The "Third" United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think 0198855850, 9780198855859

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The “Third” United Nations

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 6/1/2021, SPi

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The “Third” United Nations How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think TATIANA CARAYANNIS and

THOMAS G. WEISS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss 2021 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949098 ISBN 978–0–19–885585–9 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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About the Authors Tatiana Carayannis is director of the Social Science Research Council’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF), Understanding Violent Conflict (UVC) program, and China-Africa Knowledge Project. She has a visiting appointment at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Africa Centre and Department of International Development, where she also serves as a research director for the Centre for Public Authority and International Development (CPAID). Until recently, she convened the DRC Affinity Group, a small brain trust of leading Congo scholars and analysts. She has been building bridges between researchers and policy practitioners for two decades. A scholar of international organization and Central Africa, particularly the DRC, her research focuses on conflict prevention, the networked dynamics of violence, UN peacekeeping and preventive diplomacy, evidenced-based policymaking, and the agenda-setting role of UN human rights and development ideas. She has conducted extensive field work in Central Africa, and has written and lectured widely on these issues. Her books include UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (co-authored with Thomas G. Weiss et al., 2005) and Making Sense of the Central African Republic (co-edited with Louisa Lombard, 2015). Current book projects include Pioneers of Peacekeeping: ONUC 1960–1964 and Anatomy of Rebellion: JP Bemba and the Mouvement de Libération du Congo. Carayannis holds a PhD and MA in political science from The City University of New York Graduate Center and New York University. She grew up in Central and West Africa and pre-pandemic could usually be found on an airplane. Thomas G. Weiss is fighting valiantly against senior moments and creaking joints as Presidential Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He is also Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Eminent International Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He was a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a past president of the International Studies Association (2009–10) as well as the recipient of its “2016 Distinguished IO Scholar Award.” Other recent posts included Research Professor at SOAS, University of London (2012–15); Chair of the Academic Council on the UN System (2006–9); editor of Global Governance (2000–5); and Research Director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000–1). He has written extensively about multilateral approaches to international peace and security, humanitarian action, and sustainable development. His latest single-authored books are Would the World Be Better without the UN? (2018); What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It (2016); Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (2016); Governing

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the World? Addressing “Problems without Passports” (2014); Global Governance: Why? What? Whither? (2013); Humanitarian Business (2013); and Thinking about Global Governance: People and Ideas Matter (2011). He is also most recently the editor of Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development (2021, with Stephen Browne), the second edition of The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (2018, with Sam Daws), and the second edition of International Organization and Global Governance (2018, with Rorden Wilkinson).

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List of Figures, Tables, and Box Figures 1.1 Interactions among the Three United Nations

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1.2 Historical overview of the number of IGOs and INGOs, 1909–2017

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1.3 Parent TNCs and foreign affiliates, World Investment Report 1992–2009

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Tables 2.1 Number and ratio of INGOs and IGOs founded by decade, 1900–2019 4.1 Number of think tanks by region, 2018

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Box 4.1 The functions of knowledge brokers

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List of Abbreviations A4P AGE AI AI AMISOM APMBC ASEAN AU BRI BRICS CAR CARICOM CCA CDP CEDAW CGPCS CHR CIC CICC CIS CMC CONGO COP CPPF CRASH CSD CSR DAC DaO DCAF DESA DHA DHF DPA

Action for Peacekeeping Advisory Group of Experts on Peacebuilding Amnesty International artificial intelligence African Union Mission in Somalia Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention Association of Southeast Asian Nations African Union Belt and Road Initiative [China] Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa [Group of] Central African Republic Caribbean Community Common Country Assessment Committee on Development Policy (previously Planning) Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women Contact Group for Piracy off the Coast of Somalia Commission on Human Rights Center for International Cooperation Coalition for the International Criminal Court Commonwealth of Independent States Cluster Munition Coalition Conference of Non-governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations Conference of Parties Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires Commission on Sustainable Development corporate social responsibility Development Assistance Committee [of the OECD] Delivering as One Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance Department of Economic and Social Affairs Department of Humanitarian Affairs Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation Department of Political Affairs

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xvi    DPET DPI DPKO DPO DPPA DRC ECA ECLA[C] ECOSOC ECOWAS ECPS EEZ EISAS EOSG ERC ESCAP EU FAO FDI FIFA G-7/G-8 G-20 G-77 GATT GAVI GCC GCRP GDP GDPR GEF GHGs GIS GNI GNP GONGO GWOT HD HDI HI HIPPO HIV/AIDS

Department of Policy, Education, and Training Department of Public Information Department of Peacekeeping Operations Department of Peace Operations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Democratic Republic of the Congo Economic Commission for Africa Economic Commission for Latin America [and the Caribbean, after 1984] Economic and Social Council Economic Community of West African States Executive Committee on Peace and Security Exclusive Economic Zone Electronic Information and Strategic Analysis unit in the Secretariat Executive Office of the Secretary-General Emergency Relief Coordinator Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific European Union Food and Agriculture Organization foreign direct investment Fédération Internationale de Football Association Group of Seven/Group of Eight Group of 20 Group of 77 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization Gulf Cooperation Council Geneva Centre for Security Policy gross domestic product General Data Protection Regulation Global Environment Facility greenhouse gases geographic information system gross national income gross national product government-organized NGO Global War on Terror (Centre for) Humanitarian Dialogue Human Development Index Handicap International High-level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome

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   HLP HLPF HPG HRC HRI HRuF HRW IAEA IASC IBRD IBSA ICANN ICAO ICBL ICC ICG ICISS ICJ ICM ICRC ICTR ICTY IDP IFAD IFRC IGO IHL IHR IL ILC ILO IMF IMO INGO IO IPCC IPE IPI IR IRC IRO ITU IUCN

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High-level Panel High-level Political Forum Humanitarian Policy Group Human Rights Council Humanitarian Responses Index Human Rights up Front Human Rights Watch International Atomic Energy Agency Inter-Agency Standing Committee International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [World Bank] India, Brazil, South Africa [Group of] Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers International Civil Aviation Organization International Campaign to Ban Landmines International Criminal Court International Crisis Group (or Crisis Group) International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty International Court of Justice International Commission on Multilateralism International Committee of the Red Cross International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia internally displaced person International Fund for Agricultural Development International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies intergovernmental organization international humanitarian law International Health Regulations international law International Law Commission International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund International Maritime Organization international non-governmental organization international organization Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change International Political Economy International Peace Institute (previously International Peace Academy) International Relations International Rescue Committee International Refugee Organization International Telecommunications Union International Union for the Conservation of Nature

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xviii    LGBTQ MAG MI MDG MINUSTAH MONUSCO MPTFO MSF NAACP NAM NATO NGO NIEO NRA OAS OCHA ODA OECD OHCHR OPCW OPEC OSCE OWG Oxfam P-5 PBC PBF PBSO PCIJ PHR PMD PoC R2P RC REF RMR RwP SCO SCR SDG SEA SGBV

lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Mines Advisory Group Medico International Millennium Development Goal United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti Mission de l’Organisation des Nations-Unies pour la Stabilisation en Republique Démocratique du Congo Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors without Borders] National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples Non-Aligned Movement North Atlantic Treaty Organization non-governmental organization New International Economic Order National Rifle Association (US) Organization of American States Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs official development assistance Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Open Working Group Oxford Committee for Famine Relief permanent five members of the Security Council Peacebuilding Commission Peacebuilding Fund Peacebuilding Support Office Permanent Court of International Justice Physicians for Human Rights Policy and Mediation Division protection of civilians responsibility to protect resident coordinator Research in Excellence Framework (UK) Regional Monthly Review Responsibility while Protecting Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Security Council Report Sustainable Development Goal sexual exploitation and abuse sexual and gender-based violence

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   SIPRI SNA SRSG SSRC SWIFT TAN TCC TNC UK UDHR UN UNCED UNCHE UNCHS UNCIO UNCT UNCTAD UNCTC UNDP UNEF UNEP UNESCO UNFCCC UNFPA UNGC UNHCR UNICEF UNIDO UNIFEM UNIHP UNITAR UNMOGIP UNOG UNRISD UNSC UNSO UNU UNU-CPR UPU US USSR VVAF WEF

Swedish International Peace Research Institute System of National Accounts special representative of the Secretary-General Social Science Research Council Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication transnational advocacy network troop-contributing country transnational corporation United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Universal Declaration of Human Rights United Nations United Nations Conference on Environment and Development United Nations Conference on the Human Environment United Nations Centre for Human Settlements [Habitat] United Nations Conference on International Organization United Nations Country Team United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations United Nations Development Programme United Nations Emergency Force United Nations Environment Programme United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change United Nations Population Fund United Nations Global Compact [Office of the] United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Industrial Development Organization United Nations Development Fund for Women United Nations Intellectual History Project United Nations Institute for Training and Research United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan United Nations Office in Geneva United Nations Research Institute for Social Development United Nations Statistical Commission United Nations Statistical Office United Nations University UNU Centre for Policy Research Universal Postal Union United States of America Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation World Economic Forum

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xx    WFM-IGP WFP WHO WIPO WMD WMO WTO WWF

World Federalist Movement’s Institute for Global Policy World Food Programme World Health Organization World Intellectual Property Organization weapons of mass destruction World Meteorological Organization World Trade Organization World Wildlife Fund [World Wide Fund for Nature]

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Introduction Think tanks, knowledge brokers, and epistemic communities are phenomena that have entered both the academic and policy lexicons, but their intellectual role remains marginal to analyses of such intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) as the United Nations (UN). Recent texts on the UN, of course, discuss non-state actors,¹ but the bulk of analytical attention has concentrated on nefarious non-state actors in violent conflicts and the difficulties in the UN’s response to threats to peace and security. In addition, the essential operational role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in development and humanitarian action has also been a topic for research, including an edited volume by one of us that is still in print and cited despite having appeared a quartercentury ago.² The emphasis here, in contrast, is upon the dynamics and processes of ideas and norms and, more particularly still, upon the impact of a subset of nonstate actors on how the UN thinks, and how we think about the UN. The recognition of the essential role of scholars, think tanks, civil society, the forprofit private sector, and other non-state actors on UN thinking required adding a “Third UN” to our analytical toolkit in order to move beyond the binary concept of a United Nations composed of member states whose directives are carried out by international civil servants. In short; we needed to capture accurately the politics of knowledge and norm production that shape those directives and the ideas and narratives that drive them. In one of the early classic textbooks, Inis Claude dubbed member states the “First UN,” and he called the executive heads and their staffs in international secretariats the “Second UN.” His two-fold distinction, between the world organization as an intergovernmental arena and as an autonomous actor,³ provided the lenses through which analysts of the UN have traditionally peered. However, our research, and especially the in-depth oral history interviews⁴ that we conducted over a decade for the United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP), pointed to another dimension. Ideas are one of the UN’s most important legacies; they have made a substantial contribution to human progress. However, in order to explain their origins and refinement,

The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0001

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their application and impact, we required a better understanding of the intellectual firepower from outside the First UN and the Second UN.⁵ We first spelled out the “Third UN” in 2009—together with Richard Jolly— in the journal Global Governance.⁶ Many colleagues have, over the years, cited that piece on what amounts to an “additional” UN as insightful. As we write in 2020, a quick Google search has references to it in the first several hits. Many of the same colleagues also asked why we had not fleshed out the concept, to make it reflect our improved understanding of the way that ideas and norms flourish or fall flat. This book responds to those queries. Helping the UN to think, our sub-title, is especially pressing as we finalize these pages. A pandemic strikes and the global economy implodes. Politicians, pundits, and people are looking for answers, but the world organization is largely missing in action. If past is prelude, the most creative and imaginative rethinking of the contemporary bases for international cooperation will emanate from the Third United Nations. The next section briefly parses it to provide the basis for the following chapters. Readers may have noticed that our original argument appeared in a journal whose title, Global Governance, reflects the move away from the older notion of states and their creations in the form of IGOs as the only substantial pillars of world order. We explain that evolution in the following section before briefly summarizing the book.

The Third UN: What Is It and Why Is It Important? We begin with a definition. The Third UN is the ecology of supportive nonstate actors—intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the forprofit private sector, and the media—that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN and the Second UN to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN “think.” This book fills a gap in understanding the impact of non-state actors. It is essential to note that our use of this term connotes those working toward knowledge and normative advances for the realization of the values underlying the UN Charter—that is, we are clearly not talking about armed belligerents and criminals. We nonetheless keep in mind the counsel of James O. C. Jonah, who noted that uniform categories of “saints” or “sinners” are not airtight—at least for someone who had attempted to coordinate non-state inputs in Somalia as the UN special

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representative and then in Sierra Leone as a government minister: “Not all of them are solid. Some of them are outright ‘crooks,’ sorry to say, . . . [G]overnments are raising questions—and I know we did in Sierra Leone— about the accountability of NGOs in terms of how they run their show.”⁷ We note two significant developments since our earlier framing of the Third UN. One, for-profit actors, especially in the digital technology sector, play a far larger role today than during the UN’s earliest years. While the private sector has always had an over-sized impact on the global economy, it was marginalized until recently in UN circles because of its perceived negative impact— certainly in ideological terms, in the Socialist bloc and much of the Global South. Hence, their relatively marginal role for UN politics compared with other members of the category has changed abruptly in the twenty-first century. It shapes how the UN works, thinks, and the global challenges that it faces. Two, the media—print, electronic, and more recently social—is a more important factor for the dissemination of ideas and the battle for primacy than for the creation of new ideas and norms. Historically, the media have been less frequent participants than other members of the Third UN because they typically (other than occasionally a creative journalist) “do not help the UN think,” or formulate and refine ideas. In addition to shaping the way that all three UNs operate, the emergence of new technologies and digital media is giving greater prominence to these actors in the Third UN. Analyses of world politics increasingly acknowledge the extent to which the stage is crowded with a variety of actors. Nonetheless, the point of departure for this book reflects the fact that the most-used adjective in our related disciplinary fields of work can be misleading. International relations (IR), international law (IL), international organization (IO), and international political economy (IPE) are the major components of our research and teaching. Yet, the Latin root “natio” (birth) no longer makes sense because state-centric perspectives in a globalizing world ignore movements across borders of peoples, information, capital, ideas, and technologies. Scholars and practitioners formerly used “nation-state,” which is misleading as nations and states are different. Legally speaking, where there is a state, there is a nation. However, there are several peoples—some born within a territory but others born elsewhere who have moved—within virtually every state; moreover, many significant peoples (for example, the Kurds and Palestinians) are without a nation-state. Sovereignty remains the predominant characteristic of world politics. Indeed, in many ways with the emergence of new nationalisms and populisms,

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state sovereignty is back with a vengeance. At the same time, it is not what it used to be. Analyses of world politics acknowledge the extent to which the stage is crowded with a variety of actors, which is why “global governance” emerged in the late twentieth century as the term of art to conceptualize the UN, other IGOs, multilateral cooperation, and public-private partnerships.⁸ This realization is fundamental for those who concentrate on only two United Nations, the one composed of member states and the second one of secretariats with international civil servants—recruited on the basis of their nationality—who work for the states that determine agendas and (sometimes) pay the bills. We have long pointed to another UN, which is composed of non-state actors closely associated with the organization and its activities but not formally part of it. Despite the growth in analyses attempting to understand the relationships between non-state actors and IGOs, this “other” or “Third” UN is poorly understood, often ignored, and normally discounted. The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization whose 193 members are states. UN analysts are typically students of IR, IL, IO, and IPE. They begin with the building block of the Peace of Westphalia that essentially ended European religious wars in 1648. They also have long accepted that the world is divided into territorial states. Prior to Westphalia, dynastic empires, citystates, feudalistic orders, clans and tribes, churches, and a variety of other public authorities organized people into groupings for identity and problemsolving. The territorial state emerged as the basic unit of social organization from about the middle of the fifteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century, first in Europe and then elsewhere. It commanded primary loyalty and was responsible for order, and eventually for justice and prosperity within a state’s territorial boundaries. European rulers found the institution of the state useful and perpetuated its image; ironically, politically aware persons outside the West adopted the notion to resist domination by those same colonial powers. With decolonization, the number of states has grown, as has the rigidity of the attachment to sacrosanct sovereignty by young and old states alike. Despite the persistence of clan, ethnic, and religious identities and a pattern of inconsistencies that Stephen Krasner famously called “organized hypocrisy,”⁹ most of those exercising power have promoted the perception that the basic political-legal unit of world politics was and should remain the territorial state. The basis for sovereignty is an administrative apparatus with a supposed monopoly on the legitimate use of force over a specific geographical area with a stable population.

