Fulfilling the Sacred Trust explores the implementation of international accountability for dependent territories under the United Nations during the early Cold War era. Although the Western nations that drafted the UN Charter saw the organization as a means of maintaining the international status quo they controlled, newly independent nations saw the UN as an instrument of decolonization and an agent of change disrupting global political norms. Mary Ann Heiss documents the unprecedented process through which these new nations came to wrest control of the United Nations from the World War II victors that founded it, allowing the UN to become a vehicle for global reform.

Heiss examines the consequences of these early changes on the global political landscape in the midst of heightened international tensions playing out in Europe, the developing world, and the UN General Assembly. She puts this anti-colonial advocacy for accountability into perspective by making connections between the campaign for international accountability in the United Nations and other postwar international reform efforts such as the anti-apartheid movement, Pan-Africanism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the drive for global human rights.

Chronicling the combative history of this campaign, Fulfilling the Sacred Trust details the global impact of the larger UN reformist effort. Heiss demonstrates the unintended impact of decolonization on the United Nations and its agenda, as well as the shift in global influence from the developed to the developing world.

Mary Ann Heiss is Associate Professor at Kent State University. She is author of Empire and Nationhood.

Mary Ann Heiss has written a genuinely terrific examination of trusteeship and colonialism, illuminating the complex and contested struggle between United States, Great Britain, and the UN's new members after World War II. Her book is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the Cold War and decolonization.

Jeffrey Byrne, University of British Columbia, author of Mecca of Revolution:

Fulfilling the Sacred Trust constitutes a precise, serious, and rigorous intervention in a very prominent field of inquiry at present, the history of international organizations and global governance. I can't think of a better portrayal of what actually happens on the UN's higher levels of debate and diplomacy.