship Council is clearly the key organ,’Footnote 68 the next section examines how the TC’s routine procedures articulated colonial difference and how practices of status gatekeeping worked to stabilize it within this institutional setting.
Petition system
Only a few actors were granted the right to be heard before the UN’s principal organs, even though the UN Charter opens with the invocation ‘We the peoples of the United Nations’: sovereign states and the inhabitants of trust territories. This institutional promise created an opening for inhabitants from these territories, who could challenge colonial administrations in two ways: First, they could use their formal access to UN procedures to articulate demands for independence and raise a wide range of grievances. Second, they could mobilize information and symbolic politics to contest state narratives and hold colonial powers publicly accountable. Yet, the mandate powers exerted quasi-colonial control over mobility, politics, and the security of Trusteeship representation. Every visit, appointment, and discussion was meticulously curated, transforming the petitions and visiting missions into a tool for projecting a carefully managed image. The extensive debates over who could legitimately petition, on what grounds, and through which channels reveal that the practice was significantly reworked during the Trusteeship era.
The number of petitions submitted to the TC varied over time. For instance, in 1947, only 26 petitions were submitted, but the number dramatically increased in subsequent years. By 1951, a standing committee was established to handle petitions, tasked with reviewing them and writing reports on the necessary actions. However, this process created practical difficulties, including lengthy delays, which sometimes extended up to one year and a half, caused by the slow responses from the administering states. The high number of petitions – by 1956 the TC had received 20,000 petitions from Cameroon alone – posed another challenge, prompting the TC to introduce a new procedure that grouped petitions by complaint area instead of being examined one by one. In total, over 45,000 petitions were submitted from both the British and French territories of Cameroon.Footnote 69
Anticolonialists Sylvanus Olympio from the UN trusteeship of Togoland and Ruben Um Nyobè from Cameroonian Trusteeship under French administration were among the petition writers. Despite the system’s limited opportunities for participation, both Olympio and Um Nyobè strategically leveraged these channels to advocate for their countries within the UN. A key moment highlights the colonial difference in practice: Sylvanus Olympio became the earliest petitioner from Africa to deliver an oral statement before the UN TC in 1947. Recalling this event, an observer cited by Quaison-Sackey (1963), a Ghanaian politician, described the prejudices surrounding Olympio’s appearance at this international forum: ‘We heard that a petitioner was coming from Africa and didn’t know what to expect. None of the delegates knew much about Africa, and I sincerely believe that many of them expected someone to come rushing into the Council in a leopard skin accompanied by a rumble of drums. Instead of which, he strolled Sylvanus Olympio in his natty business suit. The delegates may not have known it, but they were seeing, for the first time, the shape of things to come.’Footnote 70 Olympio, a Western-educated member of Togoland’s Afro-Brazilian merchant elite, used his cultural capital and polished demeanour to advocate for Ewe unificationFootnote 71 and served as vice-president of the CUT, French Togoland’s earliest political party. Despite Olympio’s prominence, the French and British dismissed his representativeness, rejecting his call for a referendum on Ewe unification. The French initially attempted to discredit him as a communist,Footnote 72 but this accusation failed. Afterwards, they repressed the CUT, supporting pro-French parties like the Togolese Progress Party. By 1951, the CUT’s electoral boycotts left it sidelined, marking the unification movement’s initial defeat.
After Olympio’s interventions, other anticolonial representatives from regions including French Cameroon, Somaliland, and Tanganyika likewise became vocal in challenging the actions of their quasi-colonial administrations. Yet this was particularly evident in the case of oral presentations of petitions illustrates how administrative authorities exercised control over petitioners’ narratives prior to their appearance before the TC. Petitioners were repeatedly denied exit permits or visas and, when travel was permitted, it was often tightly circumscribed. In one instance, Um Nyobè and his party colleague Abel Kingue were granted only a highly restrictive C-class visa that limited their movements to a direct route between their hotel and the UN headquarters, explicitly to prevent contact with other lobby groups.Footnote 73 This constellation highlights a structural tension inherent in the TS: although deliberations were formally held at the UN’s New York headquarters, much of the effective control over political participation was exercised on the ground, in the territories under trusteeship.
