Media

With a new Secretary-General, António Guterres, installed in 2017, the United Nations is in a position to hasten changes to its public information system and functions, which were slow to catch up with a fast-moving social media age. As the former head of UNHCR, he understands the importance of good relations with the media, which often have felt shut out by UN officials and member nations reluctant to expand the organization’s information outreach. Media attention had atrophied, at a time when the UN was coming under greater pressure and criticism for its handling of peacekeeping scandals and slow responses to crises, even when these were not the fault of the Secretariat.

Legal Perspectives

This chapter surveys how international legal scholars have catalogued and sought to explain the legal impact of the UN even though its political and judicial organs have not been delegated the power to make law. It explains how the UN attempts to adhere to, but also challenges, the traditional sources of international law—treaties, custom, and general principles—contained in the Statute of the International Court of Justice. It enumerates how the turn to UN system organizations—amidst newly empowered non-state actors, increasing resort to ‘soft’ or ‘informal’ norms, and recourse to institutionalized processes—have led to distinct legal frameworks such as process or deliberative theories, interdisciplinary ‘law and’ approaches, feminist and ‘Third World’ critiques, and scholarly work that renews attention to or revises legal positivism.

Formal and Informal Groups

The chapter examines the idea and practice of regional governance during the last twenty years. Intergovernmental regional organizations provide the focus of the analysis as they often are the hub of regional interaction leading to the generation of rules. In order to understand the idea of regional governance, the chapter looks into the relation between this idea and three other processes taking place in the international system: the changing nature of sovereignty, globalization, and the challenges to nationally based representative democracy. The role of regional multidimensional organizations that perform similar tasks in the human rights is a focus in the humanitarian, democratic governance, development, and security spheres as a result of the diffusion of international governance practices.

Origins of the United Nations

This chapter analyzes the transformational journey that plans for the United Nations undertook from summer 1941 to the San Francisco Conference of 1945 at which the UN Charter was agreed. Prior to the conference, the ‘Big Three’ great powers of the day—the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom—often struggled to establish the common ground on which the UN’s success would depend. However, their debates were only the start of the diplomatic travails which would eventually lead to the establishment of the world organization that we know today. Once gathered at San Francisco, the fifty delegations spent the next two months locked in debate over issues such as the role of international law; the relationship between the General Assembly and Security Council; the permanent members’ veto; and Charter amendment. One of modern history’s most important diplomatic events, its outcome continues to resonate through world politics.

The UN’s Role in a Changing Global Landscape

This chapter describes a fraught global landscape in which the pace and nature of change have outstripped the ability for human beings and their states to manage its downsides or equitably share its upsides. The interconnections are not yet reflected in who sits at the table, what tools are used, or even what problems are on the agenda. Such profound change is testing the UN as never before. However, it could also trigger a renewed sense of common purpose. The ninth Secretary-General can turn this crisis into an opportunity to drive through long-needed reforms and to position the UN as the key platform for collectively managing shared global risks and problems. Success would mean understanding and getting ahead of major global trends, rather than merely reacting to them.

Peacebuilding

Peacebuilding—helping societies make the transition from civil violence to a durable peace—has been the UN’s principal security activity since the end of the Cold War. Although peacebuilding methods have been refined over years of trial and error, it remains an uncertain science, yielding mixed results. Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, the international peacebuilding ‘project’ remains one of the most remarkable exercises in collective conflict management the world has ever witnessed. This chapter identifies the principal features of the UN’s peacebuilding operations, examines the record of peacebuilding since the end of the Cold War, and describes some of the main issues and controversies surrounding these missions.

Cyber Threats

Cyber threats have become a pre-eminent concern in international affairs. The security of cyberspace has become a condition of the survival of modern societies; yet the scale of the threats grows only larger with time. Some states have turned to the UN system to address cyber issues. These efforts are of two general sorts. One involves the management of conflict in the cyber domain, a realm of security competition in which the dangers of miscalculation abound. The other concerns Internet governance, which pits Russia and China against Western countries. This chapter examines these multilateral thrusts. It argues that none has gone far, for various reasons. Cyber threats challenge the legal and institutional orthodoxies of the UN system. Large member states clash over the meaning and priorities of cybersecurity. Before analyzing these problems the chapter reviews the origins and history of cyber threats.

Political Approaches

This chapter examines how prominent theories capture the various ways that the UN affects world politics. Different theories of international relations (IR) cast the UN in distinctive roles, which logically lead scholars to identify distinctive kinds of effects. We identify five roles that the UN might have: as an agent of great powers doing their bidding; as a mechanism for interstate cooperation; as a governor of an international society of states; as a constructor of the social world; and as a legitimation forum. Each role has roots in a well-known theory of international politics. In many, perhaps most, real-world political situations, the UN plays more than one of these roles, but these stylized theoretical arguments about the world body’s influence help discipline our thinking. They force us to be explicit about which effects of the world organization we think are important, what is causing them, and why.

UN Development System

This chapter presents an overview of the UN coordination machinery in the economic and social development field together with an analysis of its evolution and recurring operational problems of fragmentation, effectiveness, and duplication. Changing conceptions of security, a growing concern for the sustainability of peace and prevention, and a corresponding need for greater coherence and integration and collaborative and strategic partnerships, offer cautious grounds for optimism. But the capacity for internal leadership in improving coordination at headquarters and field levels is likely to be sharply constrained by the world organization’s decentralized structure, donor incentives, limited resources, and the absence of a political consensus about its desirable role in the promotion of development.

Women’s Rights and Gender Integration

This chapter outlines the quest for women’s equality, empowerment, and human rights through the United Nations from its founding to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. It considers the on-going dilemma in this work of whether, and when, to pursue women’s equality through separate entities and through gender mainstreaming. Describing the evolution of the major UN women-specific institutions, conferences, and standard-setting documents, and the critical role of civil society—especially women’s non-governmental organizations—the chapter argues that these have driven this agenda. Finally, it analyses the progress of gender integration and women’s advancement on UN agendas in the areas of development; health and sexual rights; human rights; and peace and security.