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Maria Witteveen (1904-1991) started her international career in 1931 at the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva. From there she was appointed secretary to the Netherlands delegation to the First General Assembly of the UN which met in London in January 1946. This provided Maria with an opening into diplomacy and she joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the following year as Counsellor to the Netherlands representation at the UN in New York. Despite an atmosphere that was unfriendly to women, she managed to obtain a permanent footing among Dutch diplomats, evidenced in a posting to Moscow in 1953 and then promotion to become Permanent Representative at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in 1956. Maria left this post in 1963, not to be re-posted until her retirement from the Dutch foreign service in 1969.

This article argues that writing longer, deeper and wider histories of UN observances can help to push forward the historiography of international organizations, and to overcome global-local dichotomies in writing about international interventions in the Global South. To make this point, it uses one historical case study: the International Year of Disabled Persons (iydp) in 1981 and how it played out in Kenya. The main argument is that this UN observance did not bring about “global” approaches that stood in stark contrast to “local” ways of dealing with disability. Writing a longer history shows how the approaches promoted during the iydp can be traced back to late colonialism; a deeper history shows how this event played out on the ground, rather than on an abstract global level; and a wider history lays bare the broad range of actors involved beyond “the UN.”

The article discusses the creation of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (idndr, 1990–1999), a global observance event that emanated neither from within the United Nations – for whom until then disaster management or rights of disaster victims had not been a real priority – nor from within civil society organizations or governments. In actuality, it was primarily a scientist-led initiative. This article suggests that this episode is a rare example of a joint effort on the part of a scientific community to create international scientific institutions to deal with the issue of disaster risk. The framing of the issue as “scientific” by earth scientists led the UN Secretariat and governments to embrace an issue that they had hitherto neglected. However, archival evidence also suggests that the eventual takeover of the project by the UN bureaucracy weakened the role of earth scientists in the idndr and changed its orientation.

Diplomats as consumers and producers of literary texts have a long history. More recent, however, is a literary understanding of dress, ceremony, gifts, and other trappings of the diplomatic profession as essential components of representation – of power, of the state, and of diplomats themselves.