United Nations Archive

The words “cease-fire monitoring” are unlikely to create ripples of excitement in a group of military officers or civilian security specialists. Ambitious soldiers hanker after kinetic action, not observing static peace lines. Professional peacemakers associate tending to cease-fires with an outdated, Cold War-era approach to conflict management. This is unfortunate. Making simple cease-fires work is hard, and it seems that neither big powers nor international organizations are much good at it. Over the past week, the cessation of hostilities in Syria has lurched toward collapse, as violence escalated around Aleppo. It may be remarkable that the lull in fighting, which […]

Few analysts have lost money betting on a United Nations debate to be dull. There are exceptions. Fans of U.N. diplomacy cite the time in 1960 that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table during a heated General Assembly session. Harold Macmillan, the patrician then-British prime minister whose speech Khrushchev interrupted, paused to ask for a translation from the Russian. Such moments of multilateral hilarity are sadly rare, however. So I felt all too comfortable last week when I predicted that a series of General Assembly hearings with candidates for the post of U.N. secretary-general would fall […]

This week, three of the United Nations’ thankless peace missions—in Libya, Yemen and Syria—will mark steps forward. To be sure, the definition of success is modest. For now, just reducing violence and beginning a political process is the best that one can hope for. But the U.N. deserves credit for persevering and nudging the parties along. Even as U.N. negotiators, sometimes with the ambiguous help of the great powers and regional leaders, begin cajoling the warring parties in the Middle East’s three terrible crises to compromise, the prospects for real peace are distant. The U.N. process not only aims to […]

This column should start with a health warning: It contains some truly tedious writing about the future of the United Nations. In my own defense, I should add that the passages in question were not authored by me. This week, the current eight candidates to replace Ban Ki-moon as secretary-general when his term expires at the end of this year will have two-hour hearings at the U.N. General Assembly. As of this weekend, seven had published “vision statements” to pave the way for their appearances; the one exception was the last to declare, New Zealand’s Helen Clark. I have read […]

Editor’s note: Guest columnist Jim Della-Giacoma is filling in for Richard Gowan, who is on leave until early April. Peace and the United Nations go together; at least that’s what its founders intended. But in the meeting rooms of the organization’s New York headquarters, diplomats often argue over the buzzword vocabulary of compound words and phrases for advancing the U.N.’s peace mandate. They parse whether an operation is a special political mission or a peacekeeping mission. They worry that calling something a “peace operation” is too imprecise. When they cannot agree whether something should be peace building or “sustaining the […]