Ecumenical Action in World Politics

The study shows how the CCIA (the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs) was created and how it established itself as an agency of its parent bodies in the context of the political polarisation of the world in the early Cold War era. The study spans the years 1945 to 1949, from the end of the Second World War to the early stages of the Cold War. It introduces a significant factor almost wholly ignored in the history of the ecumenical movement and its relations to the United Nations: the major contribution of the CCIA in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.