Telling the world about historic peacekeeping efforts

On 1 January, 1942, a document was signed by 26 states, coining the term "United Nations". The Declaration of the United Nations External link pledged that their governments would continue fighting together against the Axis Powers. Swiss Public Television, RTS, takes a closer look at attempts to make historic documents like these available to a wider public. (RTS/swissinfo.ch)

The Geneva archives are testament to efforts to establish peace through diplomacy. The League of Nations was the predecessor of the United Nations, and was the first international organisation that set out to achieve world peace. The 26 years of the League’s history are summed up in 15 million pages. 

These documents will soon be available on the Internet, thanks partly to students at the University of Geneva. They are busy deciphering and indexing the documents with the help of thousands of Internet users via an online research platform. The project is part of a crowdsourcing project and it’s like a social media site for researchers.

The efforts of the League of Nations did not remove the major obstacles to peace which occurred in the early ‘30s, and it was powerless in the face of the Second World War. But it did embed the concept of international cooperation in people’s minds.