The French administration was particularly concerned with the potential political consequences of these petitions. They feared that petitioners who appeared before the UN might return to their territories with enhanced personal prestige, potentially positioning themselves as spokespeople for the UN, which could damage the legitimacy of the colonial powers.Footnote 74 While early reports framed political mobilization as a sign of immaturity, later debates increasingly portrayed the same practices as evidence of premature politicization, a subtle but consequential shift in how political competence was defined. In TC debates, colonial powers argued that petitioners like Olympio lacked legitimacy: ‘Petitioners, however, had refused to participate […] because they felt that they had no chance of being in the majority. Instead of appealing to the people, they had appealed to the United Nations.’Footnote 75 Consequently, the movement shifted its focus from the imperial-dominated TC to the General Assembly’s Fourth Committee, where anticolonial arguments found more support.Footnote 76
Despite the large number of petitions, the TC’s response to human rights violations remained cautious and diplomatic.Footnote 77 At the outset, anticolonial actors nevertheless viewed the UN as a potential ally in their struggle for independence. As Um Nyobé emphasized, the UN was ‘a legitimizing element in our struggle’.Footnote 78 Yet his position was ambivalent: while insisting that the ultimate solution to Cameroon’s problems rested with Cameroonians themselves, he also held the UN accountable for fulfilling its responsibilities.Footnote 79 Over time, petitions shifted from formal socio-economic complaints to increasingly urgent calls for intervention in response to police violence and other forms of repression.Footnote 80 The May 1955 crackdown and the subsequent banning of the UPCFootnote 81 further intensified this dynamic, prompting the movement to use the TC more actively as a diplomatic arena to contest colonial authority. Petitions during this period not only denounced the French administration’s repressive actions but also called on the UN to take a stand against the colonial powers, primarily FranceFootnote 82: ‘Is the United Nations condoning the massacres in Cameroon? That is to say, a status that leaves the French colonialists full decision-making power over our foreign relations, our defence, our currency, our strategic raw materials, our higher education, our telecommunications, etc.’Footnote 83 Another petition demanded that the UN choose between upholding its Charter principles or supporting colonial powers: ‘The United Nations must choose between the principles of the Charter and support of the Colonialist Powers … The whole world is waiting for some gesture from you in this brutal tragedy of a defenceless people struggling against a Power endowed with modern means of extermination.’Footnote 84
These petitions were also critical in drawing attention to human rights violations, such as military pressure on the Cameroonian population to vote under the Loi CadreFootnote 85 in opposition to their will. In response, a petition stated: ‘We protest vehemently against this act which infringes the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’Footnote 86 Many petitions concluded with a reaffirmation of support for the UN and a vision of an independent and united Cameroon. The UPC’s efforts were not without success. Moments, such as the opportunity for Um Nyobé and Abel Kingué to present their political demands in New York in 1952, were seen as significant victories. Another success came in 1953 when the TC agreed to allow a petition to be presented orally before the General Assembly. In his speech, Um Nyobé highlighted the fundamental contradictions of the TS, arguing that the agreement was invalid as the Cameroonian population had never consented to it and that it contradicted the goals of the UN’s trusteeship mandate. He also called for a definitive plan and timeline for Cameroon’s independence.Footnote 87
The administering authorities reacted with slowing down proceedings and with restricting anonymous petitions, a practice already heavily curtailed in the formative years of the Trusteeship. This was particularly problematic, as petitioners had reported facing repression as a consequence of their petitioning activities. Nevertheless, in defending the prohibition on anonymous submissions, French representative Henri Laurentie invoked a distinctly Eurocentric moral hierarchy: ‘The Trusteeship Council had never judged those practices by the moral code of the so-called backward peoples but had invariably done so on the basis of the European moral code.’Footnote 88 Laurentie argued that the Council had no grounds to alter its policy on anonymous petitions, insisting that given that freedom of expression in the Trust Territories had formally not been questioned, such petitions must stem from motives of dubious integrity. Drawing on his experience in Africa, he further claimed that anonymous petitioners were fully aware of the impropriety of their actions. By rejecting anonymity on moral grounds rooted in ‘European norms’, Laurentie effectively delegitimized dissenting voices and asserted moral superiority.