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That the only bona fide UN members are territorial states (with the exception of the Vatican) is the point of departure for an analytical puzzle about what constitutes the United Nations. Some examples should help the reader understand why we came up with the analytical tool of the Third UN. Numerous non-territorial players in issue-specific global governance are more influential than many territorial states: the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for the laws of war and humanitarian principles; the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (or FIFA, its familiar abbreviation) for the world’s most popular sport (football or soccer); and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (also better known by its acronym, ICANN) for the internet. Similarly, corporations have come together to participate in the development of governance systems either at the urging of international organizations, such as the UN’s Global Compact, or in shared recognition of the need for new systems of coordination, such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Ratings Group render judgments that are authoritative enough to cause market responses. Individual experts serving on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or eminent persons on other panels and commissions have altered narratives and public policy. The global significance of non-traditional actors like Facebook and the need for new governance systems for digital space was explicit in UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ 2018 appointment of a High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. It is hard to imagine contemporary world politics without non-state actors—indeed, their activities and influence on politics and the world economy often dwarf those of many small countries. That said, geo-political power is reflected in the UN’s state-based, institutional structures, ranging from the veto-wielding permanent five members of the Security Council (P-5) to the leverage of the largest contributors to the budget. As we see, the history of the Third UN resembles that of the First UN and the Second UN in lacking diversity—that is, it is more white, male, and elitist than the globe’s population, or even the vast bulk of member states. The Third UN’s roles include research, policy analysis, idea mongering, advocacy, and public education. Its various components put forward new information and ideas, push for alternative policies, and mobilize public opinion around UN deliberations and projects. They also can impede progress, by deploying the same methods; the polarization that afflicts geopolitical dynamics and left-right, secular-religious societal battles are also reflected across the Third UN’s ever-changing network of networks that

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helps the UN “think.” Some Third UN actors advocate for particular ideas, while others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation. Participation varies with issues and geographic focus as well as timing. At any given time, any of these non-state actors can be a member of the Third UN. There are no barriers to entry or exit, and no permanent membership. Some critics might regard our perspectives as rather orthodox and as extensions of the status quo.¹⁰ However, many non-state actors such as informed scholars, practitioners, and activists have had a distinct valueadded within intergovernmental contexts to push out intellectual and policy envelopes, to venture beyond what passes for conventional wisdom. These actors of the Third UN are independent of but provide essential inputs into Claude’s other two United Nations. They do not necessarily foster progressive values and actions—the National Rifle Association and many transnational corporations (TNCs), for instance, pursue agendas that may distort the pursuit of the UN’s human rights or environmental norms. What is impossible to ignore, however, is that such “outside-insiders” or “inside-outsiders” are integral, today and tomorrow, to the world body. What once may have seemed marginal is now central for world politics and multilateralism. In addition, the relationships often are more complicated than they appear. Michael Doyle, who was a professor at Princeton and Columbia Universities before joining the UN Secretariat in New York and rejoined the academy after leaving, agreed: “If you want genuinely fresh ideas, you’ve got to go outside the system altogether. You have to go to commissions, panels, academics and NGOs, and a few governments—mostly academics and NGOs.” Just Faaland, who spent most of his career at the Norwegian development institute in Bergen but often interacted with the UN system, also emphasized the relevance of injecting outside intellectual grist: “The UN would be a much poorer organization if it hadn’t been for . . . consultancies and other ways of mobilizing the outside world.”¹¹ Social scientists are taught to ask, “So what?” The following pages demonstrate four ways that ideas and norms make a difference: • They change the way that issues are perceived. • They redefine state and non-state interests and goals, setting agendas for action. • They mobilize coalitions to press for action. • They become embedded in institutions.

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We say more about such impacts in subsequent chapters, but the dynamics of change invariably involve the creation, refinement, and implementation of ideas—for good and for evil. Any explanations of continuity and change also entail technology, politics, and economics; but at a minimum, ideas matter in opening space for experimentation and modification. Hence, the complexity of the planet and the analytical requirement to accurately reflect the UN go hand-in-hand. A heterogeneous and numerous array of actors participates in processes that produce knowledge and norms. In addition, a prescriptive agenda looms. Besides reinforcing the overarching argument that the UN is more than the sum of its member-state and secretariat parts, we are committed to taking advantage of as diverse (in terms of geographic origins and substantive backgrounds) a range of sources as possible for alternative knowledge and norms, for non-traditional or non-mainstream thinking. To simplify, ideas and operations are the two main activities by the First UN and the Second UN; the Third UN has a discernable impact on their thinking and activities. Although operations account for the bulk of actual expenditures and are important for testing ideas and policies, we focus on how non-state actors help the UN think. Those that receive our attention are NGOs, eminent individuals, think tanks, university researchers, and the for-profit sector. They are essential and underappreciated sources of knowledge and norms produced by the UN—in the past and at present, as they will be in the future. We remind readers that there is also a Third International Monetary Fund (IMF) and an equivalent network in other IGOs. Theoretical and analytical tool kits must reflect this reality; we hope that our attempts to better understand the Third UN will inspire others to do the same for other multilateral organizations.

Global Governance Reflects the Reality of the Third UN It should be obvious that we need to conceptualize the UN, other IGOs, and multilateral cooperation more comprehensively than had been the case until late in the twentieth century. That happened in the 1990s within the academy and policy circles. The term “global governance” was born from a marriage—neither shotgun nor arranged but precipitated by a blend of real-world events accompanied by developments in scholarly and policy circles—between academic theory and practical policy-formulation. At the outset of the twentieth century’s final

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decade, it became entwined with another meta-phenomenon of the last decades of the century, globalization.¹² In 1992, James Rosenau and Ernst Czempiel published their theoretical Governance without Government, at approximately the same time that the Swedish government launched the policy-oriented Commission on Global Governance with Sonny Ramphal and Ingmar Carlsson as co-chairs. Both events set in motion interest in the newly coined notion of “global governance.”¹³ The 1995 publication of the commission’s report, Our Global Neighbourhood, coincided with the first issue of the Academic Council on the United Nations System’s journal Global Governance. This quarterly sought to return to the global problem-solving and institutional origins of the leading journal in the field, International Organization, which seemed to have lost its way. As Timothy Sinclair wrote, “From the late 1960s, the idea of international organization fell into disuse . . . [and] International Organization, the journal which carried this name founded in the 1940s, increasingly drew back from matters of international policy and instead became a vehicle for the development of rigorous academic theorizing.”¹⁴ These developments paved the way for a raft of works about growing global complexity, the management of globalization, and the challenges confronting international institutions.¹⁵ The vocabulary became “global governance,” which replaced an immediate predecessor as a normative endeavor, “world order studies.” Having grown from World Peace through World Law—the classic from Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn—world order not only seemed overly top-down and static but also failed to capture adequately the variety of actors, networks, and relationships that characterized international relations.¹⁶ When the perspectives from world-order scholars began to look a little oldfashioned, the stage was set for a new analytical and normative cottage industry. After his archival labors to write a two-volume history of world federalism, Joseph Barrata observed that in the 1990s “the new expression, ‘global governance,’ emerged as an acceptable term in debate on international organization for the desired and practical goal of progressive efforts, in place of ‘world government.’”¹⁷ Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall put it more dramatically: “The idea of global governance has attained near-celebrity status.”¹⁸ Michael Zürn calculated in 2018 that the growth rate of new titles for global governance surpasses all others in international relations; its absolute annual numbers now are greater than the more familiar “war and peace” and “international cooperation.”¹⁹

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Public-private partnerships are not new to the UN. In fact, most UN entities maintain some kind of public-private partnership program. As non-state-led governance has grown exponentially in some sectors, e.g. the environment, so has the academic literature about these public authorities. In discussing environmental governance, Liliana B. Andonova defines these partnerships as “agreements for collaborative governance between public actors (national governmental agencies, sub-national governments, or IOs) and nonstate actors (foundations, firms, advocacy organizations, or others), which establish common norms, rules, objectives, and decision-making and implementation procedures for a set of policy problems.”²⁰ Anne Marie Goetz writes that “[f]Feminist engagement with international institutions is . . . a paradigmatic example of how a relatively power-deprived social group (women and feminists)” by building partnerships with states willing to champion gender equality, can “challenge the power of sovereign states.”²¹ The emergence of the term—and changes in the way that the purpose of insights from it were expressed—imbued global governance with the aspirations that had motivated earlier generations of IR, IL, IO, and IPE scholars. Global governance came to refer to collective efforts to identify, understand, and address worldwide problems and processes that went beyond the capacities of individual states. It included both formal and informal values, rules, norms, practices, and organizations that provided additional order beyond purely formal regulations and structures. It reflected a longing for the international system to provide government-like services—in this case, global public goods—in the absence of anything like a world government. Global governance thus encompasses a wide variety of cooperative problemsolving arrangements that are visible but informal (e.g., practices or guidelines) or are temporary formations (e.g., coalitions of the willing). Such arrangements could also be more formal, taking the shape of hard rules (laws and treaties) or institutions with administrative structures and established practices to manage collective affairs by a variety of actors—including state authorities, IGOs, NGOs, private sector entities, and other civil society actors.²² One of us has spent considerable intellectual efforts²³ in trying to move beyond answering the question that Lawrence Finkelstein provocatively posed shortly after the term emerged 25 years ago—“What is global governance?” His answer at that moment was “virtually anything.”²⁴ The other one of us has been tinkering with social network-based approaches to understand how an institution built on state sovereignty can adapt to the trans-boundary issues and actors of our globalized world.²⁵ Both of us represent two successive

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10  “  ”  generations of the Third UN. This book seeks to put more flesh on one part of the global governance skeleton, the United Nations. It is part history, and part a call to action. Readers should recall that our original argument appeared in a journal whose title, “Global Governance,” reflects the move away from the oldfashioned notion of states and their creation in the form of IGOs as the only meaningful pillars of world order.

About This Book Among other things, the thaw in the Cold War changed the balance between markets and states. As a result, a number of voices—for instance, human rights advocates, gender activists, development specialists, and groups of indigenous peoples—were amplified in the ideational and operational spaces that earlier had been virtually the exclusive territory of states or intergovernmental secretariats. This book explores this phenomenon. Chapter 1 begins our exploration of “The Third UN” by probing the nutsand-bolts of “Non-State Actors and the World Organization’s Thinking.” It defends our selection of and concentration on the main knowledge brokers in the Third UN. It explores the growth in numbers of the two major types of non-state actors that are easiest to count, international NGOs and TNCs, as well as their dynamics within the UN system. The widespread push, including within IGOs, for evidence-based policymaking has created a further demand for think tanks and research that “translate applied and basic research into a language that is understandable, reliable, and accessible for policy makers.”²⁶ It is impossible to appreciate the nature of the policy process without understanding the “whole” UN—First, Second, and Third. Chapter 2, “NGOs: Sovereignty-Free Partners for UN Policy Development,” examines the main tasks of NGOs and how they are related to the achievement of their missions and to those of the United Nations. The history of NGO links to the Third UN—including an official role in the UN’s constitution, Charter Article 71—as well as the various distinctions between them and other non-state actors provides an essential building block for the book. Detailed cases concern efforts to alleviate the plague of landmines (the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, ICBL), to improve international judicial pursuit (the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, CICC), and to set the agenda for sustainable development (the conversations leading to the formulation and adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs).

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It is worthwhile opening a parenthesis about case selection. While we certainly refer to examples of failure, the detailed illustrations in Chapter 2 and elsewhere are case studies that have two characteristics. First, they are far enough in the past to provide some historical distance as well as an abundance of secondary literature about them, including some first-hand accounts by important players. They thus provide well-documented examples from which we can generalize. Second, they are “successes” and illustrate the four ways that ideas matter. In particular, they have altered the ways that conversations take place among the 193 members of the First UN, and the nature of decisions by them at home as well as in intergovernmental forums. They have also altered the ways that secretariats act in headquarters and in the field—that is, the numbers of people working on a topic and the resources devoted to action. In “Commissions and Panels: How Eminent Individuals Shape UN Thinking,” Chapter 3 analyzes the over-sized role of one visible component of the Third UN. Prominent individuals—many of whom made their government and international civil servant careers as members of the First and the Second UNs—have come to constitute essential and frequent contributors to the advance of knowledge and norms. The examples concern peace operations (the Brahimi report of 2001 and HIPPO [High-level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations] of 2015); the protection of human beings in war zones (the ICISS, International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) report of 2001); and for sustainable development (the Brundtland report of 1987 and the ongoing work by the IPCC). As a counterpoint, less successful or even counterproductive group efforts also figure in the discussion, but the main examples seek to demonstrate how and when such blue-ribbon groups make a difference. Chapter 4, “The UN’s Knowledge Economy: Think Tanks, Academics, and Knowledge Brokers,” spells out the various ways that the world organization’s intergovernmental machinery requires outside inputs for making various UN policy sausages. A cottage industry of outside experts—think tankers, consultants, and university faculty members—greases the gears of this messy process with substantive inputs.²⁷ The ways that ideas matter, and how they influence state decision-making, are essential elements in this discussion, as are the Third UN’s knowledge brokers. Among the actors considered are the International Peace Institute (IPI), the International Crisis Group (ICG), the DC-based Stimson Center, the Security Council Report, UN University, and the smaller Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF) at the US-based Social Science Research Council. In the other UN headquarters site, the Centre

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12  “  ”  for Humanitarian Dialogue, the Small Arms Survey, and others have helped shape thinking within UN Geneva. Especially over the last two decades, these intellectual entry points—primarily based in the Global North but increasingly with wider participation from individuals and institutions worldwide—have helped shape the UN’s framing of international peace and security, human rights and humanitarian action, and sustainable development. Chapter 5 follows by detailing the growing inputs for UN deliberations from “Alternative Voices”; the sub-title indicates the result, namely “Challengers of the Normative Postwar Order.” There are two distinct sets of “voices” that appear in this chapter: from within emerging powers that formerly were absent or largely hidden; and from for-profit businesses. The first part examines the political and economic changes brought about by rising and emerging powers. We need not exaggerate either the shadow cast by the declining West or what Amitav Acharya calls the “hype of the rest”²⁸ to see that the role of emerging powers in global governance is altering the landscape for how to approach international peace and security, human rights, humanitarian action, and sustainable development—the pillars of UN activity. The second part of Chapter 5 reflects the arrival on the UN stage of actors that formerly had cameo roles despite their weight in the global economy. As mentioned, business in general and TNCs in particular were once anathema in UN circles because of their perceived role in the Global South as exploiters of resources and drivers of poverty. What began as an effort to bring them into the system through the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) has burgeoned in the twenty-first century that has witnessed, belatedly, the mobilization of the private business sector for numerous tasks and of the essential role of foreign direct investment (FDI) and overseas remittances. We emphasize technology and data firms, many of which are related to media and social media. These long-ignored partners bring resources, expertise, new technologies, and energy to international problem-solving and to the Third UN; they have also challenged the multilateral system and led to calls for a new architecture of global governance. By looking ahead to “The UN’s Normative Future,” Chapter 6 asks honestly whether the world organization can become “Fitter for Purpose?” An essential motivation for getting right the understanding of the Third UN is the need to identify the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the “whole” organization. For instance, a crucial challenge is to determine how the UN should act in the era of information disorder and public health pandemics, and thus how a variety of knowledge producers and brokers from the Third UN can help the UN think. There are areas where its role is accepted and well

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developed; others where there are agreements but also gaps; still others where there is virtually no agreement or role. The task of analyzing what the UN can and cannot do, as well as how to make it fitter-for-purpose, should have been undertaken more vigorously earlier. However, it is even more crucial in the Age of Trump, Brexit, Putin, Maduro, Xi, Netanyahu, Erdogan, Obrador, Bolsanaro, and Duterte. If the United Nations is not to be a relic, the rhetoric of “[insert country] First” needs to be replaced by a more viable and robust world body. We write at the height of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, when the breakdown of international cooperation and the pressing need for a robust multilateral system cannot be more obvious. It is impossible to ignore the ongoing polarization of politics in the First UN fueled by new nationalisms and populisms worldwide. It also is a sad reality that the Second UN is subject to a tightening grip by and pressure from the most powerful member states. New ideas, norms, and actors are challenging and re-shaping the United Nations. We should not overlook or minimize them, and the Third UN is an essential contributor to these conversations. How effective the whole UN will be in responding and managing emerging global challenges will depend, in no small measure, on the Third UN. If multilateralism of all stripes is under siege, the United Nations—warts and all—remains essential.²⁹ The COVID-19 crisis revealed the limits of the postwar system for which there are few signs of resuscitation; but at a minimum, we must rebuild the crumbling foundations. Moreover, because global problems require global solutions, a more ambitious redesign and rebuilding effort is required if we are to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, pandemics, and climate change. “We are calling for a great reawakening of nations,” is how Donald Trump concluded his first remarks to the UN General Assembly in September 2017. He ignored the fact that some three-quarters of a century earlier, the United States agreed to create the world organization in order to curb the demonstrated horrors of nationalism run amok; yet, he has repeatedly undermined it. Instead, he and the rest of us should be calling for a great reawakening of the United Nations. This book about the intellectual contribution of the non-state actors of the Third UN is a modest contribution to that objective.

