“Third Worlding” International Organization: The Parallel Quests of Santa-Cruz and Aga Khan for a New International Institutional Order (1946–2002)

The literature on the history of international organization tends to highlight the dominant role of European internationalists and their (arguably) secular cosmopolitan visions in the life and functioning of these institutions. Conversely, in our contribution, we trace the parallel trajectories of two path-breaking figures in the United Nations (UN) with affinities with the Global South and between the 1950s and 1990s: Hernán Santa-Cruz and Sadruddin Aga Khan. In the tense international (dis)order of the Cold War, they both relied on a combination of Third Worldist solidarity and religious visions, more specifically Catholic Socialism and Ismaili Shi’ism, to advance proposals for alternative international order(s) in the North while simultaneously promoting the ‘global’ in the South. Their narratives shed light on how international civil servants with anticolonial visions pushed for an expansion of the mandate of IOs to pursue a fairer distribution of resources at the planetary scale and to empower formerly colonized peoples to shape the ‘global’ in their own terms. Moreover, Santa Cruz and Aga Khan’s trajectories allow us to break free from the binary of ‘secular’ liberal internationalism vs ‘irrational’ religious cosmopolitanism and explore the immanent religious undertones of internationalism in the international institutions of the post-decolonization era. Finally, both histories show that the Cold War, contrary to the common assumption, was not a time of hiatus, but rather an intense period of dispute where lawyer-diplomats from the ‘Global South’ attempted to remake the world in its own likeness and image —a struggle that is far from over.