While acknowledging the need for trained administrative personnel, the petitions and annual reports reveal deep inequalities between European and local inhabitants in Cameroon, particularly in elections, education, and career opportunities.Footnote 89 The system of two electoral collèges privileged white Europeans, like Louis Aujoulat,Footnote 90 over the local population, reinforcing colonial hierarchies. At the 688th meeting on 19 March 1956,Footnote 91 Mr. Lefevre (France) defended this structure, arguing that Europeans played a disproportionate role in the territory’s development. While he acknowledged the need for reforms towards a single-college system, disparities remained. This system safeguarded the political and social dominance of Europeans, reflecting broader colonial dynamics of exclusion and unequal representation within the governance of trust territories. In the same meeting, Guatemala’s raised concerns about wage discrimination, but Lefevre denied systematic inequality, citing legal guarantees of equal pay, though he admitted individual injustices might exist. This caters well to the fact that the main audience for the anticolonial UPC in Cameroon was so-called evoluées, Cameroonians who were well-educated and sought to climb the career ladder but were prevented from that by the overstaffed French administration.
This structural inequality extended to informal dimensions often obscured in archival documentation. For example, alcohol abuse among locals in TT was acknowledged only when it involved drivers of UN visiting missions, as it posed a potential threat to the safety of international observers.Footnote 92 No such records document incidents of alcohol abuse by internationals at the expense of local populations, underscoring whose security was prioritized.
Overall, as these paragraphs show, inhabitants of the trust territories could technically submit petitions to the UN, yet their voices carried little weight, as gatekeeping within the TC kept effective authority firmly with the administering powers.
Visiting missions
Visiting missions were another supervisory tool used by the TC to bridge the written data presented in yearbooks and petitions with on-the-ground impressions of ongoing developments. For each mission, the Council adopted a resolution setting the terms of reference; in general, each territory was visited about every three years. The members of the mission were nominated by the TC as well and consisted, in the early missions, of four people; later this number increased to six nominees, accompanied by members of the Secretariat,Footnote 93 a change possibly driven by growing interest in the missions and the rising number of hearings, prompting the missions during the trip to split up to accommodate them. Visiting missions and all expenses were financed by the UN, according to Rule 98 of the Trusteeship Agreement 1947. In 1952, the GA issued a resolution stating that the number of visiting missions should be reduced by evenly spending more time in each territory. According to the itineraries, the missions appeared to take the visiting function seriously, travelling to even smaller outposts. After completing their visits, the missions typically reconvened in Geneva to jointly draft the final report, which was subsequently circulated to the administering authorities and the TC.
Despite the immense travel activity and numerous hearings during the missions – for instance in Cameroon’s mission 1955 ‘some 40,000 communications and memoranda from groups and individuals’Footnote 94 were issued-they underscore the uneven distribution of power, revealing how colonial control reinforced existing hierarchies as these missions were not impartial from the beginning. This becomes evident when zooming in on the visiting mission to Cameroon in 1955. Prior to the UN mission in 1955, clear instructions were given on how the territory should present itself in the best light,Footnote 95 and detailed information about the composition and procedure of the mission was sent to regional and local administrators, alongside specific directives. These efforts reveal that France recognized the mission’s value for legitimizing its political strategies, and that it would become a pivotal moment in the subsequent trajectory of Cameroon’s trusteeship.
The final report noted the tense atmosphere, observing that the uprisings and aggressive propaganda by the UPC were likely to strengthen hostile attitudes across the territory.Footnote 96 The administration and Cameroonian politicians appeared divided, and the mission’s report suggested that unity was at risk.Footnote 97 A notable aspect of the report was the documented attempts by the UPC to contact the mission, which were unsuccessful. In its early paragraphs, the report clearly positioned itself against the UPC, describing it as ‘a movement on totalitarian lines, modelled on European Communist parties, which adopted their methods’ and stating that the UPC ‘bore sole responsibility for the disturbances’ of May 1955.Footnote 98 This stance demonstrates how the mission adopted the French narrative of the UPC as a threat to the peaceful developments.