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1 The “Third” UN Non-State Actors and the World Organization’s Thinking

This chapter begins with a discussion of the complexity and interdependence of international relations that have grown perceptively in the last half-century. It continues by spelling out several important elements of the world organization that go beyond its 193 member states and some 100,000 international civil servants. The next section explains the emphases in this book, the relevance of ideas, and the dynamics of the Third UN. The final sections assemble the numbers for both international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and transnational corporations (TNCs)—the non-state actors whose numbers are possible to estimate—and explain how they matter.

Complexity, Continuity, Change, and Confusion In the second half of the twentieth century, an unprecedented growth occurred in the number of non-state actors along with dramatic changes in the scope of international connectivity; a corresponding boom took place in discussions among scholars and policy analysts about the pluses and minuses of globalization, as well as how to manage complex world politics. Wherever one stands in the debate about the pluses and minuses of globalization,¹ everyone can agree that the intensity, speed, and volume of global interactions reflect increasing interdependence. As Manuel Castells aptly captures, we live in a world in which “Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies.”² In short, and especially since the thaw in East–West relations accompanied by the growing and recognized importance of markets vis-àvis states, we have witnessed networks of human rights advocates, gender activists, development specialists, scholars, and researchers from think tanks become more vocal, operational, and consequential. They have influenced policy and norms in arenas that earlier were considered the prerogative of states and their creations, intergovernmental secretariats. The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0002

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Understanding the nature of knowledge production and dissemination along with normative advances requires understanding the nature of contemporary networks working side-by-side behind closed office doors, in conference rooms, at cafés, and along the policy-formulation corridors of UN organizations worldwide. Complex contemporary problems and possible solutions demanding inputs or at least consent from a range of state and non-state actors often results in analytical confusion and conflicting views about priorities or the sequencing of priority actions. The remarks by two historians providing a “bird’s eye view” of transformations resulting from the invention of printing, the advances in navigation, and the proliferation of sources of authority in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are apt here: “Human lives increasingly were molded by events and processes originating far away, acting in combination with evolving local realities, making for historical forces that few contemporaries understood.”³ It is worth repeating the definition that began this volume because its scope helps to capture the difficulty in trying to make sense of a vast and motley assortment of actors. The Third UN is the ecology of supportive non-state actors—intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media—that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First and Second UN to formulate and refine UN ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. The notion of a three-faceted UN—the “whole” UN—is a contribution to the challenge of more adequately theorizing contemporary global governance, a task made more difficult because social media and other types of connectivity make the current landscape for the three UNs largely uncharted, if not unknown, territory. It builds on a growing body of work that calls for taking into account “multiple multilateralisms” and other unpronounceable terms.⁴ As noted, other IGOs are comparable because there is a “Third” European Union (EU) and a “Third” African Union (AU), just as there is a Third UN. We conceptualized the Third UN as an integral part of the world body only a decade ago, but the phenomenon of non-state actors is not new. It has been gaining momentum over the last two centuries, beginning with the antislavery movement late in the eighteenth century.⁵ As Stephen Schlesinger reminds us, there were so many (mostly domestic) advocacy groups, lobbyists, consultants, and academics demanding a presence at the nine-week San Francisco conference that birthed the UN in 1945, that both the Americans and the Soviets felt compelled to spy on them.⁶ The estimated 1,500 NGOs in San Francisco included the New York City Council on African Affairs and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP),

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16  “”  whose director for special research, W.E.B. Du Bois, was among the leading voices opposed to colonialism. Washington was particularly concerned that these groups were meeting with the African delegates at the conference to lobby for decolonization. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (better known by its abbreviation, FBI), together with the US Army Signal Security Agency (now the National Security Agency), monitored the interactions among the three United Nations. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union docked an entertainment ship in San Francisco Bay filled with vodka and caviar for its delegates, but also with communications and listening devices for its own espionage campaign. In addition to these unofficial “outsiders,” the US delegation had 42 official “outsider-insiders”—consultants officially recognized by the conference.⁷ Sponsored by Washington, they included the likes of James Shotwell, a Columbia University historian, Virginia Gildersleeve, the long-time dean of Barnard College and co-founder of the International Federation of University Women, Clark Eichelberger, a peace activist and national director of the League of Nations Association (the precursor to the UN Association), and Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee. The consultants met regularly with the US delegation, gave presentations, and offered ideas and amendments as the draft Charter was being finalized. In addition to successfully advocating for firmly embedding the idea of human rights into the Charter, Schlesinger and Dorothy Robins,⁸ who documented the role of NGOs at the San Francisco Conference, point to at least two other instances when these outsider-insiders helped shaped the final Charter, thereby enshrining international norms in it. The first was their successful advocacy for the inclusion of international cooperation around education, an idea already backed by hundreds of US university presidents and educators in dozens of countries, but that the US delegation initially resisted—lest it open the door to Soviet propaganda in US schools and universities. The final UN Charter Article 13 in Chapter IV calls for the world body to “promote international co-operation in the economic, social, cultural, educational, and health fields.” The second example was the consultants’ successful push to include a new Article 71, which enshrined in the Charter the right for civil society to be present and consulted in UN matters. While this hoped-for UN–NGO collaboration has often been a rocky road, the idea of civil society’s inclusion in UN policy discussions—as relevant today as it was in 1945—would likely not have been introduced had it not been for the efforts of those early Third UN actors who had secured a seat at the table.

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Emphases and Dynamics of the Third UN Why parse this dynamic, given that networks of all types are not new?⁹ Although many governments have resisted the influence by non-state actors in IGOs, parts of the UN system have long engaged them and drawn on academic and policy expertise located outside the official confines of the system. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has incorporated representatives of trade unions and the business sector into its tripartite structure since 1919. NGOs have been significant for advances in norms and policies at the UN, beginning with advocacy for the inclusion of human rights in the UN Charter in 1945 and for the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention three years later. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has long had close interactions with civil society and national commissions for a wide range of children’s issues as well as for fund-raising and advocacy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and more recently UN Women that incorporated it, have interacted with national committees consisting of academics and NGOs. Indeed, it is a well-known secret: virtually all parts of the UN have drawn on academic or professional expertise located outside the system through consultants or ad hoc expert groups. A number of authors have noted the phenomenon of non-state actors, especially NGOs, as they intersect with the United Nations; but none has incorporated them as an integral component of the world body itself.¹⁰ Previous analyses provide an incomplete understanding of the roles played by members of the Third UN. First, they are viewed as “outsiders” rather than as an essential element of an intergovernmental body. Second, their role as purveyors of ideas and new thinking as crucial inputs to the world body has largely been ignored. The number of non-official groups has grown dramatically; meanwhile, globalization accompanied by communications and technological advances have increased the volume, reach, and impact of non-state voices. Geographical distance and limited resources for international travel no longer necessarily mean a lack of presence. Adopting the notion of the Third UN is a sharper way to depict interactions than the usual threefold vocabulary of state, market, and civil society.¹¹ The terminology of the “Third” UN resonates well for students of IO who cut their analytical teeth on Claude’s framework, including many of the readers of such traditional journals as International Organization or newer ones such as Global Governance. Finally, it better captures the networked, diverse, and

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18  “”  ever-changing nature of the non-state actors and intellectual partnerships that constitute the Third UN. Most social scientists—including development economists, students of comparative politics, sociologists, and anthropologists—have long recognized the central empirical and theoretical reality of non-state actors. However, this insight largely has eluded IR, IL, IO, and even some IPE specialists who remain preoccupied with state sovereignty and with the UN’s being an intergovernmental organization, whose priorities and actions reflect the views expressed by the national representatives of member states. While leadership can provide the explanation for success or failure, the staff members of the Second UN are customarily viewed as subservient to their paymasters. For a long time, analysts have minimized or even ignored interactions by non-state actors and their influence on UN decision-making. Yet, they are integral and not peripheral. Beginning in the 1970s, however, with such liberal institutionalists as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye¹² and continuing with such constructivists as Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall,¹³ the growing presence and activities of actors other than states have gradually enticed theorists—with the notable exception of hard-core Realists—to pry open the lid on the black box of statecentric theories, to question the UN system’s relevance as more than a facade to divert attention away from power politics.¹⁴ Realists remain unreconstructed and regard the UN and other multilateral institutions as distractions from the real red meat of zero-sum competition; if IGOs are largely irrelevant, the Third UN must be totally so. However, liberal institutionalists but especially constructivists view cooperation as not only possible but also essential for addressing issues as varied as rights, pandemics, terrorism, and climate change. Such issues figure prominently on the international agenda, and so knowledge about them as well as norms to guide policymaking and action certainly reflect efforts by non-state actors. Our previous research, and this book, reflect our location squarely in these theoretical camps. In spite of the rise of what The Economist called “the new nationalisms,” for decades even the United States “has done what realist theory claimed was impossible, playing international politics as a team sport, not an individual one.”¹⁵ That is, applying a social constructivist perspective is not only about hoping to locate a “soft” ideational impact, but also about how UN ideas affect actions and results in the real world—in other words, how and when they have impact, and how and when they do not. Why have analysts neglected—and even resisted—something so obvious? Part of the answer lies in such a large and amorphous group of actors that

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engage with the United Nations at a variety of levels, at a variety of times, on a variety of issues, and with a variety of intensities. The Third UN is anything except homogeneous. Patterns are hard to grasp, generalizations hazardous, and many interactions ad hoc. Which groups should be included? Should one examine all NGOs and all academics? Where does one draw the line? Would it make more sense to focus on policy orientations rather than on entire sectors? Once inside a caucus, are all actors forever part of the Third UN, or do they move in and out depending on the issue, their influence, or the calendar? This book constitutes another step in conceptualizing global governance in terms of free-flowing networks rather than rigid formal structures¹⁶ or sectors in which they work.¹⁷ A better understanding of intergovernmental institutions and their interactions with non-state actors is essential to understanding and improving global governance. Despite the recalcitrance of many states from the First UN and international civil servants from the Second UN, it is imperative to realize the magnitude of the phenomenon and understand the dynamics and impact of the Third UN on knowledge and norms. Ultimately UN success or failure depends on the ability and willingness to give intellectual content and operational meaning to the Charter’s original vision of peace, agreement through negotiations, human rights, and human welfare. It is useful to recall the two main categories of UN contributions to improved world order: ideas and operations. The Third UN works in these two areas, but we concentrate on the former, the politics of knowledge and norms—even if in budgetary terms operations are usually more important for both UN organizations and many NGOs. Operations can, of course, lead to new ideas and policies or serve as testing grounds for their feasibility. However, the various members of the Third UN are too numerous, diverse, and dispersed to generalize about their operations in this volume. Another reason justifying the emphasis is the multiplier effect of ideas, norms, principles, and standards. The proverbial rubber hits the road when UN recommendations become more widespread as policy, practice, and law at the local, national, regional, and international levels. Thus, our focus is on how non-state actors help the UN think, and more specifically still on the contributions of those that have had a significant impact on changes in major international norms and UN policies: NGOs, think tanks and universities, eminent individuals, and businesses.¹⁸ In addition, we should specify our emphases on non-state actors in the UN’s New York and Geneva headquarters, where both of us have worked and observed. This choice is not merely a convenience but because they are often the primary conduits for ideas into the wider UN system. That said, we also examine the

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20  “”  First UN (Member States)

B

A D Second UN (Secretariats)

C

Third UN (Academics, Experts, Think Tanks, NGOs, Business, Media)

A: International and national civil servants’ interactions (e.g., agency boards). B: State and non-state interactions (e.g., government donor agencies and national experts). C: Secretariat and non-state interactions (e.g., forums at global conferences and subcontractors). D: The networked space within which individuals and private organizations interact with the Member States and Secretariats to influence or advance thinking, policies, priorities, or actions.

Figure 1.1 Interactions among the Three United Nations

newest actors, such as Chinese and Brazilian think tanks and analysts, who produce research that reflects alternative world views to those of what has been, until recently, a largely western- and northern-dominated Third UN. Our discussion of NGOs emphasizes international non-governmental organizations, which play major roles in knowledge and norms although local NGOs often are key counterparts in dissemination and field operations. The point is that INGOs (including think tanks, advocacy organizations, and operational bodies) along with scholars, eminent individuals, and the forprofit private sector are essential yet underappreciated sources of knowledge inputs for the development and promulgation of norms by the UN—today, yesterday, and certainly tomorrow. Figure 1.1 illustrates the interactions among the three United Nations. It depicts them as separate circles whose overlapping areas convey interactive space. We are particularly interested in where the three come together (D), which is where the most intellectual sparks fly. Within this networked space, individuals and private organizations interact with UN member states and secretariats to influence or advance thinking, policies, priorities, and actions. Juan Somavia has a well-informed vantage point—he worked in all three UNs, including as the ILO director-general—and emphasized that for most issues the Third UN has led, but that the First UN and the Second UN have played “a very fundamental role as a legitimizer of ideas that are nascent, of things that

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are out there. . . . The moment the UN begins discussing an issue, and it becomes part of programs and institutional debate, then it legitimizes something that otherwise could be perceived of as marginal in society.”¹⁹ This book pays especial attention to other key parts of this networked space—in particular, where the Third UN and the Second UN interact (C), because this space has been under-explored. It helps explain shifts in UN policies, priorities, and practices—in short, the UN’s production of knowledge and norms. “I’ve always reached out to talk to others,” Secretary-General Kofi Annan recalled. “There is a tendency for people in this house to say, ‘We are special. We are different. The rest of the world does not understand us.’ And you can really get into a cocoon.” In a refreshing openness to outside inputs, he continued: “There are times when I bring in groups to advise me on issues— use experienced leaders to give me advice.”²⁰ We also analyze how the Third UN informs the First UN (B), both directly as well as indirectly (via the Second UN). The reasons why come from Nafis Sadik, executive director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in 1987–2000: “I think population work has always come from outside of the UN. . . . Outside organizations put a lot more pressure on the UN, but also on governments. I think the work of the Pop[ulation] Council, the work of many of the scholars at Princeton University, at Stanford University influenced very much the eventual outcome of setting up a UNFPA and having a population program. Those influences came from outside, because in fact many members of the UN itself in fact resisted it.”²¹ Figure 1.1 also depicts these interactions in combination with those between the First UN and the Second UN (A). The relations between government representatives and international civil servants have constituted the bulk of previous UN scholarship. Those between governments and non-state actors as well as between secretariats and non-state actors have expanded but been inadequate. This book aims to right the balance.

Why Ideas Matter What do we mean by ideas? We define them broadly as beliefs held by individuals, groups, or governments that influence their attitudes and actions, in this case toward the benefits of multilateral cooperation in building a more peaceful and just world, one that reflects more the rule of law than the law of the jungle. The ideas mostly arise as the result of social interactions among individuals or groups of individuals within any of the three United Nations.

