Kal Raustiala's biography of Ralph Johnson Bunche befittingly opens with the 1951 Academy Awards Ceremony and with Fred Astaire at the podium. Wearing a white tie and tails, Bunche is welcomed to the stage by a raucous showbiz crowd. It is no doubt a cinematic opening, a literary technique rarely used by scholars of international relations or international law.

The decision to start the book with such an opening suits the main protagonist. Bunche, who would spend many years in Los Angeles, was a well-rounded intellectual, a lover of music, sports, and entertainment. With a very amusing writing supplemented by his deep expertise as a professor of Comparative and International Law in the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Kal Raustiala manages with The Absolutely Indispensable Man not only to tell the captivating story of an exceptional man but also to deliver a treatise of twentieth century international relations’ theory and history.

Like Bunche's speech on that memorable occasion, Raustiala's book jumps quickly into substance and highlights the three central themes of Bunche's life, namely: (1) his fight for the self-determination of the peoples under colonial rule; (2) his commitment to the United Nations and the development of its basic and most fundamental tools for action; and (3) his fight against racism at home and abroad.

Born in 1904 in Detroit, Bunche's early days receive little attention in the book. This is not to say that Raustiala is uninterested; vignettes of his family and childhood provide the necessary brush strokes to depict Bunche in his childhood and early teens. However, unlike the 1993 Bunche biography authored by his friend and colleague, Sir Brian Urquhart, An American Odyssey,Footnote ¹ Raustiala omits many of the details of the lives of Bunche's parents, siblings, or ancestors. The family's connection with slavery's legacy is covered extensively in Urquhart's biography, whereas Raustiala briefly mentions it but focuses instead on the making of Bunche, the intellectual and the diplomat.

Brought up by his maternal grandmother (“the literal matriarch of our ‘clan’” (p. 5)), Ralph Bunche soon became an accomplished student. Highly driven and competitive—his grandmother instilled in him that he had no real limits but those he imposed on himself—Bunche was also an athlete. He started his academic career as an undergraduate at UCLA, followed by graduate studies at Harvard University, where he obtained his master's degree in 1928, and culminating in his appointment, at the age of twenty-five, as professor in the newly established political science department of Howard University. While a Howard professor, Bunche pursued a PhD at Harvard University. As described by Raustiala, Bunche's doctoral focus on colonial rule was unusual, but he thought it was important given the vast expanse of empire. Moreover, he found deplorable that the “American Negro” had seen fit to ignore the question of colonial rule in Africa and instead focused on what he would term “petty local problems” (p. 21). (Howard University's president would later complain that “Bunche is going all the way to Africa to find a problem” (p. 47).)

Against the backdrop of 1920s concepts of race, power, and human destiny, Bunche began his colonial research with a special focus on French West Africa. As Raustiala notes, this was a fateful choice that would launch Bunche onto an unimagined path, putting him at the center of “the single most dramatic and momentous change” in the governance of the lives of hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa: the process of decolonization (p. 22).

Indeed, the book describes in detail the virtually unprecedented journey traveling by ship to Paris and Geneva and later to West Africa; only one other political scientist in America had ever studied colonial governance on the ground in Africa. In these discussions, Raustiala provides useful background on the League of Nations’ mandate system, which provided an intellectual context and point of departure for Bunche's reflections. During this time, Bunche also developed an interest in Marxist thought, and in a paper at a Howard University conference on the broader trajectory of imperial rule, he traced the links between capitalism and imperialism, drawn previously by Vladimir Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism. (These associations with Marxism, echoed some years later in his own book A World View of Race, would make him the object of McCarthyism in the 1950s.) Bunche's primary thesis, however, was about the importance of keeping local people and their preferences central in governance decisions, a position that married his own sensitivity for basic concepts of racial justice with traditional liberal thinking. Bunche returned to the United States and submitted his thesis in 1936.

Throughout this period, Bunche's work also continued at home. Most prominently, he participated in Gunnar Myrdal's major and influential multi-year project, An American Dilemma, on racial relations in the United States, which led President Harry S. Truman to establish the first presidential commission on race relations and helped shape the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1936, Bunche's important monograph, A World View of Race, was published. In this volume, Bunche addressed the intersection between geopolitics and race, a topic of continued relevance today and a constant throughout his career. The book denounced the hypocrisy of Western powers, who professed belief in equality and yet ruled over others they deemed inferior on the basis of race. Coinciding with the positions of some of his contemporaries, such as W.E.B. Dubois, Bunche considered racial relations as much a geopolitical issue as a civil rights issue. His Marxist undertones and reference to imperialism as an international expression of capitalism in A World View of Race concerned his editor and Howard colleague, Alain Locke. (Bunche would later retract some of his positions in that book.)

