United Nations Archive

Saudi Arabia has lately been in the news for all the wrong reasons. It has been widely condemned for a disastrous war in Yemen that has forced over 3 million civilians to flee and left over 15 million people on the brink of famine. The killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul—allegedly on orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—is a story that refuses to go away. More recently, the Saudi government finds itself responding to alarming allegations regarding the detention, torture and impending trial of many prominent female activists in the kingdom. On March […]

Ten years ago, the Sri Lankan military carried out a violent final offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a rebel group with a long history of atrocities. The offensive, which ultimately resulted in the end of the war, involved the brutal killings of thousands of civilians—acts that were documented in real time by journalists and United Nations officials. Back in New York, however, the U.N.’s leaders failed to muster a meaningful response to mitigate the bloodshed, and Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general at the time, soon came under heavy criticism. As Richard Gowan writes in this week’s in-depth report, […]

Ten years ago this month, senior United Nations officials were hard at work equivocating over a crisis. A cynic might say that the U.N. exists in a constant state of equivocation. But in March 2009, its leaders were mired in an especially grim political mess—and handling it badly. The cause of their troubles lay in northern Sri Lanka. After decades of civil war, the Sri Lankan military was carrying out a final offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a rebel group with a long history of atrocities. As the decisive battle wore on, U.N. officials and journalists in […]

Are U.N. peacekeeping missions no longer relevant to today’s conflicts? Or do we just need to change the goals? Find out more when you subscribe to World Politics Review (WPR). There were understandably mixed feelings at the United Nations in June, when the organization marked the 70th anniversary of modern U.N. peacekeeping missions. The Security Council sent military observers to the Middle East in 1948 to supervise the end of the first Arab-Israeli war, marking the first of over 70 U.N. missions that have become the organization’s trademark. U.N. officials used this year’s anniversary to honor the efforts of today’s […]

Editor’s note: This will be Richard Gowan’s final weekly column for World Politics Review. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Richard for the keen analysis, luculent prose and delightful wit he has offered WPR readers each week for the past six years. We wish Richard the best of luck at International Crisis Group and look forward to his periodic contributions to WPR in the future. If you want to write seriously about politics, you need to know how to get things wrong. Political analysts are generally praised for getting things right. They win kudos by surveying current affairs […]

It is time to say some goodbyes. Next week will mark the conclusion of this column, roughly 250 editions and a quarter of a million words after I launched it in January 2013. Professional obligations mean that I must move on. I will keep writing about international affairs, but I am sad to bid farewell to this weekly perch. It has been a fruitful but frustrating time to comment on crisis management and multilateral affairs. When I kicked off “Diplomatic Fallout,” a political resolution to the Syrian civil war still seemed possible and Russia had not yet seized Crimea. I […]