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22  “”  Often the ideas assume a more definite shape over time, sometimes as the result of research, often through debate or challenge, and sometimes through efforts to turn ideas into policy. As is to be expected, power and politics infuse every stage. In the quest for knowledge and norms, economist Barbara Ward reminded us that: “Ideas are the prime movers of history. Revolutions usually begin with ideas.”²² Victor Hugo had earlier expressed a similar sentiment: “On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées.”²³ Ideas lead to action in numerous ways but almost never in a linear fashion—running from the creation of a new idea to dissemination, from decisions by policymakers to implementation, and on to impact and results. The non-linear process is varied, but we reiterate the four distinct ways that ideas have an impact: • They alter the ways that issues are perceived and the language used to describe them. • They redefine state and non-state interests and goals, setting agendas for action. • They change the ways that key groups perceive their interests and mobilize new coalitions—thus altering the balance of forces pressing for action or resisting it. • They become embedded in institutions, which devote human and financial resources to carry an idea forward and thereby become a focus for accountability and monitoring. These four impacts provide a framework for the evidence that we marshal; when they come together, they affect implementation at all levels, including at the micro-level within individual countries and communities where norms and policies affect implementation. In moving from the international to the national level, the itinerary and speed of ideas varies depending on issues. “The UN became the place where women could bring issues ignored at the national level into the international spotlight to be addressed by national governments,” is the dynamic that UNIFEM’s former executive director and ESCAP’s former executive secretary Noeleen Heyzer stressed. She pointed out why that mattered: “When the ideas took a powerful form, they got recognized and accepted, because it spoke about women’s lives. . . . With these international norms, women pressured for the revisions of national norms and policies based on international standards. We worked so hard to ensure that decision making in the courts and in the criminal justice system

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also changed because of new legal standards and norms. So ideas became action which changed people’s lives.”²⁴ With respect to UN ideas, elements of all four ways UN ideas have mattered figure throughout the fifteen UN Intellectual History Project’s volumes published by Indiana University Press between 2001 and 2010. They emphasized economic and social development, but this book also includes examples from international peace and security as well as human rights and humanitarian action. Here, we repeat a concrete example that can quickly illustrate the proposition: the formulation of statistical norms and guidelines. In Quantifying the World, Michael Ward traced the development in the early 1950s of the System of National Accounts (SNA). It provided the guidelines which even today enables and encourages countries around the world to calculate their gross national product (GNP) and other core economic statistics on a standardized basis. For better or worse, the SNA provides an economic snapshot of a country’s economic performance. The system has helped define agendas for economic policy and action in country after country, which in turn unleashed pressures for the better use of economic resources and, often in reaction, calls from various quarters for more attention to social and non-economic indicators. The SNA has been embedded in the work of the UN Statistical Commission (UNSC) and the UN Statistical Office (UNSO). Thus, in all four of these areas, and in quite specific ways, the UN’s early work on the SNA has had a concrete and continuous impact over the last seven decades. It is helpful to let Ward speak for himself: “the creation of a universally acknowledged statistical system and of a general framework guiding the collection and compilation of data according to recognized standards, both internationally and nationally, has been one of the great and mostly unsung successes of the UN Organization.”²⁵ We distinguish three types of ideas or beliefs—positive, normative, and causal. Positive ideas or beliefs are those resting on hard evidence, open to challenge, and verifiable, at least in principle. That the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC) countries spent 0.32 percent of their gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA) in 2016 is an example.²⁶ Normative ideas are beliefs about what the world should look like. That these countries ought to implement the long-standing UN target of spending 0.7 percent of their GNI on ODA, or that there should be a more equitable allocation of world resources or fewer greenhouse gases (GHGs) are additional examples. Causal ideas, on the other hand, are applied notions— often about what strategy will have a particular result, or what tactics will

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24  “”  achieve a particular outcome; they are frequently hard to measure and often with a normative element. At the UN, causal ideas regularly take an operational form—for instance, the calculation that over 0.5 percent of GNI would be needed as ODA to support the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was an idea that has continued for the follow-on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Causal ideas can be specific, but they are less than full-blown theories.²⁷ For example, if we were to begin with the sweeping ethical proposition that the world should be more just, then the idea of a more equitable allocation of resources can be both a normative idea as well as a causal way to improve international justice. Research about the role of ideas falls into three categories. The first is usually called “institutionalism.” For instance, Judith Goldstein’s and Robert Keohane’s analyses of foreign policy²⁸ and Kathryn Sikkink’s of development in Latin America²⁹ are concerned with how organizations shape the policy preferences of their members. Ideas can be particularly important to policymaking processes during periods of upheaval. In thinking about the end of World War II, the Cold War, or post-9/11 and post-COVID-19 challenges, for example, ideas provide conceptual road maps to understand changing preferences and definitions of the vital interests of state and non-state actors alike. Such an approach helps us to situate the dynamics at work among ideas, multilateral institutions, and national policies. It also enables us to begin generalizing about how the three UNs influence elite and popular images, as well as how opinion-makers affect the world organization. The second research category relates to the approaches and interactions of various groups, including Peter Haas’s epistemic communities,³⁰ Peter Hall’s analyses of the impact of Keynesian economists,³¹ and Ernst B. Haas’s work on knowledge and power³² as well as work by Sikkink and others on transnational networks of activists.³³ These approaches examine the role of intellectuals in creating ideas, of technical experts in diffusing them and making them more concrete and scientifically grounded, and of all sorts of people in influencing the positions adopted by a wide range of actors. The relevance of policy decisions and action by government is an especially pertinent indicator of impact—for which the influence of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a powerful ongoing illustration. Networks of experts influence a broad spectrum of world politics through their ability to interact with policymakers regardless of location and national boundaries; this reality has become more obvious with an accelerating number of technological advances—data collected in South Africa, Singapore, or Sweden are instantaneously available to researchers with an internet

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connection. Those working on HIV/AIDS, climate change, or peacebuilding can generate new evidence and interpretations; they can thereby influence policy by clarifying an issue upon which decision-makers on the other side of the globe may interpret as being in their interests. Researchers can also help to frame the debate on a particular issue by narrowing the acceptable range of bargaining topics during international negotiations. They can introduce standards for action. These networks can help provide justifications for alternatives, and often build national or international coalitions to support chosen policies and to advocate for change. This interpretation borrows from Thomas Kuhn’s classic on the nature of scientific revolutions although he undoubtedly would be surprised by the speed at which contemporary paradigm shifts occur and are communicated.³⁴ The third category that informs our work consists of insights from social constructivists such as Alexander Wendt³⁵ and John G. Ruggie.³⁶ They seek to determine the potential for individuals, governments, and international institutions to be active agents for change rather than robots whose primary behavior maintains the status quo. The critical approaches of those more influenced by the Italian school of Marxism, such as Robert Cox and his followers,³⁷ are also pertinent. They view the work of all organizations and their ideologies, including the United Nations, as heavily determined by material conditions and historical path dependencies. The UN system has spawned or nurtured numerous ideas that have called into question conventional wisdom as well as reinforced it. Indeed, the very definition of what passes for “conventional” at a particular moment in certain parts of the world, but not elsewhere, is part of our inquiry. Ideas, concepts, standards, principles, and norms are the UN’s most important asset, a legacy that has been a driving force in many areas of human progress. They have set past, present, and future agendas for international peace and security; human rights and humanitarian action; and sustainable development. This book is part of a larger effort to correct the previous paucity of attention to the role of the UN and other IGOs in generating or nurturing ideas. The view of the University of Oxford’s Ngaire Woods from late in the last century still has resonance: “In short, ideas, whether economic or not, have been left out of analyses of international relations.”³⁸ There is a widespread, but inaccurate, impression of western normative predominance; as such, analysts have overlooked the intellectual agency of the Global South, which has become a topic for research.³⁹ Although relatively new in analyses of international relations and organizations, the study of knowledge and ideas

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26  “”  is common bill-of-fare for historians, philosophers, students of literature, and economists. Our parsing of the three UNs responds to the need to address another analytical reality: many observers do not explain the sources of ideas, just their effects. They rarely explain how ideas emerge or evolve, with the exception of pointing to technological innovations as a driver of change. By ignoring where ideas come from and their itineraries, cause and effect are hazy. Do ideas shape policy? Does policy push existing ideas forward, and perhaps even generate new ideas that may emerge in response to that policy or action? Do ideas serve, after the fact, as a convenient justification for a policy or a decision? In short, we encounter variations of the chicken-and-egg question. Our approach to knowledge and norms is to analyze them in light of historical and social contexts; they cannot be understood without reference to a specific time and place. In assigning responsibility for ideas, Somavia remarked: “You always have this combination of issues and people who are the bearers of the torch, and who dare to go forward and go beyond the accepted.” In pointing to a new norm or policy, he continued: “If it had been left to the UN system alone, it would have been a complicated thing to move forward. . . . The instrument was generated by the UN, but the actual capacity to promote it and develop it had to come from civil society.”⁴⁰ Thus, the birth and survival of ideas in the UN—or their death and suppression—invariably reflect events and are contingent upon politics and the world economy; they also depend on the power and leverage of the actors and coalitions that spawn and advocate for them. It is a fool’s errand—or at least a largely frustrating and fruitless expenditure of time and energy—to try and identify at what point in its life or in which of its many possible incarnations one should begin to study an idea. As Woods aptly summarizes, “Very few ideas are very new.”⁴¹ Observers are still arguing whether Alexander Graham Bell deserves credit for inventing the telephone because so many others were toying with the same idea at about the same time, or whether evolution should be credited to Charles Darwin or his rival Alfred Russel Wallace. The difficulty of identifying a single individual or institution responsible for the creation of knowledge and norms is one illustration of this problem, which is manifest in the overlapping processes and actors in the “whole UN” and other multilateral organizations. An idea often evolves and ownership becomes more widely shared through group processes, a particularly pertinent reality within the United Nations in which the pooling of a multiplicity of geographic and other groupings is the only way of doing business—in fact, widespread ownership is the central goal of deliberations.⁴²

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Hence, we do not attempt to follow A. O. Lovejoy, who sought to trace an idea “through all the provinces of history in which it appears.”⁴³ Instead, we pick up an idea when it first intersects with UN debates because we seek to understand the value-added by the Third UN to the production of knowledge and norms. Finally, what is the influence of ideas themselves versus their carriers? What is the impact of specific members of the Third UN?⁴⁴ It can be argued that the more influential the members of an expert group or university or think tank, or the greater their access to policymaking elites, the greater the odds that their ideas will be adopted—that is, irrespective of their inherent value. Ideas presuppose agents, who possess varying degrees of access and credibility, along with power and its resulting leverage. Power and the long-standing barriers to participation by poorer and less well positioned actors—in particular from the Global South—are realities in all three United Nations. Throughout these pages, we use examples from the three broad thematic baskets of activities and outputs from the world organization. The Third UN has provided essential inputs for peace and security; human rights and humanitarian action; and sustainable development. The interactions among the three UNs are crucial for global policy processes, but they are complicated to trace because of the increasing ease of movement by individuals who contribute to UN deliberations and actions from several positions during their careers and typically from several geographical locations. In fact, it is not uncommon for leading policy figures to have significant experience in all three United Nations. For instance, Adebayo Adedeji was a junior academic working on UN issues before becoming a government minister, before taking over as the head of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), and before setting up his own UN-related NGO in Nigeria after his retirement from the secretariat in Addis Ababa. Julia Taft ran the emergency program of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), after having been the CEO of InterAction—a consortium of almost 200 US development and humanitarian NGOs—while being a member of a UN committee coordinating emergency operations, and after having headed the US State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Boutros Boutros-Ghali earned a reputation as a professor of international law and a government minister in Egypt before spending five years at the helm on First Avenue; he subsequently headed two NGOs in Europe after his failed bid for re-election as the UN’s top civil servant. The impact is evident albeit difficult to measure. John Ruggie left Columbia University to join the Second UN on the 38th floor; but he returned to the Third UN at Harvard University after his UN service. However, he remained a special representative on business and

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28  “”  human rights and noted the reasons why the movement among the three UNs is important for the development of norms and policies: “The most direct carrier, obviously, is people. . . . You bring with you ideas, and there is a contagion effect among the people you’re working with.”⁴⁵ In terms of the politics of knowledge and norms, member states make policies, sign treaties, deploy soldiers to halt murder or keep the peace, establish priorities and budgets, and pay the bills (or are supposed to). Ideas can emanate from visionary individuals within the first UN. Examples include Canadian foreign minister Lester B. Pearson’s call for the first peacekeeping effort in 1956 and the Swedish government’s decision to organize the first global conference on the human environment in 1972. Influential ideas sometimes gravitate from the Second UN as well. An intriguing example is the notion of declining terms of trade, a thesis formulated by Hans Singer in 1950 at UN headquarters in the Department of Economic Affairs and further developed and applied by Raúl Prebisch at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA).⁴⁶ At the time, the two intellectual stalwarts were highly influential members of the Second UN, who had assembled the initial data and argument outside of secretariats. They then publicized the problems created by the tendency of the terms of trade to move against primary commodities, thus creating persistent balance-of-payments problems for poor countries and slowing their economic growth. This argument, radical at the time, framed contentious debates on economic development for the 1960s and 1970s; it led to the establishment in 1964 of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which resulted in the visible counter-hegemonic agenda of that period. Indeed, the Second UN remains one of the largest producers of reliable social science data in the world, some of which is original and some of which is combined with government sources to produce a composite interpretation, which also can be original. We highlight efforts by the Third UN to influence the politics of knowledge and norms. “The UN is, of course, a practical body, and it is right that it would be mainly concerned with the urgent and the immediate,” commented Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, a prominent member of the Third UN who has long worked on the margins of secretariats. “Yet, it is also necessary not to be boorish in ignoring the ancestry of many of the ideas that the UN stands for and tries to promote. I think the UN has, taking the rough with the smooth, made good use of ideas, generally. . . . This can make a difference in giving intellectual depth to practical strategies.”⁴⁷

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Members of the Third UN often launch or doggedly pursue notions about which important players in the First UN or the Second UN are less than enthusiastic. From the Brookings Institution in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Francis M. Deng and Roberta Cohen deftly designed “sovereignty as responsibility” to help foster international assistance and protection for internally displaced persons (IDPs).⁴⁸ In turn, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) made the topic more visible and palatable in 2001 with their report, The Responsibility to Protect.⁴⁹ For decades, too few members of the First or the Second UNs embraced the notion of international responsibility to enforce basic human rights standards because of the Charter’s sacrosanct Article 2(7). When SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan dared to speak out in 1998–9,⁵⁰ many member states were livid, and many staff members were baffled. Nonetheless, this emerging norm figured in the consensus of the 2005 World Summit, where diplomats agreed to include it—one of the few issues that moved ahead on the 60th anniversary.⁵¹ It is also possible that combinations of elements from the First, the Second, and the Third United Nations can constitute a like-minded partnership to move ahead on issues, with or without other powerful member states, including major powers. Two prominent cases were the coming together of likeminded governments, UN officials, analysts, and NGOs in the Ottawa Process, which in 1997 produced the convention banning antipersonnel landmines.⁵² A similarly diverse coalition led to the adoption of the 1998 Rome Treaty, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC).⁵³ More recently, the agreement on the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda cannot be interpreted without examining inputs from all three United Nations.⁵⁴ In another variation, members of the Second UN may sometimes turn to the Third UN to formulate ideas that are controversial but propitious to place on the formal agenda and to pursue after consideration. They may be more palatable, or at least not rejected outright, when they emanate from non-state actors outside the organization rather than from inside. An example is “human development,” which then UNDP administrator William Draper imported by calling upon two former Cambridge roommates, Mahbub ul-Haq and Amartya Sen. The concept has been continually refined since the first publication of the quasi-independent Human Development Report in 1990.⁵⁵ Some UNDP staff, including Draper, were keen on the notion although they felt constrained by their status as international civil servants. The technical details thus fell to minds largely outside the confines of the UNDP’s staff and Governing Council, although the

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30  “”  analytical team for the Human Development Report had office space in UNDP headquarters. Governments that were irritated with the publicity given to their embarrassing positions in the rankings attacked the human development teams. Indeed, many disgruntled governments disputed the appropriateness of paying the bill for such UN research, a complaint they applied to commissions and panels as well.⁵⁶ At the same time, we should not minimize the clashes between parts of the Third UN and government and UN officials. Important distinctions in views among non-state actors bear on UN processes and their outcomes. For instance, the contrast is sharp between the perspectives of most NGOs and the far more significant influence of corporations over the content of norms in the public health arena—breastfeeding versus infant formula is one example— or in negotiations for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and SDGs. The role of some non-state actors in impeding effective implementation of UN standards in such national jurisdictions as women’s rights also are indicative of the types of power and ideological differences within segments of the Third UN. The double-edged sword of the increased non-core financing by governments and by private business and philanthropic sources adds to the complexity of understanding the impact of the three United Nations.⁵⁷

Counting INGOs and TNCs, and Why the Numbers Matter It is a truism that the contemporary world is more interconnected than it used to be, which has increased the ease of establishing international entities of all sorts and in multiplying and intensifying interactions among them. Over the past century, a marked increase has taken place in the number and the scope of international actors on the world stage. This burgeoning has been concentrated in non-state actors, and more specifically for this discussion of the Third UN in INGOs and TNCs, for which measurements and time-series data are readily available—numbers for the dramatic growth in and locations of think tanks are found in Chapter 4, but they cover a shorter time span. Here we marshal evidence about the growth of INGOs and TNCs since the beginning of the last century. New non-state actors or the expansion of older ones, by the nature of their working to address issues or facilitate action internationally, represent additional bricks and mortar for the foundations of global governance.