Continuing his academic career, Bunche moved to London in 1937 to study anthropology under London School of Economics’ Professor Bronislaw Malinowski, expanding the incredibly broad network of intellectual and influential figures that would mark his life and career. In London, he would launch a new stream of research that would take him to South Africa (which had recently been granted independence from Britain), Kenya, Tanzania, and later to Southeast Asia.

In light of his solid credentials, in 1941, Bunche was recruited to be an analyst in the Office of Strategic Services (the intelligence service of the United States during World War II) to head up the colonial aspects of their intelligence work. It was while working in this capacity that Bunche embarked decisively on a journey to unwind European colonialism in what Raustiala describes as “a principled, practical, and politically realistic manner” (p. 70). In 1943, Bunche was transferred to the U.S. State Department, slowly moving into the definitive chemin toward the United Nations.

Raustiala provides elaborate and necessary political and academic context to explain Bunche's journey. These passages not only teach the reader much about Bunche's times, but also enable the reader to assess and contextualize Bunche's historical contribution. The text also emphasizes Bunche's foresight, carefully explaining how he anticipated many of the key geopolitical developments of his time. Not surprisingly, Bunche becomes an indispensable figure at the newly established United Nations. With most of the founding documents still uninterpreted, the United Nations provided an ideal setting for talented individuals with experience and vision to create the tools for the UN to advance its mission.

In hindsight, Bunche seems to have always been at the right place at the right time, uniquely placed to influence the course of history.

For example, before the San Francisco Conference in 1945, Bunche authored a secret memorandum for President Roosevelt arguing that the new post-war organization should have a system of international trusteeship for the existing mandates under the League of Nations as well as other territories. In that memorandum, Bunche recommended that colonial peoples be given full independence in accordance with a fixed time schedule. As it happened, in San Francisco, debates over decolonization and trusteeship were at the heart of many of the negotiations. At Yalta, held months earlier in 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had broadly agreed on the need to replace the League system of mandates but how to do so was still to be determined. This gave Bunche an opening to show his value. Indeed, at San Francisco, Bunche sought to forge a set of provisions about colonies that were ambitious and yet politically workable.

As Raustiala explains, Bunche was fully aware of the fact that not necessarily all societies were ready to rule themselves ably. At the same time, he came to believe that waiting for the right moment for freedom was morally wrong and politically difficult. He felt that when a people demanded self-government, they ought to get it. As a pragmatist, the key—he believed—was that the international community served as the bridge to modernity (p. 99).

While San Francisco would not yield the dismantling of existing empires, a process of trusteeship that would move colonies toward independence was born then, under the auspices of the newly created International Organization. The United Nations would become a global forum for the expression of the basic principle of self-rule as reflected in Article 1(2) of the UN Charter, providing the legitimacy of the Organization to the idea of freedom for all peoples.

To be sure, these topics were controversial for they posed serious existential challenges to major European powers accustomed to rule unrestrained. Despite much opposition to international oversight over the end of colonial empire, the process culminated successfully in the creation of the Trusteeship Council, effectively achieving the goal—advocated by Bunche and others—of allowing the peoples under colonial rule to bring their claims before a newly created international body and to recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories were paramount, as provided for in Article 73 of the UN Charter. The process toward decolonization had started and Bunche had a key role to play in it.

In 1946, as part of the U.S. delegation which included Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he befriended throughout his life, Bunche traveled to London to attend the first meetings of various organs of the newly created United Nations Organization. These meetings provided an opportunity to make sense of the UN Charter and bring it to life. In London, he was first approached to join the UN and work for the Trusteeship Division, and later that year, he decided to take the opportunity and join the new Secretariat (initially on secondment from the State Department until, in 1947, he became a UN staff member).

His first challenge came soon after joining the UN Secretariat in relation to Palestine, a conflict and a region in which he had little experience or interest. In 1947, UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie tasked Bunche to lead the preparatory commission that would study the scope of the challenges in Palestine against the backdrop of Britain's decision to leave Palestine and have the United Nations decide the territory's future.

Contrary to the current narrative of siloed work between the General Assembly and the Security Council, the Palestine example illustrates vividly how both organs had then (and can still today have),Footnote ² a very active dialogue in managing conflict,Footnote ³ in large part thanks to the proactive engagement of Secretariat officials.

