Despite the state-centric approach we will adopt as a starting-point, it must be said that one of the paradoxes and fascinations of the history of these global organisations is that while they have confirmed and embodied the sovereign state model, they have been impressively instrumental in undermining or transforming the very principle of sovereignty; not the least of these transformations has been in the field of human rights. By examining states’ perceptions and attitudes towards the UN as well as the complex multi-lateral dynamics the UN has helped generate, we hope to be able to relate how the UN has been used by the states and how in turn the UN has imposed various kinds of constraints on the states. In other words, our examination of member states’ political relations with the UN can directly contribute to an inquiry into the UN’s roles as a major agent of ‘global governance’. This is precisely the theme of the major inter-disciplinary research project on which we at the Faculty Law and Politics of Hokkaido University are currently working funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture.

The conference is organised in a form that will hopefully stimulate interaction between historians and international political scientists of more theoretical orientation. Admittedly, mainstream international historians have tended to dismiss the UN as powerless and of marginal significance to realpolitik while political theorists of the UN have not always been free from reductionism and formalism. The recent crises over Iraq and North Korea in particular appear to urge us to redress the gap between case-by-case empiricism and a generalist approach in the study of the UN. The largely chronological order in which the sessions are organised will hopefully allow participants to frame the evolution of the League/UN in the context of a broad international political history of the past hundred years. Also, it may be of fresh interest to conventional students of the UN that half of the sessions are in some way or other related to East Asia, which is of course the site of this conference. With keynote speeches by Dr Sadako Ogata, former High Commissioner of the UNHCR, and Sir Marrack Goulding, former Under Secretary General of the UN in charge of Peace Keeping Operations (1986-97), the sessions will be open to the public. Selected papers will later be published in book form in Japanese