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80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 1909 1954 1958 1962 1966 1970 1976 1978 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017

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Figure 1.2 Historical overview of the number of IGOs and INGOs, 1909–2017

The Yearbook of International Organizations provides the time-series data to track the number of IGOs and INGOs over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their data dramatically demonstrate the changing landscape of international organization.⁵⁸ Figure 1.2 provides an overview of the total number of IGOs and INGOs from 1909 to 2017. While there were 213 organizations in 1909, they had increased more than four times by 1951 and then to 6,476 in 1976, although the number dropped to 3,821 in the following year. Despite the temporary drop (led by INGOs, repeated, for instance, from 1988 to 1989), the pattern is clear: the number of IGOs and INGOs continues to increase significantly, reaching 71,397 in 2018. A dramatic surge in the total number of INGOs resulted in this growth as well as the change in the growth rate. The Union of International Associations provides longitudinal data for IGOs and INGOs, but data do not cover those entities organized across national boundaries whose activities are profit-oriented. Transnational corporations are another key non-state actor and substantial participant in the Third UN, along with global business and consumer associations.⁵⁹ In light of their voices and resources, their absence—or at least marginalization within debates of UN organizations—until the twenty-first century was short-sighted. Our own attempt to assemble the pieces of the contemporary global governance puzzle, and more particularly the UN’s production of knowledge and norms, moves TNCs from the periphery closer to the center of UN deliberations.

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32  “”  TNCs are easy enough to describe, but a precise definition that allows for a compilation of data about their exact numbers is more daunting. The networked structure of many modern business enterprises means that they are often a collection of subsidiary and superordinate bodies with complex ownership and supply ties.⁶⁰ This structure makes it challenging and even misleading to identify a single entity within such structures. UNCTAD did attempt a definition: A TNC is an enterprise, which is irrespective of its country of origin and its ownership, including private, public or mixed, which comprises entities located in two or more countries which are linked, by ownership or otherwise, such that one or more of them may be able to exercise significant influence over the activities of others and, in particular, to share knowledge, resources and responsibilities with the others. TNCs operate under a system of decision making which permits coherent policies and a common strategy through one or more decision-making centres.⁶¹

The increasingly transnational nature of business means that this definition is best viewed as a spectrum. In light of the nature of global supply and demand and subcontracting, more and more companies have commercial ties internationally that meet the UNCTAD definition. The continuing internationalization of global investment and supply and distribution chains also complicates attempts to count the numbers of TNCs; increasing 900000 800000 700000 600000 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000

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Figure 1.3 Parent TNCs and foreign affiliates, World Investment Report 1992–2009

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economic engagement obscures distinctions between national and transnational corporations. Even with these caveats, estimates about the growth of TNCs allow us to weigh the importance of TNCs on the global stage and compare them to international non-profits. From 1991 to 2009,⁶² UNCTAD’s annual World Investment Report tracked the number of parent companies⁶³ and foreign subsidiaries of TNCs.⁶⁴ The data in Figure 1.3 demonstrate the relationship between TNCs and global economic activity.⁶⁵ UNCTAD found more TNCs during the economic expansions in the late 1990s and again in the 2000s, but TNC numbers dropped precipitously or stagnated during economic and financial downturns over the last decade. However, overall growth has been fairly steady and trending upwards: on average, the global economic system added 2,677 parent TNCs and 38,579 foreign affiliates per year over the 1990s and 2000s. There are more international organizations now than at any other point in history. The burgeoning presence of INGOs and TNCs accompanies the essentially steady number of IGOs; however, their budgets and scope have continued to grow, and their geographical and programmatic diversification and presence are missed when merely counting IGO numbers. We are not arguing, however, a case for the more-the-merrier. Rather, to what extent have these increased numbers in the Third UN contributed to the past evolution and future prospects for enhanced global governance? The growth in actors permits—indeed fosters—a networked structure of global interconnections, with the various different types of partners making identifiable or potential contributions to global governance. We have not dwelled upon the skirmishes within the Third UN itself that reflect the current moment’s polarization at many levels. Global confrontations mirror left-right societal and political battles at the national level. Western conservative forces include white supremacists as well as religious groups that are pro-life, anti-feminist, and anti-LGBTQ. They too have embraced and benefited from their own form of transnationalism and extended their influence to other countries, at times using UN gatherings as a convenient platform. These non-state actors are not particularly supportive of the ‘knowledge’ type of roles we discuss. A skeptic, noting that international organizations have been with us for some time, may ask, “So, what’s new?” Our answer, at least in part, is that “more is different.”⁶⁶ The quantitative growth, especially of INGOs and TNCs, over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries constitutes, in effect, a qualitative change in global governance. Earlier, many problems had a few or even no

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34  “”  non-state actors active in analysis, advocacy, or operations within an issue area. The reach of the networks created by quantitative and qualitative growth means that virtually all global challenges now have a complex web of international stakeholders working to understand and to address them. Moreover, technology has accelerated the nature and speed of the longer-term pattern of growing interactions. As Kenneth W. Abbott, Jessica F. Green, and Robert O. Keohane remind us, intergovernmental organizations are no longer the dominant nor fastest growing global governance institutional form.⁶⁷ In recent years we have seen an expansion of networked forms of public authority that may not include IGOs or states at all. These provide opportunities to bring in new knowledge and ideas to solve intractable problems and shape political orders; they can help decentralize the UN system by providing entry points for private actors to participate in global governance; and they can at times overcome the political gridlock currently paralyzing both states and UN secretariats. The proliferation of non-state actors has meant that there are many more potentially powerful contributors to the UN’s production of knowledge and norms—sometimes by themselves, sometimes in tandem, and sometimes in partnership with member states of the First UN and officials of the Second UN. This perspective implies a different structure, process, and function for how governance operates on the global level. Specifically, states or state-based entities no longer enjoy a monopoly or even a monopsony in world politics or in the politics of the UN’s production of knowledge and norms. States remain the most essential players in the global arena, but they certainly are no longer the sole—or in some instances, even the most noteworthy—actors in the limelight on an ever-more-crowded governance stage. “States’ ability to control or regulate [global economic growth] has diminished,” according to Deborah Avant, Martha Finnemore, and Susan Sell, “while nonstate actors’ efforts to shape or tame it have increased.”⁶⁸ Peter Willetts points out that NGOs have long participated in global governance although he prefers abandoning the purely negative designation because it reinforces the centrality of states—that is, by defining others as “non” states.⁶⁹ The end of the Cold War facilitated the growth of non-state actors of all types, which in turn supported networks of various types in fostering additional interactions across borders. “Transnationalism is my name for a way of understanding global governance that focuses not on international institutions or national states themselves,” wrote Tim Sinclair, “but on other agents and processes.”⁷⁰

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The growth of non-state actors has meant an increasing diversity of potential players and partners, and more contributors to ideas and norm-making in the various formal and informal gatherings of the UN system. The proliferation of actors who legitimately represent stakeholders and contribute concretely to contemporary global problem-solving means that reality diverges from the state-centric models of traditional international relations, law, organization, and political economy. It is perhaps easier to paint a specific picture of the age of partnerships in operations rather than in normative processes. Two examples from today’s script for global governance suggest complex interactions between states and their creations, IGOs, with non-state actors. The first, over the last decade, consists of some 100,000 to 120,000 international soldiers, police officers, and civilian monitors who were deployed worldwide annually in UN peace operations.⁷¹ Personnel have come from not only member states but also regional organizations such as the AU, sub-regional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), coalitions of the willing, or some combination of the preceding. Alongside states and IGO-supported troops, we have also seen a host of not-for-profit development and humanitarian agencies funded by states, foundations, and public donations in wartorn areas and fragile countries to support economic development and provide emergency succor, health care, education, access to clean water, and more. In addition, local and international for-profit companies operated in countries before, during, and after armed conflicts. In short, some typical duties of national governments—providing security, economic development, and access to public goods—are often facilitated by a complex international partnership consisting of a combination of actors representing states, IGOs, INGOs, and TNCs. The second example regards reactions to piracy as it surged in the waters of the Horn of Africa and elsewhere. Actual stakeholders (including not only states, but also other participants in international maritime transport) joined forces to address the problem in the first decade of the twenty-first century. These stakeholders eschewed formal UN structures and the constraints that accompany them—although they were buoyed by the 2008 Security Council resolution 1851—the Contact Group for Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS) began as an informal multi-stakeholder network for the coordination of counter-piracy planning. The CGPCS had active participation by naval, intelligence, legal, and other staff from many states along with personnel from IGOs, NGOs, and a host of industry associations.⁷²

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36  “”  Non-state actors have thus come together in different combinations to address specific problems with varying degrees of success. In doing so, states and non-state actors have cobbled together frameworks for cooperation and responses that have resulted in more order, stability, and predictability than could reasonably be expected by examining only formal authority structures. In short, non-state actors have contributed to global governance, which goes far beyond a system of coordination by state-based entities to include an everevolving mosaic of partnerships. NGOs play active roles in generating data and information as well as shaping norms, laws, and policies. They can challenge traditional notions of representation, accountability, and legitimacy. Similarly, for-profit corporations may expand their purview beyond a concern merely with their bottom lines; they can delve into arenas (active participation in international conferences, for example) and activities (e.g., corporate social responsibility, CSR) from which they were earlier either absent or peripheral.⁷³ In an increasingly diverse, complex, and interdependent world, states alone cannot pretend to have all of the answers to collective-action (or most other) questions. One illustration of the changing, hybrid structure of actors engaged in transnational activities was the establishment of the UN Global Compact (UNGC) at the Millennium Summit of 2000. This UN initiative was agreed by member states but conceived and pushed by the Secretary-General and Secretariat (the Second UN). At the same time, the target for these efforts was to encourage corporate participation (the Third UN) in sustainable development and protection of human rights but to be monitored by NGOs (also the Third UN). By definition, states pay the bills and make the decisions in IGOs; but to be meaningful in today’s world, their actions have to embrace non-state actors. While NGOs specifically figure in the UN Charter in Article 71, market actors do not; indeed, the UN system kept them at arm’s length during the decades of the Cold War because of ideological opposition from the Soviet bloc and many countries in the Global South. The Global Compact altered that outmoded perspective. It is treated in more depth in Chapter 5, but here the emphasis is on the specific recognition by UN member states and international civil servants of the crucial role of these two prominent components of the Third UN. The United Nations, as the foremost IGO and preeminent global governance institution, acknowledged some eight decades after the ILO that the members of the private sector—both for-profit and non-profit—are essential partners in supporting the world organization’s goals and decisions. At the beginning of his mandate, UN Secretary-General António Guterres created his High-Level Panel of

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Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, which applied the phrase “global partnership” to capture the reality that progress on development, as in every other sector, involves not just governments but also business, civil society, NGOs, and individuals.⁷⁴ Most UN global meetings attract INGO participation, and their numbers are large. As Simon Chesterman observes, “a major intergovernmental conference without civil society participation would be regarded as incomplete.”⁷⁵ Usually their participation does not resemble the 1999 Seattle Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), when tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets and destroyed property. The Third UN’s tactics are normally more peaceful and supportive of the first two UNs even when perspectives and priorities diverge. While estimates vary because of the different ways that analysts count delegates, the orders of magnitude are striking. The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 had some 17,000 non-governmental participants, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 drew some 32,000 (including 5,000 Chinese); earlier, UNICEF’s World Summit for Children in 1990 stirred over a million individuals worldwide to join in candlelight vigils.⁷⁶ Comparable numbers—although not as large— characterized other global conferences on more specialized topics. Hence, the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in 2003 had some 3,300 participants from INGOs and over 500 from business;⁷⁷ the second phase of the event in Tunis in 2005 had over 6,000 participants from INGOs and civil society entities and almost 5,000 from the business sector.⁷⁸ The Rio+20 in 2012 had almost 10,000 non-state participants.⁷⁹ The Cold War inhibited the growth of non-state actors’ participation in the world organization,⁸⁰ especially because the communist bloc and authoritarian developing countries resisted independent and dissident voices. If they existed at all, NGOs in such places were essentially an extension of the state and its views, which prompted the ugly acronym “GONGO” (government-organized NGO). Indeed, there are still so-called NGOs in repressive countries that are anything but non-governmental. Moreover, authoritarian regimes still seek to keep the presence of independent critics to a minimum in intergovernmental deliberations just as they continue to restrict and repress them at home. Purists would also point to problems when democratic governments provide substantial funding to NGOs. Moisés Naím’s proposal for a rating agency to evaluate the funding, independence, goals, and performance of NGOs suggests one way to modify procedures to counter the self-nomination process that presently amounts to the basic criterion.⁸¹ Eleven of the world’s largest INGOs in the

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38  “”  fields of human rights, environment, and social development approved that procedure in the 2006 Accountability Charter, but follow-up has lagged.⁸² During the 1990s, the altered balance between markets and states and the sheer growth in NGO numbers prompted Lester Salamon to identify an “associational revolution,” which communications and funding facilitated.⁸³ While not all are active in UN matters, the size of the phenomenon is clear. Much INGO engagement for policy changes occurs at headquarters in encounters with the First UN and the Second UN. The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) agreed to more flexible INGO accreditation standards in 1996. In 2020, some 5,161 INGOs had ECOSOC “consultative status”;⁸⁴ but others routinely join in conversations and advocacy without such official status, a reality that technology and especially social media have facilitated.⁸⁵ Those accredited to other UN organizations would raise the total to over 11,000—quite a jump from the 14 that participated in the League of Nations.⁸⁶ In the field, meanwhile, outsourcing and subcontracting to members of the Third UN also reflects the ever-changing balance between markets and states in global governance. Executing predetermined activities as subcontractors is not the same as shaping policy, but many dual-purpose INGOs use field experience as a basis for their advocacy and vice versa. As noted, we can only refer to but not really discuss in a meaningful way the local NGO partners whose numbers are virtually impossible to establish accurately, but some observers estimate at perhaps 10 million.⁸⁷ Lest we sound naïve, neither all INGOs nor many corporations in the Third UN are appealing if one takes Charter values seriously. Much has been made of the ugly elements of local civil society, for example, in the atrocities in Rwanda, Myanmar, and Sudan. INGOs with direct links to the UN also include “nasty” social movements,⁸⁸ or what Cyril Ritchie has called “criminals, charlatans and narcissists.”⁸⁹ In addition, some mainstream INGOs and their corresponding TNCs are unattractive—for instance, the National Rifle Association (NRA) pursues the antithesis of a human security agenda supported by the authors, most readers, and the vast majority of INGOs with consultative status. Energy and tobacco companies have long lobbied to keep their business models dominant over the clear threats to the environment and health that are represented by the sale of their products. In humanitarian emergencies, a number of mom-and-pop organizations as well as larger operators have agendas that reflect the biases of government funders— especially evident in Afghanistan and Iraq—or like Samaritan’s Purse,

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proselytize against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people and are anathema to many other INGOs in the Third UN. That said, NGOs and other looser associations of what is increasingly called “global civil society”—defined as “the sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organisations, networks and individuals located between the family, the state, and the market and operating beyond the confines of national societies, polities, and economies”⁹⁰—are inserting themselves into a range of intergovernmental deliberations. Washington-insider Ann Florini already noted two decades ago that “NGOs are an increasingly important piece of the larger problem of global governance. Although the state system that has governed the world for centuries is neither divinely ordained nor easily swept away, in many ways that system is not well suited to addressing the world’s grown agenda of border-crossing problems.”⁹¹ The presence of alternative voices has become integral to the UN system’s policy processes and deliberations, and to world politics more generally. Knowledge and normative production would simply not be the same without them.