Raustiala's narrative in the chapters covering Palestine is particularly riveting, filled with colorful details and anecdotes of leading actors, the complex politics, and the difficult tasks the UN faced. In Bunche's words, “Palestine was a battleground” (p. 184). In a show of resolve and responding to the violence that erupted right after the departure of the British soldiers and Israel's declaration of independence in May 1948, the General Assembly empowered a committee of its own consisting of the five permanent members of the Security Council to appoint a UN mediator for Palestine. Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden was appointed by the Security Council soon thereafter and Trygve Lie would immediately task Bunche to accompany Bernadotte as the secretary-general's chief representative in Palestine.

With very different abilities and sensitivities toward the parties in conflict, Bernadotte and Bunche succeeded in securing an early truce and establishing their headquarters outside of Palestine, in the nearby island of Rhodes. But their next steps were highly unsatisfactory to the parties, particularly regarding the treatment of Jerusalem. Tragically, Bernadotte was assassinated in September of 1948 by members of the Lehi group, a Jewish paramilitary underground organization deeply opposed to the partition of Palestine and the UN process. Through sheer luck, Bunche was not with Bernadotte, and the brazen attack would have the effect of catapulting Bunche to the center of the UN process as acting mediator for Palestine.

In that role, Bunche proposed an armistice-based approach to move from the existing truce into a sturdier framework. Egypt was the first of four Arab countries to agree to Bunche's proposed negotiations with Israel. As an astute mediator, Bunche was able to forge a successful outcome by carefully choosing where and how the parties would meet and interact, cultivating special relationships with members of the delegations involved in the negotiations and designing a novel mediation process. In fact, by placing himself at the middle of the negotiations (the “Rhodes formula”), Bunche enabled each side to claim that it was not talking to the enemy. (This is a formula that would be later used in many other processes, including in solving gang violence in Los Angeles.) He also introduced the concept of demilitarized zones, a notion that Israel accepted only reluctantly. The priority for Bunche was to end the war and in achieving this goal he charted new territory.

By the end of July 1949, in a space of approximately seven months, the result of Bunche's work was evident: Israel had negotiated and signed armistice agreements with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. (To any observer of today's dynamics in the Middle East, the results of Bunche's work were nothing short of astonishing.) Bunche's mediation provided—in Raustiala's words—a “proof of concept” for UN conflict management and would become a core task of the Organization.

In recognition of his work in relation to the armistice agreements, Bunche was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. He was the first person of color to receive the award, and it effectively turned him into a superhero. In the chapter entitled “Bunche Fever,” Raustiala describes Bunche's immediate rise to stardom in parallel with his life back at the UN where he was still technically a mid-level official in the Trusteeship Division.

With the arrival of Dag Hammarskjöld as secretary-general in 1953, Bunche's UN career took a new turn, as he was transferred from the Trusteeship Division to the executive office of the secretary-general and was promoted to the position of under-secretary-general. While at first their relationship was awkward, Hammarskjöld and Bunche would soon become the perfect match. The two men would have a decisive influence in the creation of UN peacekeeping.

In highlighting Bunche's belief that many global conflicts and tensions have their roots in colonialism, Raustiala contributes not only to ongoing conversations on the impact of colonialism on twentieth century history, but to current debates over colonialism's impact on twenty-first century political developments. Much of the book is indeed a new look at Bunche's thinking. Raustiala also provides exhaustive background on the political processes unfolding in the 1950s with particular focus on the rising antipathy to Western dominance and colonial rule.

Raustiala's presentation of this background sets the scene for the Suez crisis, and helps the reader better understand the complex politics of the time and the underlying rationale for the solutions proposed. In addition to Egypt and Israel, two permanent members (France and the United Kingdom) would be directly involved in the crisis, thus paralyzing the Security Council.Footnote ⁴ Raustiala gives step-by-step details on the creation of the first United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) by the General Assembly to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities, an effort that gave birth to the modern practice of UN peacekeeping.

Comically referred to in the book as “Bunche's army,” UNEF deployed with the consent of Egypt, paving the way to what would become one of the most popular tools at the disposal of the United Nations in addressing conflict. Ultimately, it was Lester Pearson—the Canadian ambassador critically involved with Hammarskjöld and Bunche in the establishment of the Force—who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for his work on UNEF.

