Mapping Populations: The United Nations, Globalization, and Engendered Spaces, 1948-1960.

Lynne Phillips [*]

Over the last hundred years, we in the more favored parts of the world have been doing all that we could to displace [the] attitude of resignation and feeling of inability to do anything about such circumstances ["poverty and disease and ignorance"]. We sent missionaries throughout the world preaching the gospel of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and converting a lot of people in the underdeveloped areas of the world to a conviction that they can in fact work out an improvement of their own lives. In addition to these religious missionaries we sent out trade missionaries, commercial agents, who aroused desires on the part of the people of the underdeveloped areas for conditions of life and physical comforts that are commonplace in the advanced countries of the West. Moreover, during both World Wars, but particularly during the second, we sent our military forces into practically every corner of the world so that at the present time there is no place anywhere on the globe in which any consider able number of peoples live who do not know that it is possible for a human being to live a far better life than is customary for three quarters of the human race. [1]

In the above statement made by UN Director-General Hugh Keenleyside in 1951, one can only be struck by the homogenization of "desires," the perceived differences between the "West" and the "underdeveloped," and the overwhelming need for widespread intervention. Embodying the "brotherhood of man," this interventionist orientation reveals early forms of mapping populations that draw our attention to the ways in which UN cartographies have made space political. It also alerts us to the location of gender in such processes. These cartographies, pervasive in UN policy since the organization's inception, provide a glimpse into the management of space and the production of gendered spaces during the incipient phases of globalization: the historical process that has absorbed specific localities, reconstituted identities, and reorganized the spaces, places, and social relations of production.

The United Nations makes a compelling case for the study of globalization because the development of the concept of human rights and the rights of women in particular were primary goals of the organization and formed an important part of the UN's discourses from its onset. There are, however, a number of issues that complicate the UN context. First, as a global institution, UN development policies did not aim to represent regional concerns but were ostensibly an amalgamation of the concerns of all countries and the general populace. Yet, beginning in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, developing East-West confrontations sharpened disagreement on many issues, many related to gender. Consequently, UN policies framed the rural as a site of enormous interventions that had implications for the ways in which gender was debated and incorporated into the organization's agenda.

Second, in pre-1970s discourses about human rights, the United Nations developed two covenants. [2] One covenant promoted political and civil rights, while the other dealt with economic, social, and cultural rights. [3] This distinction is important because, although the UN Committee on the Status of Women (UNCSW) had the broad mandate to make recommendations "on promoting women's rights in political, economic, social and educational fields" (UN 1995, 16, 148), women 's issues were addressed more narrowly as political and civil issues. Political and civil rights were considered more easily protected by the courts, more suitable to monitoring by "fact-finding" bodies, and more quickly implemented than economic, social, and cultural rights. [4] Thus, women were more visible in UN debates about political and civil rights. Understanding the place of gender in this early period, however, requires an alternative perspective that moves us beyond a legalistic reading of this history to one that reveals the United Nat ions as a significant agent for mapping the "inequities" of the modern world.

Undertaking research on the historical configurations of gender in the field of rural development immediately following World War II requires facing a major conceptual problem: women seldom emerge in early textual accounts of the United Nations. While there exists a substantial record on the historical creation of the male farmer in developing countries, rural women, it seems, have been left uncharted; at best, they are understood as timeless "mothers" removed from the public eye. It would appear that the United Nations did not address rural women's concerns until after the 1970s. [5] However, by formulating a more spatially sensitive analysis of imperialist expansion and by recognizing that places are not clearly visible entities, [6] this article sets out to reevaluate the placement of gender in early UN development projects and to challenge the ways in which populations were mapped and targeted for new forms of globalization.

Increasingly, researchers are emphasizing the analytical importance of space for examining contemporary social transformations that may not, at first sight, be evident. [7] Studies that focus on colonial expansion and globalization raise new questions about how social space has been conceptualized historically and the extent to which notions of space have been imposed on developing countries by the West. These studies consider how space has been culturally represented over time, by whom, and with what consequences. [8] In this way, they alert us to the need for alternative frameworks to explore the influence of historical interventions on our understanding of gender and globalization and for revisiting the post-World War II emergence of "rural development" as an arena of intervention in the lives of women and men.