The report further reveals how closely the Visiting Mission aligned itself with the French administration’s interpretation of local conditions. For instance, following a debate in the TC, a communiqué was published: ‘During its visit, the Mission will be able to observe the progress made in every field; as in the past, it will also give hearings to representatives of all lawfully constituted parties and organizations and to any private person speaking on his own behalf.’Footnote 99 This meant that the UPC, which had been banned in July 1955, was excluded from the hearings process. The delegitimizing strategies of the French administration had evidently created a strong foundation for reducing the political influence of the UPC. Interestingly, the mission was ambivalent in its treatment of violent events that occurred during the visit: ‘During the hearings at Garoua, a group from the southern part of the Territory, said to have been active members of the dissolved UPC, was attacked by horsemen and followers of the Lamido, brandishing riding crops and swords, when it was thought by the latter that the group of southerners would be granted an audience by the Mission. The Chairman expressed his displeasure at such acts of violence … and requested the Lamido to intervene immediately to stop the disturbance.’Footnote 100 This sequence of actions demonstrates how status gatekeeping operated through both local and international practices: the Lamido’s followers physically prevented UPC sympathizers from accessing the Mission, while the Mission’s own refusal to hear them reinforced their exclusion from recognition as legitimate political actors. Rather than a simple episode of disorder, the confrontation reveals how local, colonial, and international actors engaged in overlapping status practices that shaped who could speak, who was heard, and who was recognized as a political actor within the TS.
Further incidents involving the UPC took place during the trip. In one case, letters and publications from the UPC were presented to the mission, but it refused to accept and read them. Additionally, the report described a roadblock situation along a route the mission intended to travel, aimed at drawing attention to the UPC’s situation and the broader anticolonial movement in Cameroon, which was assessed as hostile and violent. As indicated in the report, the French administration and its security forces were only cautiously questioned about their actions against the UPC. When the High Commissioner was asked about rumours of gunfire in the area, he responded: ‘[I]n fact, patrols were active in many parts of the Region as it was one of the strongholds of the UPC, but […] no shots had been fired.’Footnote 101 This response suggests a very fragile security situation in Cameroon, yet no critical follow-up was conducted. Instead, the French administration’s narrative, that the situation was stable and under control, was simply accepted. The binary framing of ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ violence, and the TC’s preoccupation with stability, not only shaped how visiting missions operated but also resonates with debates on the ethics of anticolonial violenceFootnote 102 – a dilemma the UPC itself reflected uponFootnote 103 – and with the stabilization turn in UN peacekeeping,Footnote 104 making the visiting missions an instructive case for tracing these continuities.
What the mission seemed more interested in was the presence of UN materials in the territory as the report states: ‘… literature and posters published by the United Nations were displayed in school classrooms, libraries, cultural centers, and other institutions … Studies on the United Nations are held in many schools in connection with civics classes, to make the local inhabitants more aware of the general purposes and principles of the United Nations and the International Trusteeship System’.Footnote 105 This engagement with UN materials reveals certain ironies, as the UPC’s primary educational goal was to inform the population about their rights and privileges under UN trusteeship, distinguishing it from sole French colonial rule. Yet, credit for these efforts was given to the administration. The Visiting Mission’s report exemplifies how the French administration successfully imposed its interpretation of the situation. After the mission, the UPC expressed disappointment about their status and at being ignored, fuelling frustration as stated in one of their leaflets: ‘it is enough to know that even an American observer said of this Mission: if the 1955 visiting mission had been able to carry out the work for which it had been sent, the subsequent disorders would certainly not have occurred’.Footnote 106
Justifications of colonial difference in the TC: status heterarchies
