John Kent au séminaire du CEHEC

The seminar will give the opportunity to examine the role of the UN in conflict resolution in Africa in the 1960s and its relation to the Cold War. Focussing on the Congo, it will be tried to show how the preservation of the existing economic and social order in the Congo was a key element in the decolonisation process and the fighting of the Cold War. It links the international aspects of British, Belgian, Angolan and Central African Federation involvement with the roles of the US and UN in order to understand how supplies to and profits from the Congo were producing growing African problems. This large Central African country played a vital, if not fully understood role, in the Cold War and proved to be a fascinating example of complex African problems of decolonisation interacting with international forces, in ways that revealed a great deal about the problems inherent in colonialism and its end.

The lecture will cover four neglected areas in decolonisation in general and in the Congo in particular :
1.  The economic arrangements made by the Belgian government pre-independence and the role of European capitalists, particularly Tanganyika Concessions and the UMHK in the arrangements for the distribution of future profits in the independent State which were threatened by the failure to prevent Lumumba becoming Prime Minister
2. The reasons for the agreement by virtually all interested parties on the need to eliminate Lumumba
3. The role of the UN in allying closely with the US and the issues on which the US and UN did not always agree even though the State Department drafted key UN papers including the final UN plan
4. The strange way in which secession ended almost by chance with important roles played by on the spot low level officials sometimes under the influence of alcohol.

John KENT, M.A., Ph.D. (Aberdeen)

Taught at the Universities of Aberdeen and Strathclyde and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. Been at the London School of Economics since 1987
                                               
Present position
Reader in International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Chair of Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
Editorial Board Cold War History
Joint Editor of CIS series with Routledge

Published Books

America, the UN and Decolonisation: Cold War Conflict in the Congo 1959-1964 (Routledge, 2010)

The Internationalization of Colonialism: Britain, France and Black Africa, 1939-1956 (OUP, 1992) pp xi+365.

British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944-1949 (Leicester University Press, 1993) pp viii+224.

British Documents on the End of Empire, Series B, Volume 4, (ed) Egypt and the Defence of the Middle East, 1945-1956

           Part 1 1945-1949 pp cx+386

           Part 2 1949-1953 pp xxii+594

           Part 3 1953-1956 pp xxxv+590

(Stationary Office,1998)

with John Young International Relations since 1945:A Global History (OUP January 2004) pp xx, 743.



Numerous articles on French and British West Africa, Egypt and the Middle East and British foreign and colonial policy in the early Cold War and  US policy to Black Africa