After two years of war and tens of thousands of casualties, Israel and Hamas have accepted a peace plan put forward by US President Donald Trump. The agreement offers a structured plan for the release of all hostages, a phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the strip, and a pathway to recognition of an independent Palestinian state under a reformed Palestinian Authority. In the meantime, Gaza will be governed not by Hamas or Israel, but by an international transitional administration dubbed the “Board of Peace.” Chaired by Trump and including figures such as former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, this board will oversee a technocratic Palestinian administration, backed by an International Stabilization Force drawn from Arab and international partners. Sovereignty over the Gaza Strip, then, will rest with the Board of Peace: Trump, counseled by Blair and various international partners, will hold the final authority.
Trump’s proposal may sound novel, but it belongs to a long tradition of international territorial management. Studying that history can help us understand both the promise and pitfalls of Trump’s plan for Gaza.
When multiple powerful states have overlapping strategic interests in a particular place but find exclusive control by any one actor unacceptable or destabilizing, they create international zones to govern that space cooperatively. Over the past two centuries, states have repeatedly experimented with these arrangements, with examples ranging from the Shanghai International Settlement of the novelist J.G. Ballard’s youth and the international control of Vienna described in the opening narration of the 1949 film The Third Man to the installation of a “Viceroy of Bosnia” in the 1990s. These experiments have varied in purpose and form, but they share a common logic: They are geopolitical stopgaps, designed to stabilize contested spaces when partition, unilateral control, or independence are seen as too dangerous by external interests.
The earliest internationalized territories were born of imperial rivalry. In 1863, the British and American concessions in Shanghai were merged into an “international settlement” that would eventually represent 19 foreign powers. The Shanghai Municipal Council, an international body unaffiliated with any single sovereign, governed more than a million residents and commanded its own armed forces to exclude Chinese authorities during periods of unrest. The council had an independent legal system, a gendarmerie of foreign soldiers, and control over day-to-day governance. The settlement enforced “neutrality” not out of idealism, but to allow imperial commerce to proceed undisturbed. Such arrangements reflected a belief that shared access to colonial extraction was preferable to a war among Western powers outside the West. Similar dynamics can be observed in the original plan for an International Congo Colony before Belgian King Leopold II seized the Congo as private property, as well as in the Tangier International Zone and the Kulangsu International Settlement.
“The first shots of World War II in Europe were fired in the port of Danzig.”
After World War I, an effort was made to neatly divide Europe into self-determining nation states. The contradictions between this vision of national self-determination and post-imperial reality are perhaps most visible in the Free City of Danzig. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points promised an independent Poland with access to the sea, but the only port through which that access could be achieved was in the formerly German city of Danzig (now Gdańsk). Granting sovereignty over the city to Poland would violate self-determination; leaving it German would threaten Polish independence.
The League’s solution was to declare it a “free city” under the oversight of the League of Nations. Danzigers were forced to renounce their German citizenship and were issued passports that designated them as citizens of the free territory. The League High Commissioner wielded ultimate authority, overruling the local parliament more than sixty times. Such power wielded by an international institution created a focal point for Nazi propaganda narratives of globalists sabotaging the German state, and ultimately the city was used as pretext for Hitler’s invasion of Poland after the first shots of World War II in Europe were fired in the port of Danzig.
The international cooperation needed for internationalized territory was hard to achieve during the Cold War. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of US unipolarity, a new form of internationalized governance emerged, inspired by liberal internationalism. Instead of indefinite, rivalrous experiments, the United Nations pioneered transitional administrations with fixed timelines and state-building mandates. These were transformative missions seeking to replace “bad institutions” with UN-approved democracies through a process of technocratic statebuilding.
Cambodia illustrates this model. Created by the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) assumed sweeping powers over governance, security, and elections. Its chief officer, Yasushi Akashi, was endowed with despotic powers. Akashi, a career bureaucrat who later oversaw the UN-run Srebrenica “safe zone,” was granted the authority to reassign or remove Cambodian government officials at will, veto decisions reached by the representative parliament, and act as “final arbiter” of Cambodian law. He commanded 15,000 soldiers and 5,000 administrators, running the state for twenty months before overseeing elections and nominally returning power to Cambodian authorities. Though hailed as a success, UNTAC’s results include a biased disarmament process that enabled the Khmer Rouge to slaughter those who disarmed, increased inequality and graft as foreign aid flowed into the state, and the return to power of the dictator Hun Sen just five years after the UN’s departure. On top of those failures to achieve the objectives of disarmament, development, and democratization, the exploitation of Cambodian women by UN blue helmets created an AIDS crisis in the region. So much for enlightened technocracy.
International territorial arrangements are geopolitical stopgaps, not teleological paths toward peace. In some cases, internationalization has successfully stabilized frontiers and managed transitions. However, the costs of that stabilization are imposed on the local polity through the denial of self-governance.
“International administrations often suffer from legitimacy deficits.”
Trump’s Gaza plan fits squarely within this lineage, and the historical record suggests what problems it might face. International administrations often suffer from legitimacy deficits, especially when imposed by outside powers without meaningful local consent. They are prone to mandate creep, indefinite timelines, and the consolidation of power in the hands of foreign bureaucrats or guarantors.
For Trump’s proposal to succeed where others have faltered, it will require clear exit conditions, a genuinely multilateral and neutral oversight structure, robust mechanisms for local political participation, and credible commitment from the guarantors to relinquish control.
Trump’s affinity for personalized, imperial-style power politics and zero-sum extractive policies over deference to multilateral institutions and foreign aid suggests that a Board of Peace may look more like earlier cases of internationalization than the more recent UN transitional administrations, which occurred without the global diffusion of power that we observe today. That said, practitioners should learn from the international mismanagement of cases like Cambodia while recognizing the limits of externally imposed state-building missions. Cooperation with regional actors will be essential to ensure that the transitional administration retains its legitimacy.
Indeed, as the example of Danzig shows, a perception of international imposition can radicalize as much as it pacifies. The Gaza plan revives a form of governance that has often proven fragile in practice. Its success will hinge not on Trump’s ambitions, but on whether the architects of the Board of Peace can learn from past failures to craft a transitional administration that is both legitimate and finite. The future of Gaza’s Board of Peace will turn on whether its architects can avoid repeating the mistakes of those who came before.