Conclusion The unprecedented growth in the number of non-state actors and of international connectivity has resulted in a more complicated and complex arena for addressing global problems. The intensity, speed, and volume of interactions and networks nudged analysts toward examining international relations through the contested lens of global governance. As we saw, the definition of “global governance” remains contested; debate continues about whether the current global governance glass is half-empty, half-full, or something else.⁹² That said, it definitely reflects the widening scope and increasing numbers of non-state actors. In short, it is impossible to appreciate the nature of policy processes within the world body without understanding the “whole” United Nations—the First, the Second, and the Third. This chapter has sought to contribute to ongoing conversations with two related points. First, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of international organizations in the private as well as in the public sector that are not only willing and able to participate in global governance, but they have also, on many occasions, helped solve problems and improve lives. However, this growth was not equal among types of organizations: INGOs and TNCs account for the lion’s share of the increase in absolute numbers of non-state

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40  “”  actors, with IGOs having attained a type of natural limit (although their budgets, activities, and networks have grown substantially). Ironically, until the 1990s, virtually all scholarship and policy analyses in the fields of IO and IL stressed the problems and prospects of IGOs. Second, as other types of international organizations came to the fore and the term “global governance” appeared, new architectures appeared for norm advances and problem solving. “Partnerships” became the preferred terminology and represented a new way to think about how the “whole UN” operates, and about how the world was, is, and could be governed.

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2 NGOs Sovereignty-Free Partners for UN Policy Development

We have argued for the imperative to understand better the wide variety of influences and impacts of the Third UN; here, however, we probe the contributions by the largest non-governmental organizations that operate transnationally and often play an outsized role in influencing public policy because of their resources and reach. Their impact reflects their character as “sovereignty-free actors,” a term coined by James Rosenau.¹ There are, literally, millions—estimates as high as 10 million—of national NGOs worldwide whose activities may be relevant as inputs to UN conversations and activities. However, we cannot address them within the limits of these pages; we trust that our fledgling efforts will stimulate other more knowledgeable analysts to complete at the national level what we sketch at the global level. This chapter begins with a brief consideration of the role of NGOs identified in the UN Charter. We turn to remarkable efforts in the UN’s main areas of activities to illustrate the kinds of impact on knowledge and norms that can result from concerted actions by the INGOs from the Third UN.²

NGOs and the UN Charter Government representatives recognized the need in 1945 to have non-state groups operating internationally associated with the work of the then new world organization. Indeed, they were already on the agenda of the preparatory sessions during World War II.³ At San Francisco, the delegations from 50 states agreed to include Charter Article 71, which recognizes part of the Third UN explicitly and officially: “The Economic and Social Council may make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence. Such arrangements may be made with international organizations and, where appropriate, with national organizations after consultation with the Member of the United Nations concerned.” The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0003

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42  “  ”  Over time, the portfolio of the NGO members of the Third UN has expanded far beyond the narrower concerns with economic and social development to include advocacy and operations for international peace and security, human rights, humanitarian action, and sustainability. The arduous process of amendment has been used only a handful of times—to increase membership in the Security Council and ECOSOC—but the Charter’s flexibility is such that the founders would hardly recognize the scope, reach, and character of what they created. Building on UN practice, analysts now generally use the term “NGO” to signify any non-state, non-profit, and noncriminal organization—however large or small. In addition, the willingness of governments to approve or reject the accreditation of NGOs has evolved as fewer and fewer governments categorically reject these independent voices. Exceptions are still China and Russia that hold a veto on official recognition. In addition, the importance of informal conversations and participation in many ways makes Article 71 today somewhat irrelevant; technological advances and social media magnify the capabilities of NGOs that are without official consultative status. As new organizations are added and old ones disappear, the growth in international organizations appears uneven; tracking the number of newly founded INGOs and IGOs is another indication of dynamism and variety. Table 2.1 presents the number of organizations founded for each decade from 1900 to 2019. Over the twentieth century, 39,515 IGOs and INGOs were founded—not far off one per day. More than 87 per cent were founded after 1950. Indeed, almost half of all organizations created in the twentieth century Table 2.1 Number and ratio of INGOs and IGOs founded by decade, 1900–2019

1900–09 1910–19 1920–29 1930–39 1940–49 1950–59 1960–69 1970–79 1980–89 1990–99 Twentieth century 2000–09 2010–19 Twenty-first century

Number INGOs

Number IGOs

Ratio INGOs: IGOs

451 493 838 737 1260 2605 3864 5738 8146 9743 33,875 5339 1962 7301

118 118 215 209 319 521 772 1176 910 1282 5640 606 140 746

3.82 4.18 3.90 3.53 3.95 5.00 5.01 4.88 8.95 7.60 6.01 8.81 14.01 9.78

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  43 were established in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The growth in activities and numbers worldwide was remarkable. It is important, however, to open a parenthesis in that the picture is not simply one of flourishing civil society worldwide. Numbers growing globally can hide the ugly reverse trend of suppression of scholars, journalists, NGOs and cutting off their funding. The persecution of indigenous peoples (especially those who organize) has reached crisis proportions in parts of the Global South. Rapid proliferation was particularly noticeable for INGOs, which by the end of the last century outnumbered by eightfold their intergovernmental counterparts. In particular, INGO growth began to pick up speed after World War II and accelerated more after the end of the Cold War. While the adjectives “non-governmental” and “intergovernmental” are distinct, the growth of both suggests that international problem-solving either requires or can occur effectively by actors that are not restricted geographically. The data show that the numbers of INGOs have always outpaced those of IGOs, but the ratio held steady at roughly four non-governmental to one intergovernmental organization until the 1950s, when it jumped closer to five. This ratio increased again in the 1980s and remained significantly higher than in the first half of the twentieth century throughout the 1990s, the 2000s, and especially the first half of the 2010s. We can explain the growth of INGOs in relation to IGOs in a variety of ways. First, many legal barriers to international commerce and human mobility disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century. The Cold War ended, and the establishment of an enlarged and borderless EU, among other changes, increased cross-border engagement. Second, technological advances (in communications and transport especially) removed some of the physical challenges that had previously constrained transnational connections. Therefore, the disappearance, or at least reduction, of legal and technical barriers empowered civil society to extend from the local to the international. Kim D. Reimann explained the rapid growth of INGOs in the scope of the topdown processes of political globalization, which produced international political opportunities for INGOs and the promotion of a “pro-NGO international norm” by donor states as well as IGOs.⁴ Non-governmental avenues became favored, except in authoritarian countries—today, still, China is lukewarm about and often resists the independence and presence of INGOs in UN gatherings and at home. Third, and perhaps most importantly, individuals can establish INGOs with relative ease, but new treaty-based IGOs face arduous public and

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44  “  ”  parliamentary challenges. In addition to INGOs’ having fewer barriers to entry, a plethora of long-standing regional and universal IGOs now exist for virtually every world problem. Thus, one could argue that they have reached a natural, numerical limit; their growth is reflected in increased resources, which have been substantial, albeit inadequate. Other factors may be at play as well: “The involvement of NGOs seems to rise when governments need them and to fall when governments and international bureaucracies gain self-confidence,” Steve Charnovitz notes, “suggesting a cyclical pattern.”⁵ Kjell Skjelsback hypothesizes, however, that “the relative number of NGOs has been growing precisely in those areas that are most politically relevant and in which national governments are likely to be most active.”⁶ Whichever explanation is favored, the twentieth-century explosion in the number of INGOs continues. Their position approaches the aspirational first seven words of the Charter’s Preamble, “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” (capital letters in original). In fact, INGOs and especially those from the United States, played a substantial role in writing these introductory words and their insertion in early drafts of the Charter. As Mike Schroeder and Paul Wapner note: “For better or worse, many see civil society as a stand-in for the people of the world.”⁷ We mentioned the ILO’s pioneering role with the inclusion of both workers and employers in intergovernmental deliberations from its creation in 1919. In addition, international relations scholarship about NGOs has been building for a century.⁸ Over the UN’s three-quarters of a century, the dramatic growth in the role and influence of researchers, advocates, and monitors has led to a qualitatively different debate about knowledge and norms than would have taken place without them. “I think life would be duller without the NGOs, and there would probably be much less point to it also,” said Viru Dayal, the former chef de cabinet for two UN secretaries-general. “Besides, civil society knows where the shoe pinches. They know when to laugh and they know when to cry.”⁹ In brief, no issue in contemporary world politics, and certainly not UN affairs, can be properly understood without considering NGOs.¹⁰ At the same time, it would be short-sighted to ignore the inequality and lack of diversity that characterize world politics in general and the UN in particular. It should come as no surprise that until recently the dominance of the West, of males, and of power differentials has characterized all three United Nations. While groups that formerly could not readily access the intergovernmental and secretariat inner sanctums are increasingly visible, the shape of the Third UN’s participation still has a substantial distance to

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  45 travel to reflect better the racial, gender, and geographical nature of the contemporary world order. Based on his two decades as an international civil servant before occupying the job on the UN’s top floor, former secretary-general Kofi Annan recognized the need to include actors from what we have labeled the “Third UN.” At the turn of the century, he remarked: “I remain convinced that the United Nations belongs not only to the governments of its Member States but above all to their peoples, in whose name it was founded.”¹¹ As part of an expansion of the purview of the world organization, he asked the Panel on United Nations– Civil Society Relations, led by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, to address the topic.¹² After chairing the panel, this former head of Latin America’s largest state described the importance of the Third UN on the First UN of state decision-making: “Few of the most pressing battles today—whether they involve hunger, poverty, illiteracy, global pandemics, terrorism, narcotics, climate change, natural disasters, environmental threats, abuse of women and children, sectarian and ethnic divides, unemployment, economic crises or inequity of wealth, power and information—can be resolved by central governments alone.” He continued: “Others are needed in these battles—from civil society, the private sector, local authorities, and elsewhere. Why? Because they have essential knowledge, abilities, experience, and links to key constituencies.”¹³

Three INGO Contributions to UN Knowledge and Norms How precisely do the international non-governmental organizations of the Third UN contribute to shaping knowledge and norms? Before looking at detailed cases from the UN’s main areas of activity, we discuss three key considerations pertinent for our selection of cases and for the reader’s interpretation of them. First, our focus is essentially on the largest and most visible international NGOs that are present in and have a large-enough geographic reach to cover ongoing and major ad hoc UN discussions in New York and Geneva along with more specialized gatherings in other key UN cities and worldwide. This focus allows us to draw on considerable research by others and our own experience; but it downplays the relevance of crucial inputs by smaller, less visible NGOs that have contributed to the evolution of norms on such issues as the environment, indigenous peoples, and women, peace, and security. In fact, the origins of resolution 1325 and the women, peace, and security agenda lie

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46  “  ”  largely in the lobbying efforts of smaller NGOs and civil society groups worldwide to get member states and UN bodies to recognize the impact of war on women, and the contributions of women in conflict mediation and peacebuilding. While the UN held a number of global conferences on the rights of women and girls dating back to the 1970s, it was not until 2000, when the NGO-led Coalition on Women and International Peace and Security was formed, that member states were persuaded to adopt resolution 1325; as a result, the gender gap in UN peacekeeping reports and practice began to be addressed. Many of these smaller, less visible NGOs may not be able to get in the front door of policy discussions, but often they can access the back door; when they combine their efforts, they can even break down the front door, as with resolution 1325. So, while we emphasize the role that large, transnational NGOs play in advocacy and knowledge production about issues of concern to the UN, it is not the only, albeit the predominant, model of NGO engagement in the Third UN. It is worth quoting in depth UNIFEM’s former executive director and ESCAP executive-secretary Noeleen Heyzer. She pointed to the impact of ideas on government policy with the specific example of women and the mechanisms to involve NGOs in helping to brief the Security Council: We worked extremely hard to put the whole issue of women, peace, and security onto the Security Council agenda. The Security Council is an extreme case of a highly controlled arena, and it is very difficult to put various issues on their agenda. To change the dialogue and to put in new issues that change people’s thinking is not easy. . . . We used what is called the Arria formula . . . to allow real consultation. . . . We brought women—the nongovernmental groups, and women themselves who were affected by conflict, to talk to the members of the Security Council to prepare for the Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. UNIFEM’s role was to get the space and to help women clarify their messages. We became the mediator of different worlds. It is not easy for different worlds to understand one another, I’ve learned. Therefore, we try to prepare the ground, help the women to crystallize their voice, make sure that their message is heard by members of the Security Council, and determine what the Security Council needs to hear before they can make certain kinds of decisions. . . . When that happened, a synergy took place. . . . Members of the Security Council after that said, “We will change our statement.” Up to that time, they were not even willing to come up with a short resolution.¹⁴

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  47 Second, one should keep in mind that many international NGOs are exclusively (or almost) devoted to knowledge production and dissemination (often combined with advocacy and public education), or alternatively to development and humanitarian operations.¹⁵ Among the former are such giants as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI). Among the latter are virtually all of the major development and humanitarian INGOs—for instance, CARE and World Vision—whose activities sometimes are conducted under contract from UN organizations.¹⁶ The latter have budgets for the concrete delivery of assistance, including overheads, which constitute all but a small percentage of their total expenditures—with their knowledge, advocacy, and educational efforts often representing as little as 1–2 per cent. Even so, such operational organizations have an interest in knowledge and in the outcomes of normative and policy debates. Thus, and depending on the importance of advocacy and education to their missions, they might properly be termed “dual-purpose” INGOs. Their operational efforts are primary and essential contributions by the Third UN, but their research and evaluation departments reflect direct experience that can provide useful feedback for testing experiments and for formulating new ideas. In addition, if a particular issue (e.g., children’s rights) is crucial to an INGO’s mission (e.g., Save the Children), it may devote considerably more effort at a particular point in time (e.g., when French soldiers were accused of raping children or trading food for sex in the Central African Republic). Oxfam-UK is one dual-purpose NGO with a balance between activities; its ideational, advocacy, and outreach activities constitute a more significant portion of total efforts than most operational INGOs, approaching one-third of annual expenditures.¹⁷ Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) is another NGO which in 1999 established an internal think tank—Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires (CRASH)—to pursue critical reflections about its operations. Moreover, some regular inputs from non-state voices have become an accepted part of deliberations by the First UN that is serviced by the Second UN. Even the Security Council’s rarified and closed meetings have for almost three decades incorporated inputs from non-state actors through the “Arria Formula” as a regular part of deliberations. The name reflects then Venezuelan ambassador Diego Arria’s 1992 initiative during deliberations about the wars in the former Yugoslavia. He sought to take advantage of the presence of a Bosnian priest with first-hand knowledge despite the council’s long-standing practice that only government officials from Security Council members and senior UN officials could speak during meetings and consultations. Ever since

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48  “  ”  that time, informal meetings with informed voices from the Third UN have regularly occurred. The clash of outside views with the more conventional perspectives inside governments cannot be avoided and is, in fact, essential according to Jan Pronk. This former Dutch minister of development cooperation, UNCTAD deputy secretary-general, and special representative for the United Nations Mission in Sudan commented: “It was important to strengthen nongovernmental organizations as part of the civil society. In international conferences, you need the participation and contribution of civil society—all major groups. In the end, governments will have to take decisions . . . [They] would be wise involving civil society fully in the definition of issues, in the development of options for solutions, in a discussion of the pros and cons, in the process of implementation and in reviews thereafter.”¹⁸ With these general points in mind, we turn to three cases. Two are undeniably successful efforts—to alleviate the plague of landmines and to improve international judicial pursuit. Yet, the remaining one constitutes, at least at present, a more mixed example—to set the agenda for sustainable development. The efforts depicted here were related to the advancement of major international norms and knowledge. NGOs reappear in Chapter 4, with more specific efforts focused on knowledge production. We repeat that these illustrations are temporally distant enough that we can analyze them with some historical detachment; they also show how the Third UN can have a direct impact not only on vocabulary and debates but also on the priorities and practices of both governments and UN staff.