Building on this, I now examine how such differentiation was justified in the TC through assessments of legitimacy, capacity, and political readiness that positioned political actors within different hierarchical orders. Within the meetings of the TC, colonial difference was indeed discussed, yet under the umbrella of the Cold War: Early in the history of the TS, the USSR boycotted the TC discussions, condemning it as an imperialist institution. Soviet bloc representatives regularly criticized Western colonial powers, pointing to the exploitation in trustee territories by highlighting the lack of adequate healthcare, education, and social services.Footnote 107 They particularly opposed the differentiation between Trusteeship territories and NSGTs, arguing that this distinction allowed for continued exploitation and inhibited genuine paths to self-governance.Footnote 108 Despite initially boycotting the TC’s first session,Footnote 109 the Soviet Union was vocal in its objections regarding the legitimacy of the trusteeship accords.Footnote 110 They were particularly concerned that former mandatory powers, now acting as administering authorities, might incorporate these territories into their neighbouring colonies, thereby undermining the stated goal of preparing them for independence.Footnote 111 Such objections were not merely strategic but also expressed Soviet status anxieties and aspirations: by challenging colonial practices, the USSR sought to signal its own authority as an anti-imperial actor and to contest Western dominance within the TS. This became evident during the 1948 Special Committee session on transmitting information, when the Soviet Union accused colonial powers of racial discriminatory practices in the non-self-governing territories. In response, France dismissed the allegations, claiming that racial discrimination was unknown in its territories.Footnote 112 By contrast, the Soviet Union positioned itself as the leader of anticolonial forces, yet its engagement with the TS was not without criticism, as Hayden observed: ‘The most earnest efforts at objectivity cannot avoid acceptance of the belief that the Soviet Union’s purpose in attending at all was to embarrass the administering authorities, to retard consideration of the agenda by lengthy and technical controversy about points of procedure, and to advertise the Soviet Union as the one true and consistent friend of the weak and oppressed …,’Footnote 113 which can be read as deliberate attempts to perform status attainment in the TS. This reading can be further nuanced by recent work showing that the Soviet Union itself engaged in practices of concealing imperial violence from foreign observers, paralleling the mandate powers’ practices.Footnote 114
Concretely, the routinely ways of challenging the administrating powers by addressing the colonial question are vividly expressed in the following vignettes: At the 653rd Opening Meeting on 7 February 1956,Footnote 115 debates over petitions in trust territories highlighted ongoing tensions. The Soviet Union was particularly vocal in criticizing the way petitions were handled, arguing that petitions were among the few meaningful mechanisms through which Indigenous communities could articulate grievances and engage in political processes. The Soviet Union, led by Mr. Grubyakov, criticized discriminatory petition practices, arguing that both written and oral petitions should be treated equally and all petitioners, regardless of political affiliation, should be granted hearings. However, administering powers resisted.Footnote 116 The French delegate blocked petitions following a visiting mission to French-administered Cameroon, while the U.S. representative, Mr. Gerig, selectively approved petitions, rejecting three as sub judice. Australia’s Mr. Walker aligned with France, citing legal justifications. Ultimately, the Council denied hearings for three UPC petitions, approving only one. These disputes reflected broader questions about anticolonial political agency, and with regard to Cameroon links to communist beliefs that needed to be prevented at all costs. The French representative, Mr. Barguès, defended restrictions, claiming trust territories followed French legal principles and political activities were limited only when public order was at risk. Similar arguments arose in discussions on Togoland, where Mr. Barguès tied political rights to economic and educational progress, warning against rapid democratization. When the Soviet Union proposed explicitly ensuring freedom of speech and assembly, France dismissed it as redundant, insisting such rights were already guaranteed. These records demonstrate a recurring pattern: while Soviet representatives consistently argued for broader local participation, administering powers maintained control under the narrative of security and stability. As the voting records of the 653rd–700th meetings show, colonial powers routinely voted as a bloc, often joined by the United States and Australia, to block proposals, ensuring that their interpretations of procedures prevailed and thereby limiting avenues for political mobilization and self-determination.Footnote 117
At the 685th meeting on 14 March 1956,Footnote 118 delegates expressed differing views on British administration in the Cameroons. While representatives from Burma, Italy, and Guatemala praised developments, the Soviet delegate, Bendryshev, offered a scathing critique. He argued that true self-government and economic independence required political freedom, which the British had failed to grant. The territory lacked separate political and administrative structures, local governance remained undemocratic, and traditional chiefs continued to wield administrative and judicial power. Economic and social conditions had not improved, with inadequate healthcare (only 23 doctors for 1.5 million people) and stagnant educational progress. The British, Bendryshev contended, justified the lack of progress by citing a shortage of trained personnel but did little to address it. In response, British delegate Burns dismissed the Soviet critique, calling it detached from reality. He thanked those who had recognized Britain’s efforts and assured the Council that constructive criticism would be considered. Burns also praised the Visiting Mission’s objective reporting, in contrast to what he saw as Soviet misrepresentation.
