In the 1940s, the idea of a UN permanent military was at the core of contentious negotiations which had a major impact on the relations between the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, it became one of the principal problems in the re-configurations of the relations between the only remaining superpower and the most important international organization during the "unipolar" moment.

This event will focus on the idea of the creation of a UN permanent military. It will explain the origins of the idea at the end of the Second World War and its revival at the end of the Cold War. Moreover, it will discuss how this was not just a utopian or idealistic scheme, but a problem which shaped relations between the main actors of the international system.

Flavia Gasbarri holds a PhD in War Studies from King's College London, where she is currently Teaching Fellow, co-Chair of the Africa Research Group and member of the Centre for Grand Strategy. Her doctoral project was entitled "The United States and the end of the Cold War in Africa, 1988-1994" and for her thesis’ fieldwork, she spent one semester (April-September 2012) in the United States as Junior Visiting Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. She has also extensively researched on US policy in the Rwandan genocide and in the Great Lakes region

Ian Johnson received his B.A. from Claremont McKenna College in 2009. He then worked as a cartographer and consultant before beginning his doctoral work at the Ohio State University. He received his MA degree in history there in 2012. A recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship and the HF Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, he was also a Smith-Richardson Predoctoral fellow in International Security Studies at Yale during the 2015-2016 academic year. He completed his Ph.D. in 2016, with a dissertation that explored secret military cooperation between the Soviet Union and Germany prior to World War Two. He is the editor of a forthcoming book, The White Nights: Pages from a Russian Doctor’s Notebook (Bowen Press Books, Fall 2017), and author of the soon-to-be released The Faustian Bargain: Secret Soviet-German Military Cooperation in the Interwar Period (Oxford University Press, Fall 2018)