United Nations Archive

Last week’s top-level session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York offered three basic lessons. The first is that the United States can still dominate the U.N. when it wants to. The second is that a clear majority of other countries’ leaders are quite relieved to follow an American lead. But the third is that the U.N. is only really still relevant in two—admittedly sensitive—regions: Africa and the Middle East. America’s ability to direct U.N. affairs was in doubt a year ago, when the annual General Assembly jamboree was overshadowed by the Syrian chemical weapons crisis. While the […]

Ban Ki-moon revealed a new side to his character over the past week: Action Ban. Last Thursday, the secretary-general of the United Nations, often written off as the personification of process-driven diplomacy, announced that he was tired of just talking about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. “We don’t need all this time-consuming, so-called consultation, or consensus-building,” he told the Security Council. “There is a consensus already that this is very serious and urgent.” He outlined plans for an ambitious regional mission to fight the disease. Then he hit the streets of Manhattan on Sunday, joining 310,000 marchers calling for […]

In April 2013, outside the steps of Parliament in London, a group of nongovernmental organizations launched a new campaign to ban the use of fully autonomous weapons. Political entrepreneurs calling themselves the International Committee for Robot Arms Control had been raising concern over this issue since 2004, but their calls for a killer robot ban had been virtually ignored by the advocacy community. Things changed dramatically in 2012 when the well-known NGO Human Rights Watch published a report calling for such a ban. Within a month, nine well-known human security organizations had joined the steering committee for a new campaign. […]