During the 686th meeting on 15 March 1956,Footnote 119 the French administration justified the lack of political progress in Cameroon by attributing it to so-called subversive activities. The French representative argued that certain groups had exploited France’s liberal policies, misleading the population and inciting unrest, culminating in the May 1955 uprisings mainly organized by the anticolonial UPC. Citing concerns over law and order, the French authorities banned the UPC and affiliated organizations under a 1936 law on private militias, rather than incorporating the party into the process towards self-determination.
At the 688th meeting on 19 March 1956, the French administration dismissed concerns over the absence of Cameroonian magistrates and civil servants, claiming that indigenous inhabitants lacked interest in administrative roles and preferred better-paid opportunities in the private sector. Although scholarships were intended to steer students towards public administration, they imposed only a moral expectation to serve. Additionally, discussions highlighted the complexities of French citizenship in Cameroon. The French representative clarified that ‘assimilated’ individuals were those who had applied for and obtained French naturalization, a process requiring proof of a lifestyle compatible with French status. He acknowledged that the term ‘assimilated’ was misleading, as it suggested a distinction within French citizenship, one that, in practice, privileged those of metropolitan French origin over African-born citizens. Being criticized for the slow pace of political development, administrative authorities often attributed it to local shortcomings rather than systemic exclusion. Unrest was framed as subversion, and limited African participation was defended as necessary for stability, with criticism in the TC dismissed as propaganda. In other cases, France and Britain states saw themselves as uniquely capable of providing development. Anti-communism further shaped trusteeship politics, as authorities aimed to empower the ‘right’ nationalists.
Taken together, these dynamics reveal how the TC became a site where colonial powers defended their authority through status gatekeeping, reframing structural inequalities as technical or moral deficiencies. These practices illuminate a broader pattern discussed earlier: during transitions from empire to the nation state, shifting hierarchies and unsettled norms heighten states’ sensitivity to status and intensify status-seeking behavior.Footnote 120 The article reveals how colonial differences persist under UN mandate, and to what extent the TC’s limited concessions fuelled anticolonial frustration by echoing dynamics observed in gender equality, where wartime institutional gains frequently provoke peacetime backlash.Footnote 121 In this context, anticolonial demands for status recognition similarly emerged from the tension between formal commitments to equality and the continued reproduction of hierarchical practices. By tracing these dynamics, it shows how the TC extended the ‘colonial question’ into a moment when decolonization had become inevitable, shaping the timing, scope, and limits of political possibility through institutional processes of closure.Footnote 122 The TS thus emerges as a paradoxical site of continuity, one that enabled limited change and strategic adaptation, preserving colonial pathways within a shifting international order and ultimately keeping the status quo intact. These overlapping logics explain not only how colonial difference was maintained, but in what ways it persisted despite the formal commitment to preparing territories for independence. In addition, the behaviour of the USSR and smaller states demonstrates that status attainment operated across multiple, intersecting arenas, vertical and horizontal alike, thereby underscoring the heterarchical structure of the international order.
Conclusion: preserving the status quo
This article examines how and why the UN engaged the colonial question at a moment when empire was increasingly framed as temporary, yet sovereignty, and access to it, remained unevenly distributed. It argues that institutions, such as the UN TC, preserved and reconfigured imperial hierarchies by using status as a lens. Despite the UN Charter’s formal commitment to sovereign equality, imperial powers used the TC to repackage colonial difference under the guise of international governance, maintaining racial hierarchies and status distinctions through institutional mechanisms. Rather than treating these hierarchies as residual legacies of empire, the article contends that they were actively reproduced and adapted through practices of status gatekeeping.
