Author Archives: Kevin O’Sullivan

About Kevin O’Sullivan

is a lecturer in history at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and is also an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham. His first book, Ireland, Africa and the End of Empire: Small State Identity in the Cold War, 1955-75, was published in 2012 by Manchester University Press, and he has written most recently on the history of humanitarian NGOs in the Journal of Genocide Research (2014) and in Marc Frey, et al., eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945-1990 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). His current project examines the social and political phenomena that shaped the rapid expansion of the humanitarian NGO sector globally in the long 1970s.

Feed the World or Fight for Justice (or Both)?

April 30, 2015 by
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This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring short articles by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Johanna Bockman and Patrick Sharma. A conference centre in the small town of Haslemere, 43 miles south-west of central London, is an unlikely place to start a revolution. But it was there, in January 1968, that a group of twenty-five “young and disillusioned” members of Britain’s NGO sector (acting in an individual capacity, but happy to be recognised as Continue reading →

The Search for Justice: NGOs in Britain and Ireland and the New International Economic Order, 1968–82

March 19, 2015 by
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On May 10, 1974, representatives from six leading British NGOs sat down to a meeting with Prime Minister Harold Wilson and three of his cabinet colleagues at 10 Downing Street. Their aim was simple: to persuade Wilson’s Labour Party government of the inherently global nature of poverty and the need for an appropriately global response. Coming just nine days after the UN General Assembly approved the G-77’s Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), this ad hoc Group for Action on Continue reading → Continue reading →