Watch United Nations power brokers – including the Russian, UK and US representatives to the UN – discuss its failings and how to fix them
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/sep/23/un-security-council-failing-70-years
The United Nations has saved millions of lives and boosted health and education across the world. But it is bloated, undemocratic – and very expensive.
How much of a part the UN played in holding nuclear armageddon at bay divides historians. But there is little doubt that in the lifetime that has passed since it was set up in 1945 it helped save millions from other kinds of hell. From the deepest of poverty. From watching their children die of treatable diseases. From starvation and exposure as they fled wars made in the cauldron of ideological rivalries between Washington and Moscow but fought on battlefields in Africa and Asia.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/what-has-the-un-achieved-united-nations
As it celebrates its 70th annual session this autumn by launching the sustainable development goals, we look at the general assembly’s history and purpose
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/14/what-is-the-un-general-assembly
Is the international order capable of meeting the enormous challenges facing states and societies around the world? We look at the four main challenges facing International Geneva.
The coronavirus pandemic should have been a moment for global action. Instead, the U.N. is riven with dissension and self-doubt, and countries are going their own way.
Unlike nearly six years ago, when the Security Council declared Ebola a threat to world peace and security, a disease that doesn’t respect borders is no longer enough to push feuding world powers — the United States, China and Russia — to use the U.N. stage to coordinate a political response. China, which held the Security Council presidency in March, when the illness was declared a pandemic and began to overwhelm some European and American health systems, did not call a meeting on it. The U.S., increasingly guided by President Donald Trump’s America First views, has not stepped up at the U.N., feeding the sense that the world body is hobbled, if not utterly paralyzed by the very kind of crisis it was meant to address.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/08/united-nations-coronavirus-176187
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