By zooming in on Cameroon and Togo, the article illustrates how status hierarchies were not only reproduced but also recalibrated over time. Categories such as civilization, development, and sovereignty did not operate as fixed standards but were repeatedly invoked, adjusted, and recombined in response to changing political dynamics. Through routine practices of reporting, petitioning, and evaluation, the TC thus remade colonial difference in the language of international governance. Beyond reproducing imperial hierarchies, Cameroon and Togo’s anticolonial actors also illuminate the constrained forms of status recognition within trusteeship governance. Political leaders and movements across all Trusteeships articulated claims to international recognition through practices such as petitioning, appeals to Human Rights norms, and engagements with visiting missions. These claims constituted attempts to reframe their status within an institutional order that persistently deferred recognition, even as it rhetorically embraced self-government. While such strategies rarely succeeded in transforming the hierarchical logics of the TC itself, they nonetheless reveal differentiated possibilities for agency within institutional settings structured by inequality. Importantly, their eventual independence did not result from trusteeship recognition alone, but from the growing dissonance between imperial governance practices, anticolonial mobilization, and shifting international political pressures. In this sense, both cases highlight how hierarchies may be sustained within international institutions even as they are gradually dismantled through forms of political action that exceed, and ultimately undermine, their formal frameworks. As the UN’s membership expanded with newly independent states emerging from colonialism, the TC became increasingly shaped by the in-build dominance of administrative authorities that were simultaneously colonial powers in neighbouring states. In reality, many inhabitants perceived little difference between colonial rule and UN Trusteeship. This continuity of imperial power illustrates how colonial legacies persist, shaping contemporary realities long after formal colonialism’s end.
The TS is shown to have institutionalized racialized hierarchies, thereby legitimizing unequal access to sovereignty and shaping the conditions for newly independent states in the existing world order. This question, together with the broader evolution and reconfiguration of the international system during this period, cautions against a simplistic reading of trusteeship for other settings. The ongoing designation of 17 territories as NSGTs by the UN further reflects enduring unequal power dynamics and constrained self-governance. While the Council ceased its primary activities in 1994, proposals to repurpose it for contemporary global challenges, such as managing global commons (e.g., seabed and outer space),Footnote 123 Gaza,Footnote 124 or serving as a forum for minority and indigenous peoples, have emerged.Footnote 125 These discussions contend that the TC remains relevant today, yet underscore the need for critical reflection on its limits pointing to the need for a broader research agenda that situates trusteeship within the shifting architecture of global hierarchy. Future work could build on this in several directions: First, smaller states played a more significant role in decolonization and within the TS than this article could cover; further investigation, for instance, into Guatemala’s interventions or aspects of competition among newly independent states-in-waitingFootnote 126 would illuminate how they shaped debates and outcomes. This line of inquiry could be supported by emerging quantitative work that begins to revisit the TC.Footnote 127 Second, as Ba’sFootnote 128 (forthcoming) work on nuclear testing during the trusteeships of the Bikini Atolls illustrates, UN supervision also often operated in zones of legal and political exception,Footnote 129 where populations were displaced, experimented upon, or rendered invisible. Connecting these cases highlights how trusteeship produced not only political inequality but also spatial, environmental, and bodily hierarchies. Furthermore, the entanglements between trusteeship, international law, and fascist governance, as seen in the Italian trusteeship of Somalia,Footnote 130 invite renewed scrutiny of how legal doctrines of ‘international responsibility’ have been mobilized to justify domination rather than protection and how fascist laws are intertwined with international mandates. Third, the recurring invocation of trusteeship in contemporary debates, from Palestine to climate governance, suggests that the concept retains political appeal despite its historical failures. Understanding why trusteeship repeatedly resurfaces, and why it consistently fails to deliver on its promise, requires closer attention to the racialized and civilizational assumptions embedded in the model and IR itself.Footnote 131 Taken together, these avenues underscore that trusteeship is not a relic of the past but a window into the ongoing reconfiguration of hierarchy, legality, and status in world politics.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210526102010.
Acknowledgements
This article was developed for the workshops ‘Race and Multilateralism’, curated by Prof. Dr. Lora Viola (SCRIPTS, Berlin) in the years of 2024 and 2025. I am grateful to Lora Viola and the workshop participants for their generous and constructive feedback, which significantly shaped the manuscript in its current form. I would especially like to thank Ksenia Oksamytna, Sarah von Billerbeck, Rich Maas, Paul McDonald, Oumar Ba, Catherine Lu, Desh Girod, Yang Han, Joanne Yao, Vincent Pouliot, Mohamed Sesay, and Mariam Salehi for their thoughtful engagement at various stages of the writing process. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, which further strengthened the final version of this article. Funded by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Bayreuth.
Open access
