United Nations Archive

The beginning of every academic year presents professors with a small cavalcade of perplexities and irritants. Universities use the summer break to come up with innovative administrative guidance and supposedly improved computer systems that inevitably backfire on first contact with students or teachers. It normally takes just a few weeks to fix these glitches. But occasionally an academic will encounter a rather more significant challenge at the start of a semester: A creeping fear that their discipline is doomed. As someone who teaches International Conflict Resolution, or ICR, I currently feel something like that. This is not because there is […]

What is the point of the United Nations Security Council? The U.N. Charter says that the body “has primary responsibility for the maintenance of international security,” but it has only ever played this role haphazardly. The Security Council seizes on some crises tenaciously and ignores others entirely. As a result, the doyen of U.N. studies, Adam Roberts, has aptly described the organization as a “selective security system.” Hankerers after global governance may wish the council were more consistent. For more pragmatic observers, the interesting question is what sort of situations it selects to concentrate on. A quick glance at the […]

There are few less fashionable phrases in international relations today than “nation building.” In the U.S. and Europe, politicians and generals are still struggling to put the ghosts of their interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq behind them. At the United Nations, international officials talk about promoting “resilience” or “sustaining peace” in volatile societies. Only a brave observer would make a full-fledged case for the need to build functional states, let alone “nations,” in the face of such widespread skepticism. Michael von der Schulenburg is courageous enough to do that. The former U.N. official, who served in countries ranging from Afghanistan […]

Amid the torrent of news this week regarding multiple brewing crises from North Korea to Venezuela, one item of seemingly minor importance managed to filter through. It was a personnel matter, a bureaucrat’s decision, but one that highlights the magnitude of the current struggle to develop an international system for conflict resolution, accountability and justice. On Sunday, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria confirmed that its most prominent member, Carla del Ponte, had resigned from the body. The resignation points to a major flaw in the system: the ability of powerful players, in this case Russia, to thwart […]

Few noticed the negotiations at the United Nations for a legally binding prohibition on nuclear weapons, until they were quickly completed last month. On July 7, 122 states voted in favor of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which prohibits parties from engaging in activities related to the development, deployment or use of nuclear weapons, and lays out pathways to eventually disarm those states that possess them. The ban is likely to reinforce existing divides between countries that rely on nuclear weapons for their security, and those that don’t—an outcome for which proponents and opponents of the treaty […]