Ottawa Convention on Landmines A potent illustration of the Third UN’s contributions to international peace and security is the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which continues to raise awareness and advocates for countries to join the Mine Ban Treaty.¹⁹ Founded in 1992, this global network of NGOs is currently active in some 100 countries, with the main goal of a world free of anti-personnel landmines. Furthermore, it also seeks to create ways—through assistance, legislation, and investment—to support the maimed survivors of such munitions so that they can lead fulfilling lives despite their injuries.²⁰ For some time, landmines have been “useful” as weapons of war. Initially, inventors designed them with defensive purposes in mind, “to protect strategic areas such as borders, camps, or important bridges and to restrict the movement of opposing forces.”²¹ First deployed widely during World War II, later militaries used them extensively during the Cold War in countries such as

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  49 Vietnam and Cambodia. In those contexts, they targeted civilians, “to terrorize communities, deny access to farming land, and restrict population movement.”²² After armed conflict, it was difficult for communities to map them and “clear the mess”; mines continued to wound civilian victims. The brutality of anti-personnel landmines is, in fact, their objective: to dissuade potential intruders with the prospect of being maimed rather than killed. Therefore, “Once planted it will never be able to tell the difference between a military and civilian footstep and will remain a threat to communities for decades to come.”²³ Regardless of the successful efforts to counteract them, landmines are still hurting civilians worldwide. The ICBL’s most visible success was the Mine Ban Treaty, the international agreement that bans anti-personnel mines, officially called “The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of AntiPersonnel Mines and on their Destruction.” It was signed by 122 states in Ottawa, Canada, on 3 December 1997. As of 2020, 164 members of the First UN are States Parties.²⁴ Canada—and its then foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy—played an essential role in convening the meeting and ensuring the success of what is thus often called “the Ottawa Process.”²⁵ Despite Canada’s singular contribution in the final stages, the Third UN had launched the campaign against anti-personnel mines that ultimately resulted in the treaty. Efforts began in 1991, when the US NGO Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) and the German NGO Medico International (MI) launched an advocacy campaign to bring more NGOs together to coordinate actions to ban landmines. In the following year, Handicap International (HI), Mines Advisory Group (MAG), and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) called for a total ban on landmines. A few months later, the VVAF, MI, HI, MAG, PHR, and HRW met in New York and established the ICBL; they decided to collaborate on advocacy and co-sponsorship of the first International NGO Conference on Landmines in London in 1993, with Jody Williams in charge.²⁶ Soon after, the campaign gained more visibility and support—from the ICRC to Belgium’s passing the first national law banning anti-personnel mines. In 1996, Canada hosted a conference, attended by 75 countries, the ICBL, and international agencies, which concluded with the call for all governments to negotiate a treaty to ban landmines and return to Ottawa in the following year.²⁷ The key year was 1997, when the Mine Ban Treaty was launched, adopted, and opened for signature. Article 1 spelled out the general obligations: 1. Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances: a) To use anti-personnel mines; b) To develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile,

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50  “  ”  retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, anti-personnel mines; c) To assist, encourage or induce, in any way, anyone to engage in any activity prohibited to a State Party under this Convention. 2. Each State Party undertakes to destroy or ensure the destruction of all anti-personnel mines in accordance with the provisions of this Convention.²⁸

In looking back to that time, Axworthy represented a key First UN member state but highlighted the essential role of NGOs: “Much of this momentum has been the result of the tremendous efforts made by NGOs to advance the cause to ban AP mines. Their commitment and dedication have contributed to the emergence of a truly global partnership.”²⁹ As a recognition of the crucial efforts of the ICBL and its head, Jody Williams, they jointly received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize “for their work for the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines.”³⁰ Kenneth Rutherford underlines the role played by NGOs: “under certain conditions NGOs contribute to setting the international political agenda, especially legal prohibitions on weapons that cause humanitarian harm, have a dubious military utility, and in turn effect state behavioral changes.”³¹ He points out why one could justifiably argue that NGOs initiated the Ottawa Process: First, they placed the issue on the international agenda, attracting public and media attention. Second, they helped to change states’ perception and behavior towards the legality of landmines. Richard Price stresses the contribution of NGOs in generating new norms, claiming specifically that they were able to delegitimize the existence and use of landmines: “norm adoption through the conversion of persuaded moral entrepreneurs and emulation.”³² As Simon Chesterman reminds us, “it was the first time in a century that a widely used conventional weapon was banned outright.”³³ These NGO efforts illustrate how extraordinary efforts by non-state actors can influence normsetting and even agreement about hard law by governments. The Ottawa Process was also a landmark for fostering partnerships among governments and INGOs. To Walk Without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban Landmines is a book-length discussion by academics, policy makers, and NGO leaders. It spells out lessons about global civil society’s collaboration with governments to achieve policy goals. Moreover, its three editors emphasize: “The Ottawa Process was a ‘fast-track’ diplomatic process. In only 14 months . . . these countries negotiated a Convention banning the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of AP mines. . . . By the standards of international negotiations, the Ottawa Process was extraordinarily fast and effective. Much of this success was due to the work of the . . . ICRC and a broad range of . . . NGOs led by the . . . ICBL.”³⁴

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  51 The United States, both Koreas, and China are not parties to the treaty. In the 1990s, however, US president Bill Clinton announced the intention to pursue an international ban on landmine transfers. In fact, the United States participated in the negotiations for the establishment of the treaty; but in 1997, its delegation withdrew before the official adoption because US amendments failed to gain support.³⁵ Even so, US NGOs have continued vigorously to advocate for the ban on landmines and to pressure Washington to sign and ratify the Rome Treaty. In 2011, the ICBL also added the issue of cluster munitions to its portfolio. At that time, it merged with the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), which fights “to eradicate cluster munitions, prevent further casualties and put an end to the suffering caused by these weapons.”³⁶ Following the example of the ICBL, it was also successful in bringing states together in 2008 to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions that ban “the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of cluster munitions.”³⁷ The ICBL and CMC subsequently became the ICBL-CMC—a single organization but with two powerful and related albeit separate agendas.³⁸ Both are supported by the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor,³⁹ an initiative that provides several research products, including country profiles, the cluster munition monitor, the landmine monitor, and factsheets. Moreover, this online platform has become the monitoring tool for the Mine Ban Treaty. In short, a modest but growing coalition of non-state actors has produced knowledge about the impact of landmines and advocated successfully for their ban. A substantial change in policy and international law resulted. The adhesion by so many member states of the First UN to the Mine Ban Treaty demonstrates the relevance of the Third UN, without which the treaty would not have come about in the form and as rapidly as it did.

International Criminal Court The following year, 1998, witnessed perhaps an even more striking advance in international law, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, which resulted from the efforts by the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC). It continues as an impressive Third UN presence and orchestrates inputs from its worldwide membership of some 2,500 organizations in 150 countries⁴⁰ that advocate for a fair, effective, and independent ICC.⁴¹ Part of the original aim was to make justice visible and universal and deter future abuse. The coalition continues to seek additional states parties to

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52  “  ”  the Rome Statute as well as lobby for stronger national legislation to deliver a measure of justice for victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. A program of the World Federalist Movement’s Institute for Global Policy (WFM-IGP),⁴² it maintains a secretariat in New York City close to UN headquarters and in The Hague, the seat of the ICC in The Netherlands. The CICC began in 1995 with a handful (some 25) of NGOs based in several regions around the globe; its ever-growing membership combined efforts at every stage of the ICC’s development from the preparatory committees, to the Rome Conference that established the ICC, to the annual Assembly of States Parties. Its first success revolved around participation in and monitoring of the 1998 Rome Conference, which resulted in the Rome Statute of the ICC. The rapid entry into force was less than four years later (on 1 July 2002), again with the Third UN’s successful lobbying. The first chief prosecutors were Luis Moreno Ocampo (2003–2012) and Fatou Bensouda (2012–2021). The third chief prosecutor will begin in mid-2021. The Assembly of States Parties themselves officially recognized the essential role of the coalition with a September 2003 resolution aptly entitled “Recognition of the Coordinating and Facilitating Role of the NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court.”⁴³ The fast track for signatures and ratifications was especially critical because the ICC can only prosecute offenses committed after the treaty entered into force. The story of the ICC is the implementation of an idea originally floated in the late 1940s after the post-war international judicial pursuit of war criminals at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. Serious and legally cogent criticisms arose that these Allied efforts, like others before them, amounted to “victors’ justice” and entailed retroactive prosecution for crimes that had not previously been identified and widely agreed to constitute international crimes. Moreover, the Cold War made impossible further institutional progress towards a more predictable pursuit of international justice. In the early 1990s, however, the Security Council established ad hoc international criminal tribunals for crimes in Rwanda (ICTR) and the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Some critics viewed the legal bases for these tribunals as murky because the UN Charter does not explicitly authorize the Security Council to establish judicial bodies. During negotiations over both tribunals, many developing countries (led by China and Brazil) questioned whether the Security Council was acting ultra vires—that is, beyond its legal authority. However, numerous precedents suggest that UN Charter Article 39 gives the Security Council a carte blanche to respond to what it determines are threats to international peace and security with means that it determines are appropriate. That provision effectively is the power to

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  53 define both what counts as a threat and what counts as an acceptable response, including a judicial one. The shortcomings of the ICTR and the ICTY (especially the costs and the burden of evidence) provided an impetus to revive the idea of creating a permanent court that could judge and perhaps deter future war criminals. By the middle of the 1990s, governments across the North and the Global South, but more especially the most engaged INGOs, had formed coalitions to lobby for what would soon become the ICC. The realization of an idea that had been on the UN’s agenda for decades became a reality when a “like-minded group” assembled at a preliminary diplomatic conference in Rome in July 1997. When the official UN Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court—better known as the “Rome Conference”—convened a year later in the Italian capital, a 60-country coalition from the First UN joined forces with what had become some 700 NGO members of the CICC. The momentum was such that the Rome Conference itself—under the convening auspices of the Second UN—moved toward a decision despite strong opposition from the Security Council’s permanent members. The first country to ratify the Rome Treaty in 1999 was Senegal. By early 2020, the ICC’s 123 States Parties—including many NATO members but not the United States—had agreed to prosecute individuals for mass atrocities. Another sixteen countries have since signed but not ratified, and a number of major powers (including China and India) have done neither. In a symbolically important fashion, the United States and Israel took a previously unknown international legal step in 2002, when they revoked their signatures; Russia followed suit in 2016, citing the US and Israeli precedents. Many found Washington’s move away from its traditional role as the standard-bearer for human rights puzzling; it delivered a blow to the rulesbased order that it had helped establish and nurture.⁴⁴ Indeed, the United States originally led the charge in the 1948 General Assembly to conduct trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo, as well as to name an international attorney-general and establish a permanent international criminal court. That subsequent US administrations have remained outside the ICC suggests the limits of the Third UN; it also demonstrates the degree to which even the world’s most powerful states—whose sovereignty would be unchallenged—continue to resist meaningful international authority, in this case of the judicial variety. Moreover, the lengths to which Washington has gone to underline its objections to the court were striking. In 2002, the US Congress passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which was dubbed “The Hague Invasion

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54  “  ”  Act” to capture the irony of coupling military action against the city most identified with the rule of law. It authorizes military force to liberate any American citizen detained by the ICC. Yet, the United States did not object when the Security Council authorized investigations in Sudan and Libya.⁴⁵ While active opposition ended under the Obama administration,⁴⁶ the Trump administration ratcheted-up hostility to new levels after the then national security adviser, John Bolton, declared that the United States not only did not recognize the ICC but also would impose travel and banking sanctions against ICC personnel if they investigated alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan. That threat became a reality in September 2020 when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced sanctions on senior ICC officials, including the chief prosecutor, for so-called illegitimate attempts to subject US citizens to its jurisdiction. Without longitudinal data, it is difficult to compare the costs (high), criticism (widespread), and convictions (relatively few) of the ICC with those of the ad hoc tribunals. Questions about the ICC’s effectiveness arise⁴⁷ because to date it has cost some $1 billion but has convicted only four of 39 indicted individuals. We choose not to cede to the temptation to dismiss the ICC’s significance as more of a symbolic achievement than an effective means to identify and prosecute individuals who have committed mass atrocities. Instead, this section’s lessons point toward the value of finding different roles, different actors, different scripts, and different stages through which to penetrate the vacuous rhetoric from the First UN that customarily paralyzes intergovernmental deliberations on the enforcement of human rights. The need to turn a page on conflict is important—David Rieff, for example, has argued “in praise of forgetting”⁴⁸—but confronting the truth and accounting for mass atrocity crimes is also essential. Despite the apparent difficulties of pursuing international justice, at least flagrant violators of international humanitarian law can no longer count on impunity, a step in the right juridical direction.⁴⁹ The benefits of a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to international negotiations emerge. Powerful and reluctant or even hostile countries have not only failed to ratify the Rome Statute but at times they have also actively sabotaged the ICC. Nonetheless, over the past two decades, a broad-gauged coalition of NGOs has worked in tandem with sympathetic governments from the North and Global South. As a result, the ICC has proven resilient and implemented its mandate faster than many had predicted. Spurred by a collective recollection of Rwanda’s 1994 horrors and South Africa’s apartheid, the African region not only had the most States Parties but

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  55 also demonstrated at first the most rhetorical enthusiasm for the ICC. Despite the early support and good will enjoyed by the ICC across the region, it was subsequently on the defensive in the face of a political firestorm among some African members because of the predominance of the continent’s cases on the ICC’s docket, especially those against sitting heads of state.⁵⁰ In addition, the ICC’s reputation has suffered because its case selection process is seen as flawed. Cases come to the court through an opaque and politicized process; they are almost exclusively state referrals, meaning that governments often bring cases that implicate political rivals. This has led to accusations that the ICC not only targets Africans, but is also captive to partisan politics, which together thereby forestall justice in favor of high-profile, self-satisfying verdicts.⁵¹ Moreover, the ICC’s small-team approach to investigations under its first chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo—what Pascal Kambale, a Congolese human rights lawyer called “hit-and-run investigations”⁵²—prioritized efficiency over longer, more thorough investigations. Short investigations may have saved money, but they have not yielded faster trials. Although nonAfrican investigations are under consideration, all the individuals currently indicted as of this writing are African, and the only persons convicted to date have been from the continent. Recent concerns include the African Union’s ambiguous resolution of October 2013, which rejected a withdrawal from the ICC by African states but requested that cases against sitting heads of state be set aside until they leave office. In October 2016, three African states (Burundi, South Africa, and Gambia) voted to withdraw. However, a subsequent change in government caused Gambia to pull back from its announced plan; in fact, in 2019 it brought a case to the International Court of Justice against the government of Myanmar for genocide against the Rohingya. A South African court declared Pretoria’s threatened withdrawal unconstitutional. In October 2017, after a scathing UN report about domestic repression, Burundi became the first country to actually withdraw. In the following month, Russia also decided to cut its ties—symbolically significant after the earlier precedent of the George W. Bush administration’s “un-signing” of the Rome Statute shortly before it went into effect. The Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention require state prosecution under universal jurisdiction for mass atrocity crimes. Until recently, the historical record contained too many excuses and too little implementation. The last two decades, however, have witnessed at least selective enforcement. As long as both powerful and Lilliputian states privilege the politics of

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56  “  ”  perceived vital interests over international criminal justice, accountability will remain inconsistent. Yet, the Security Council’s creation of the ad hoc tribunals established a precedent for enforcement that has encouraged the nascent regime of international criminal pursuit underlying the ICC. Moreover, the reach and influence of the international coalition and visible, transnational human rights NGOs has continued to support the ICC while acknowledging its flaws and despite the growing unease among African human rights activists and NGOs. The court’s defenders see its shortcomings as modest in comparison with the precedents for the pursuit of international criminal justice. Ramesh Thakur evaluated the pluses and minuses of the ICC and of the contested R2P (responsibility to protect) norm: “The world would be an even more cruel place for civilian victims without them.”⁵³ Thus, despite second thoughts by some African members and the longstanding reluctance of major powers, the setbacks for a more robust ICC in the twenty-first century do not appear fatal. The Third UN is one of the main explanations for progress on universal jurisdiction and international criminal justice, however halting; it also may push either for its salvation by addressing the ICC’s flaws, or its downfall by ignoring them.

