Sarah Wambaugh
The post-World War One peace treaties left several unresolved territorial disputes across Europe and may have revived previously dormant conflicts elsewhere, especially in Latin America. The League of Nations sought to settle these disputes by internationally monitored plebiscites, from Schleswig in 1920 to the Saar in 1935. Sarah Wambaugh (1882-1955), a now forgotten American political scientist, was the undisputed authority on territorial plebiscites, travelling the world as an international observer for the League, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and various national governments. Wambaugh wrote extensively on these always contentious and sometimes violent elections, and on the wider theory and practice of plebiscitary democracy. A confirmed internationalist and feminist, she believed that internationally co-ordinated plebiscites entrenched democratic practice and promoted the rights of women and other disenfranchised constituencies.
Wambaugh’s massive, 1100-page Monograph on Plebiscites, with accompanying official documents, was published by Oxford University Press at the behest of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1920 and summarised her initial thinking on how to organise plebiscites in the wake of World War One. The text included many detailed maps of the economic, social, cultural and linguistic geographies of disputed territories in Europe and Latin America.
In 1933, Wambaugh produced a two-volume update, Plebiscites since the World War, also accompanied by official documents but with a mass of additional material on the often fraught elections she had witnessed. She concluded her analysis with 18 specific recommendations, the last of which insisted that international plebiscites ‘must include women as well as men’. A plebiscite conducted in an area that had not been thoroughly internationalised in advance was, she argued, ‘a crime against the inhabitants as well as against political science itself’.
Further information:
Sarah Wambaugh (1920) A Monograph on Plebiscites. With a collection of official documents, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law (New York: Oxford University Press): https://archive.org/details/amonographonple00wambgoog/