Teaching the politics of international organization

Abstract

June 1985 marked the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the San Francisco conference on international organization that adopted the UN charter. This period, distinguished by the absence of war between the superpowers, is double the period that elapsed between 1918 and 1939. It was the hope and intention of those gathered at San Francisco that their labours would produce an institutional framework of collective security in which a recurrence of the conditions and behaviour that characterized the inter-war period could be avoided.