Dame Margaret Joan Anstee, DCMG (25 June 1926 – 25 August 2016)[1] was a British diplomat who served at the United Nations for over four decades (1952–93), rising to the rank of an Under-Secretary-General in 1987.

[6] She graduated with first class honours in French and Spanish in 1944, although it was another three years before the university began admitting women to full degree status.

However, due to the Foreign Office's marriage bar policy in force at the time, which required women employees to resign when they married, this ended her career.

[4] Anstee served successively as Resident Representative of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in eight countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

[6][11] After leaving the UN in July 1993, she served as a Special Adviser to the government of Bolivia on matters relating to development and international finance.

From 1996 she advised the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, on a pro bono publico basis, on operational aspects of post-conflict peace-building.

She also chaired the Advisory Board of the Lessons Learned Unit of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and for some years actively took part in practical training in peacekeeping techniques for both military and civilian personnel, including simulation exercises, in the UK, Sweden, South America and the United States, South Africa and other African countries.

[7] In 1993 she was awarded the Reves Peace Prize by the College of William & Mary (U.S.) and she held Honorary Doctorates in the UK from the Universities of Essex (1994), Westminster (1996), London (1998) and Cambridge (2004).

Orphan of the Cold War: the Inside Story of the Collapse of the Angolan Peace Process 1992–1993, was published in the UK and the US in October 1996.