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‘Hidden Motives’? African Women, Forced Marriage and Knowledge Production at the United Nations, 1950–62

The period following the Second World War saw much international debate around African marriage, especially practices believed by Western observers to be coercive, and the emergence of international instruments ostensibly designed to counter these practices. Drawing on feminist readings of governmentalities, this article explores United Nations debates around the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, and the 1962 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages. Despite the United Nations’s preferred impression of benign universality, neither the international debates around forced and early marriage, nor the instruments they generated, were the product of neutral ‘expertise’. Rather, they represented attempts to reframe and govern marriage and the family through knowledge production. The interventions produced did not – and were not intended to – produce tangible benefits in the lives of African women and girls. Instead, they served political ends in the adversarial atmosphere of the decolonization and Cold War-era United Nations, and also represented continuities with earlier colonial ideas. In the creation of these discursive framings, African women’s voices were largely ignored, excluding them from debates that concerned them and minimizing their contributions to international ‘knowledge’.