Only three years later, in what Bunche would term “The Year of Africa” (seventeen African nations became independent), he was sent to Congo. Like the UN mediation in Rhodes or the first UN Emergency Force, Congo would become yet another “proof of concept”; this time for the UN's ability to help create new states in territories emerging from colonial rule. Indeed, the UN, as the agent of the international community (with its own legal personality), would become an ally of new governments assuming power for the first time.

At the time of its independence from Belgium in 1960, Congo was challenged by centrifugal forces posing very serious obstacles to nation building, as well as by Cold War dynamics endangering the stability and viability of the country. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba's anti-colonial speech at the ceremony of independence presaged the tragedy that would ensue. Indeed, violence would soon erupt, with the country's three most prominent factions—Western, mainly Belgian, citizens, Congolese nationalists, and the secessionists from the mineral-rich Katanga—in conflict.

Raustiala explains how Bunche moved rapidly to deploy a UN peacekeeping contingent. At first, most of the troops deployed were African but slowly Bunche—characteristically sensitive to racial issues—succeeded in having also white soldiers, a strategic move that he deemed essential to gaining the confidence of the Congolese people. Race was a growing source of social division in Congo and soon also in the world.

Bunche would not only be the architect behind the concept but would actually become the Force Commander of the newly created United Nations Operation in Congo (ONUC). (He would be later replaced by a career military officer, Swedish General Carl van Horn.) In his role as Force Commander, Bunche elaborated a few basic principles, namely: no fighting and non-intervention in domestic disputes. These principles were not entirely upheld during the course of the mission but constituted the incipient steps toward what are now the basic principles of modern peacekeeping: consent of the parties; impartiality; and non-use of force except in self-defense or defense of the mandate.

In early 1961, Lumumba was assassinated, and soon thereafter ONUC abandoned its neutral stance and entered a new escalatory phase. Under the umbrella of Council Resolution 161 (1961), ONUC launched large offensives against mercenaries and foreign soldiers. While UNEF had been deployed as a force between two hostile nations, ONUC became actively engaged in hostilities. ONUC's engagement in turn made the UN a target of attacks (an aspect of modern peacekeeping that unfortunately has been normalized), and the conflict entered a period of critical danger for the UN. Indeed, Dag Hammarskjöld would pay the ultimate price; he was killed when the plane he was taking to a meeting with the president of Katanga crashed. To date, the cause of the crash is uncertain, and his death remains cloaked in a shroud of mystery.

After Palestine, Egypt, and Congo, Bunche was involved—with varying degrees of success—in a myriad of other conflicts until his death, after almost a quarter of a century of service to the Organization, in 1971. During this time, while he continued to accumulate successes and consolidate an unparalleled legacy, Bunche struggled to reconcile his personal and professional life. Toward the end of his life, he reflected more openly about the toll his professional career at the United Nations imposed on his personal life and on his relationship with his family.

Bunche also reflected on the challenges UN senior officials face. Both Raustiala and Urquhart highlight Bunche's integrity but recall his statement in 1963 denying any attempt by the U.S. government to give instructions or advice, a claim plainly disproved by the documentation and evidence described in the two biographies. Acknowledging the inevitability of such phenomena, Raustiala dwells on the pressures imposed on senior officials to navigate the harsh realities of advancing the UN's objectives while sometimes accommodating strong national interests, an issue that remains a recurring question today.Footnote ⁵

Always an optimist, never discouraged but at times frustrated, Bunche persisted with determination and a firm belief in humanity. By the end of his life, however, Bunche veered toward a less optimistic thinking. In fact, he openly renounced the goal of brotherhood (a theme of his early thinking) in favor of simple coexistence. In that sense, Bunche found satisfaction in his work on peacekeeping since—in his view—it created the space for coexistence by promoting the conditions for diplomacy and negotiation and the use of “military men for peace instead of war” (p. 536). Regarding race, Bunche was also clear and open that race was in fact the root of many conflicts and problems in world politics.

In The Indispensable Man, the American civil rights movement appears indissolubly linked to the process of decolonization. As Raustiala explains, for African Americans to see representatives of black countries walking freely in the UN halls stood in stark contrast with their own daily experience of Jim Crow. In some way, the decolonization process led by and at the UN contributed to the impetus of the civil rights movement in the 1960s in which Bunche would actively participate, marching side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with whom he became very close.

