Building States examines how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process. Eva-Maria Muschik traces how UN personnel pioneered a new kind of state building in the midst of decolonization.

Eva-Maria Muschik is a historian and an assistant professor in the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna.

Perrin Selcer, author of The Postwar Origins of the Global Environment: How the United Nations Built Spaceship Earth:
Building States will find an enthusiastic audience among historians and IR scholars interested in international organizations and development. Muschik’s focus on public administration is an important addition to the wealth of studies on agricultural and infrastructural development projects. Through a series of well-researched case studies, Muschik explores how "technical assistance" came to emphasize state-building as a job best handled by professionals and reveals how subtle (and not so subtle) tensions between ideals of expertise and democracy played out in practice.

Alessandro Iandolo, Harvard University:
Building States is a highly original book. It pushes forward our understanding of the international history of the United Nations, and it also acts as a powerful corrective to studies that lionize uncritically the work of the UN.

Samuel Moyn, Yale University:
The formation of the United Nations in 1945 proved essential to the decolonization of the world, as Eva-Maria Muschik elegantly demonstrates in this state-of-the-art international history. In its first twenty years, the UN machinery was instrumental in new states’ attainment of formal sovereignty—and played an even more pivotal role in the development of many new states after their emergence. Revising our understanding of an era in which the UN’s contribution has often been criticized or trivialized, Muschik has transformed the study of international governance.