United Nations Archive

This fall the United Nations will celebrate its 70th birthday. As for most 70-somethings, the commemoration evokes nostalgia for a more idealistic time, reflections on creaky joints and renewed hopes for the future. To be sure, this grand edifice of mid-20th century geopolitics needs some serious refurbishing to align its mission and capabilities with the demands of the 21st-century world. Migration crises affecting Africa, Europe and Asia in unprecedented numbers; war in Sudan and enduring conflict in Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere; and failing U.N. peace processes for Syria and Yemen show clearly that the current global […]

At the beginning of June, around 1,000 Syrian refugees found themselves stranded in the desert just inside Jordan, with precarious access to food and water. Their flight from Syria was driven by the desire to escape that country’s ongoing civil war, which has helped generate the largest refugee crisis since the aftermath of World War II. But their plight in the desert was the immediate result of Jordan gradually tightening its border to Syrian refugees, even as it remains officially open to them. It may be a sign of things to come, as the governments bordering Syria tire of hosting […]

Policy papers from the United Nations rarely make for scintillating reading. Last week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released “Uniting Our Strengths for Peace,” a new report by an expert panel on the future of peace operations. Running to over 90 pages and full of familiar bromides such as “the universal legitimacy of the United Nations is one of its greatest strengths,” this does not at first glance seem like an exceptionally enticing text. On closer inspection, it proves to be a subtly subversive summary of what is wrong with peace operations, and indeed the entire U.N., today. Ban convened the panel […]

Nearly 60 million people last year were displaced by war, conflict and persecution, the highest number ever on record, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) annual report today. The largest source of refugees is Syria, with 3.9 million Syrian refugees in 107 countries. Syria overtook Afghanistan in the U.N.’s ranking; Afghanistan had previously held that position for more than 30 years. As U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonia Guterres said, “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required […]

The world is finally waking up to the fact that the international humanitarian system is falling apart. European nations are bickering over how to handle Syrian refugees, while Southeast Asian nations grapple with the outflow of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar. Liberal commentators see parallels with the flight of Jews from Germany in the 1930s. “It is clear that the United States and other developed countries must find more room for refugees,” The New York Times editorialized this weekend, adding that United Nations agencies that help those who are suffering should be “amply funded.” U.N. officials reading these lines are likely […]

Do peacekeepers do more harm than good? An appalling abuse scandal has come to overshadow the two parallel peace operations, led by France and the United Nations, currently based in the Central African Republic (CAR). There is credible evidence that French troops made local children commit sex acts as entertainment. The U.N. appears to have, at the very best, mishandled its investigation of these crimes. To make matters worse, the U.N. announced last week that it is investigating further claims of abuse by its one of its own personnel in CAR. There are also claims that African peacekeepers were responsible […]

Sepp Blatter should make a bid to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations: The Swiss septuagenarian has proved he is a master of multilateral diplomacy. Last week, he won a fifth term as president of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), despite the corruption scandal engulfing the organization. Blatter has exploited political divisions among the West, Russia and the developing world to protect his position. The FIFA affair is a microcosm of wider tensions plaguing international institutions, and it offers some especially hard lessons about the limits of Western appeals to morality and the rule of law […]