Through discussions of the numerous conflicts involving post-colonial settings in which Bunche was involved (including Yemen, Cyprus, and Bahrain), The Indispensable Man also invites fundamental reflection—particularly important today in the new and emerging geopolitical equilibrium—regarding the “UN Dilemma” involving the need to develop national ownership and the need to retain internationalism and cooperation inherent to the UN itself. As a result, criticism of the UN occurs often at the difficult intersection between national interests of states and upholding international values and objectives. This has become a critical hurdle for the UN lately to achieve tangible cooperation regarding threats of an existential nature such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and pandemics.

The Indispensable Man also takes place against the backdrop of the mid-twentieth century emergence of the United States as a hegemonic power replacing, to a certain extent, former European colonial powers in establishing new forms of empire. Yet the book contains little to no reference of Bunche's criticism of what would become a steady rise of the United States’ interference in the domestic affairs of states. To be sure, Bunche is deeply critical of the United States’ role in Vietnam, a conflict in relation to which he becomes very outspoken (his own son Ralph Jr. would be deployed together with thousands of other young Americans).

By Raustiala's own account, The Indispensable Man is not a conventional biography. Rather, building on his extensive expertise in the field of international relations and international law, Raustiala delivers a treatise of twentieth century international relations’ history. In doing so, he revisits, and highlights twentieth century Black internationalist thought. Very well written and extensively researched, Raustiala contextualizes Bunche's contributions as a diplomat and policy maker.

Raustiala is adept at weaving in the voices of intellectual figures contemporary to Bunche in explaining Bunche's own contributions, in many respects ahead of his time, to modern international relations’ liberalism. In doing so, the book contains abundant academic references, offering an accessible overview of relevant international relations’ theory. Missing from the book, however, and from Bunche's thinking is of course feminist theory, which at the time was largely inexistent, only emerging in the 1980s. More surprising though is the absence of contemporary feminist figures such as Lorraine Hansberry.

Written in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic and the global outrage at the death of George Floyd and the ensuing renewed impetus of the Black Lives Matter movement, The Indispensable Man recovers Bunche's thinking and reinserts it center stage into early twenty-first century reflections on race and conflict. As if no time had elapsed since the writing of A Worldview of Race, Raustiala unearths Bunche's reflections on colonialism and race, which continue to loom large in UN halls.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, still unresolved consequences of colonial rule as well as the legacy of systemic racism continue to cloud efforts to resolve conflicts before the Security Council, most prominently in Africa but also elsewhere. Reading the pages of The Indispensable Man one cannot help wondering what Bunche's assessment of the current state of world affairs would be.

The Indispensable Man tells the story of Bunche's evolution from his 1930s “radical years” to his thinking later in life. In doing so, Raustiala offers extensive context for Bunche's “change of heart” about Marxist thinking as well as his experience later in his life faced with charges of conspiracy and disloyalty. Yet, Bunche remained consistently radical about the need to end all forms of oppression, including empire. Bunche's staunch defense of accountability mechanisms for trusteeship and his continued criticism of imperialism demonstrates that, also later in his life, he was equally convinced of the need to “keep a steady fire burning under the [colonial] powers” (p. 150). Despite the manipulation of his image as an establishment figure, Bunche was equally radical in his criticism of American racism. Somehow clouded by his unwavering commitment to American ideals (“As a Negro, my demand is very simple. I just want to be an American” (p. 569).), Bunche would become a victim of cultural politics of race and considered a “conservative” by some of his contemporaneous Black intellectuals, such as Malcom X and Adam Clayton Powell.

For many current UN staffers, Ralph Bunche is a largely unknown figure. And yet, his mark on the Organization is large and indelible. Together with Dag Hammarskjöld, Urquhart, and very few others from the founding era, Bunche's intellectual innovations continue to be the backbone of the Organization's action in pursuit of peace. The thousands of employees of the Organization who daily cross First Avenue in New York into the United Nations Headquarters hardly notice the small piece of land named Ralph Bunche Park with the towering obelisk “Peace Form One” by Daniel Larue Johnson. Opened in 1979, the significance of that space, like that of Bunche himself, has been regrettably neglected.

Raustiala's biography shines a necessary light on a towering figure of the twentieth century. Bunche personifies as no other the attributes of the international civil servant. He was deeply convinced of his own responsibility in achieving a world of peace and brotherhood, and he believed in the UN as more than just a negotiating forum. Bunche's commitment, creativity, audacity, and grit are qualities to be rescued and embraced by the international civil servants of today as they confront the enormous challenges of this already difficult twenty-first century and ensure that the Organization of the United Nations remains—like Bunche—forever indispensable.