Sustainable Development Goals For development, there is no equivalent of the two previous cases that produced concrete benefits, in the form of international treaties, which resulted in part from key inputs by INGOs. Nonetheless, it is useful and illustrative to compare the processes leading to the acceptance in 2015 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with the predecessor Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Indeed, goal-setting is one of the singular contributions by the United Nations that has often been cavalierly dismissed.⁵⁴ The case of the SDGs is more mixed than the previous two examples; but once again, it too helpfully illustrates the impact of the Third UN in moving forward the agenda to guide international development efforts between 2016 and 2030. While observers agree that states drove the SDG process, the Third UN’s presence was an important factor and built substantially on earlier experience.⁵⁵ The SDGs were the set of UN development goals that followed the MDGs, which ended in 2015. For that earlier effort, a small group of insiders from the Second UN drafted the original eight goals and 18 targets; they acted on instructions from the Secretary-General and in response to the call from the General Assembly at the Millennium Summit of 2000 to set a development

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  57 agenda. An advantage of the MDGs was their limited number and time-bound targets, but criticism was strident from INGO representatives who saw the shortcomings of MDG Goal 8 (to develop a global partnership for development). While the goals and targets essentially consolidated those from the global conferences of the 1990s, NGOs and others had a negative view of the continuing dependency of the “donor–recipient” relationship. In addition, goals other than official development assistance (ODA) required action only by developing countries—that is, they were not universal. The pursuit of “sustainable” goals for development grew from the longstanding emphasis on the topic, which began in earnest with the conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and more especially after Rio+20 finished in 2012. Hence, in 2013, and as a first step, a high-level panel chaired by three serving heads of government proposed a new set of twelve goals and fifty measurable indicators, already a quantum leap in range and ambition from the MDGs. The panel also laid down parameters, two of which were crucial as the process moved forward. First, any new set of goals should build on the MDGs but also have more breadth, including addressing concerns about economic growth and jobs, promotion of peace and security, and inclusive governance. Second, they should be universal—that is, they should be directed at all 193 UN member states without distinguishing developing from developed countries, or the “Global South” from the “North” in the First UN. The panel’s report became the starting point for work by an “Open Working Group” (OWG), which began later in 2013. Rather than a small group of individual drafters from the Second UN, the OWG involved instead not only representatives of member states and virtually all UN organizations but also a number of INGOs from the Third UN. The coming together of all three UNs resulted, after two years of negotiations, in 17 goals and 169 targets. Perhaps the most important step forward for the SDGs, in the view of their most enthusiastic supporters, was that they favor collective action by all UN member states—indeed, the difference from the 2000 goal-setting was the extent of involvement by the First UN.⁵⁶ While many viewed the universal character as advantageous, The Economist argued otherwise: they were “sprawling, misconceived” and “a mess” in comparison with the less numerous and more circumscribed MDGs.⁵⁷ Another step forward was that the ultimate objective of the goal-setting was no longer old-fashioned “development” but rather “sustainable development.” Finally, whereas the MDGs applied an isolated approach (or “silos”), the SDGs stressed the interconnectedness of problems and solutions.

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58  “  ”  In short, the SDGs represent a step forward in terms of participation and buy-in, pushed by virtually all members of the Third UN for being universal, multi-sectorial, and multi-partner in aspiration. At the same time, they can also be construed to represent some steps backwards, or at least sideways, and away from the sharper-edged MDGs that were less numerous, more measurable, and strictly time-bound.⁵⁸ Moreover, while many NGOs criticized the MDGs as only dealing with symptoms, the SDGs address many causes, although critics point out how many essential issues required for good governance—for instance, anti-corruption measures, democratic safeguards, and religious tolerance—are missing. The open consultations for the SDGs had the merit of having been more inclusive than the non-existent ones for the predecessor goals; they sought the widest possible consensus among all member states. However, one could counter by arguing that this agenda-setting was designed to fail. Without prioritization and sequencing, countries will be able to say either that “we have achieved what we said we would” (by cherry-picking), or regret that “we have failed to achieve the SDGs” (because not even Switzerland could do them all). As on other occasions, the time-tested formula for UN consensus necessitates accommodating the aggregate perceptions of all state interests, as well as those of the multiple lobbying groups representing every UN organization and as many NGOs as can find their way into conference rooms. The largest gathering ever of presidents, princes, and prime ministers—complete with a moral flogging from Pope Francis—at the September 2015 UN summit adopted “Transforming Our World by 2030: A New Agenda for Global Action.” Despite the numbers and grandiloquent packaging, several crucial and controversial issues were left on the cutting-room floor because of resistance from parts of the Global South—forced displacement and massive voluntary migration, terrorism, armed conflict, good governance, religious fundamentalism, cyber-security, capital flight, post-conflict reconstruction, human rights in general, and LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) rights in particular. The translation of goals into specific targets can perhaps partially compensate for some of the lacunae, particularly in human rights.⁵⁹ The SDGs cater to the lowest-common-denominator and do not always reflect significant institutional UN policies previously adopted at international conferences or introduced by the Secretary-General. Moreover, in some cases they also are clearly disingenuous—for instance, Washington and other wealthy capitals allowed the final document to contain the long-disputed

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  59 target of 0.7 per cent of GNI as ODA. Only seven countries (Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) had reached the target by 2015, while others have no intention of meeting it (for years the United States, for instance, has hovered around 0.17 per cent) and previously have actively opposed it.⁶⁰ Even the most sympathetic observers could be pardoned for questioning the relevance of regurgitating previously broken promises. Such sleights of hand do not bode well for other targets. In the same opinion piece cited, The Economist characterized the SDGs as “something for everyone [that] has produced too much for anyone.”⁶¹ Goal 16 and Goal 17 are notable examples. The former acknowledges that the main engine of development progress is good national governance, which includes building strong and inclusive institutions, promulgating the rule of law, respecting rights, and reducing corruption and “all forms of violence.” The final Goal 17 concerns the “means of implementation,” which refers generally to substantial new financial resources. A central problem, especially pertinent for Goal 16, is that delegates swept these last two umbrella goals under the proverbial diplomatic carpet even though they encompassed a large number of specific issues that are dear to the West but contested by many countries from the Rest. Goal 16 has no specific agreed targets, and notwithstanding Goal 17’s clarion call to financial or investment action, it leaves much to the imagination as well. The United Nations has helped nurture far-reaching ideas and norms, with goal-setting a useful device; but it would be a stretch to characterize the SDGs as a uniformly shining accomplishment. The First, Second, and Third UNs have collectively patted themselves on the back for completing the job, with the result that colorful SDG banners are omnipresent in UN corridors, SDG pins are on many lapels, and SDG footballs are being dribbled worldwide. However, the “achievement” amounted to staying in the same room long enough to agree upon a “laundry-list”—a frequent criterion of UN success. The harshest critics of the UN often lament that processes are more important than products. This particularly lengthy and muddled process—to stay with the household imagery—produced the “kitchen sink”: the SDGs. In this case, it is fair to describe the Third UN as having added to the confusion rather than clarified thinking and priorities. Therefore, INGOs made a singular contribution here, as in the other two cases; however, an observer could be pardoned at present for questioning the value of the outcome. Still, there is room to declare a partial victory in moving toward achieving the implementation of (some) SDGs (in some countries). In this regard, not only international NGOs but local ones as well could play an essential role in

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60  “  ”  helping implementation. Elisabeth Hege and Damien Demailly have analyzed the cases of France and Germany. They argue that the NGOs of the Third UN can mobilize support in four ways: pressuring governments to hold them accountable; lobbying the private sector to ensure they deliver their commitments for the 2030 Agenda; carrying projects themselves and in partnership with business sector and local administrations; and disseminating information on the SDGs, thereby raising public awareness.⁶² The SDGs do not lack ambition, but practical purchase will necessitate that even the most responsible governments retrofit critical choices onto a somewhat indigestible menu of aspirations. In some ways, the sustainable development can has been kicked down the road as hard choices and difficult sequencing will inevitably be required. Not all countries can meet all the targets, and not everything can be done simultaneously. Perhaps more importantly, the sheer number of SDGs means that reporting countries can obscure abysmal failures on some indicators with their more modest successes on others; the quantity of indicators can allow countries legitimately to claim an inability to report, allowing them to emphasize those on which they have done well and ignore others. The MDGs, with a smaller number of indicators, had the advantage of being useful to name and shame governments. It remains to be seen whether the SDGs and, more especially still, monitoring by the Second UN and the Third UN will be hard-hitting and independent enough to cause more or less embarrassment for the countries of the First UN that fail to meet many of their obligations.

Conclusion While no two campaigns are identical, the push for the International Criminal Court mirrored efforts behind the Convention on Landmines insofar as both moved ahead with a broad-based coalition of like-minded INGOs, legal scholars, and states, from the North and Global South.⁶³ In both undertakings, the INGOs of the Third UN were essential contributors to advancing a defined policy issue and agreement about hard international public law. Although the SDGs are arguably not necessarily a more pragmatic set of goals than the MDGs, the final shape of the 2030 Development Agenda reflects substantial inputs from the INGOs of the Third UN along with universal member-state participation. What once seemed far-fetched, suddenly no longer seems so. As the Kenyan development economist and former ILO official Dharam Ghai noted: “The

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  61 idea has to have some power. It must be relevant. And it should fit the time. These days, things go very fast. . . . So when some good ideas come, either from within or from outside, and they are relevant and they make sense, people try to join the bandwagon.”⁶⁴ In short, the evidence from these three cases demonstrates the extent to which ideas and norms matter, and for which INGOs of the Third UN matter especially by helping to shape them. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan summarized their growing range and influence, which is amplified in the information age: “We saw their strength in the campaign for the ban of landmines. We saw the contribution they made for the ICC. . . . Quite frankly, on some of the issues they are ahead of the curve. They can say and do things that we [the Second UN] cannot say or do. And eventually we will catch up with them.”⁶⁵ We can apply these lessons to more recent examples, including the protection of civilians; climate change; and youth and security. We judged that more historical distance was essential for our analysis; but more recent efforts also would have substantiated the synergy from the Third UN’s involvement and its impact on government positions and intergovernmental deliberations as well as Secretariat priorities and activities. We would be remiss in failing to point out that the changing face of global governance also exposes potential weaknesses from letting countless non-state flowers bloom in Rosenau’s “sovereignty-free” garden. The evolution of partnerships between the private and public sectors as well as the growing numbers of non-state actors and their increasing importance on the world stage represent a significant shift in the way that the more state-centric world was formerly governed. The growth in numbers and in the scope of activities by both the not-for-profit and for-profit members of the Third UN are reflected in a changed world order in which many international issues are understood and sometimes addressed better now than earlier. To repeat, and to an underappreciated degree, the world is governed. At the same time, the daunting array of what Annan called “problems without passports”⁶⁶ are still staring us in the face. While diverse partnerships outside of the confines of state-to-state relations are helpful and even essential, they also are unpredictable, ad hoc, episodic, and ultimately inadequate by themselves. In short and to declare the obvious, activists crossing borders in and of themselves will not halt mass atrocities or impede climate change. While non-state structures are helpful, and even powerful and flexible, they lack the legitimacy, authority, decision-making, and legal capacities derived from formal state structures, especially intergovernmental ones with universal membership. The helping and prodding hands and voices of INGOs in the

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62  “  ”  Third UN are undoubtedly essential to knowledge and norms. That said, the COVID-19 pandemic made crystal clear that without stronger formal IGOs— including the First and the Second UNs—the most daunting global problems (climate change, transnational crime, financial meltdowns, the proliferation of WMDs, and the list goes on) will not be addressed in the systematic, effective, and comprehensive way that the greatest threats to humanity require. Depending on an issue area, geographic location, and timing, there are vast disparities in power and influence among states (the First UN), secretariats (the Second UN), and INGOs (the Third UN) in the ways that they individually or collectively approach the prerequisites for solving problems.⁶⁷ Sometimes global problems are merely identified, while sometimes they are discussed and recommendations agreed; but only occasionally are new policy recommendations even partially implemented or enforced by those that count. At the least, “NGOs, god bless them, have made life unsafe for established international bureaucracies,”⁶⁸ observed Brian Urquhart. Today’s world is governed by an indistinct and intricate patchwork of authority that is diffuse and contingent, creating inconsistent rules and varying degrees of effective collective action. Knowledge and norms are better than nothing, but they also are inadequate. We return to this reality in the final chapter. Certainly, global problem-solving is not a sunset industry, and progress will require state and non-state actors alike doing what each does best and designing incentives so that they continue to contribute or begin to do so. In short, we should expand the formidable amount of practical global governance that already exists; use better the political and economic possibilities opened by the communications revolution that began in the late twentieth century; and re-work fundamentally the ways that we imagine the work of the United Nations and other IGOs. From being on the margins of concern for IR, IO, IL, and IPE scholarship, NGOs have become a central theoretical and practical concern. Jessica Matthews undoubtedly overstated the “power shift” toward non-state actors,⁶⁹ but nonetheless INGOs have clearly become a prominent feature of contemporary international society. To use an expensive word, the intense participation by the Third UN makes an analytical mixture that is “polycentric”; or, to use a cheap one, “messy.” The increasing prevalence and power of social media makes matters messier still. Furthermore, the consideration of TNCs in Chapter 5 further muddies the analytical waters. Could it be otherwise in a world of multiple and overlapping jurisdictions and allegiances, of cascading cultural and economic differences?

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3 Commissions and Panels How Eminent Individuals Shape UN Thinking

In the past half-century, some of the most challenging and effective voices in the Third UN have emanated from “eminent persons.” They oftentimes expressed views that were distinct from and even in contradiction with earlier opinions expressed by the same people when they were employees in the First UN of member states or in the Second UN of international civil servants. This mechanism is a ready-made and “go-to” option for secretaries-general. For example, as part of the lead-up to the sixtieth anniversary, Annan convened the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.¹ As part of the follow-up to the resulting September 2005 World Summit, he pulled together the High-level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian aid, and the environment.² His successor, Ban Ki-moon, did the same toward the end of his second term. The year 2015—again an anniversary, the 70th—became a banner year for UN rethinking with three blockbuster reviews about peace and security: the High-level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations (HIPPO); the Advisory Group of Experts on Peacebuilding (AGE); and the UN Global Study on Women, Peace and Security.³ That same year there were also two independent and comprehensive reviews from the Independent Commission on Multilateralism and the Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance.⁴ António Guterres made his first appeal for a high-level panel toward the end of his second year in office when he established the High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation, presided by two household names from the private sector—Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jack Ma, executive chair of the Alibaba Group. Perhaps, as this lengthy list suggests and as Sebastian von Einsiedel and Alexandra Pichler Fong conclude in their research monograph on the topic, the numbers of august panels and commissions have increased so much that their impact is being threatened by their frequency.⁵ As Guterres took office, they pointed to 65 such efforts since the UN’s first commission in 1969, of which 51 had been organized during only the preceding two decades of his The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0004

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64  “  ”  predecessors’ mandates. This chapter makes an effort to identify which worked and which did not, and why. This task is complicated because the costs of such commissions are virtually impossible to determine. Moreover, the geo-politics of the moment, the personalities involved, and exact timing enter into the equation; these variables are difficult to control or predict. As someone who had not only participated in several commissions but also had funded them while minister of development cooperation in the Netherlands, Jan Pronk judged them as cost-effective ways to improve the intellectual basis for global problem-solving. At the same time, he also understood the need to find the appropriate moment: “Timing is very important, and the choice of a political concept, which all of a sudden is being seen as eye-opening. Such an example is the Brundtland report, Our Common Future. It came at an appropriate moment, when the world was recuperating from the economic crisis and people were searching for a new perspective.”⁶ This chapter probes the politics, objectives, and benefits of calling upon this particular type of expertise—which pulls together influential individuals with a view to changing public policy and nourishing alternative perspectives and norms. We examine the conditions under which such independent groups of eminent persons have been influential in fostering ideas through their publications. The drafters typically consisted of a high dose of former politicians and senior government, UN, or NGO officials.⁷ The first section provides an overview of the history and dynamics of commissions and panels. The following section examines specific illustrations of inputs into each of the UN’s main substantive arenas.

An Overview Liberated from official positions and accompanying constraints, prominent individuals who represent a spectrum of opinion and nationalities can aim to raise the visibility of a particular global challenge and alternative solutions by hammering out a new consensus. In contrast to official or semi-official UN reports, independent commissioners and panelists speak in their individual capacities and are able more easily to move beyond what passes for politically correct or conventional wisdom. The agreement on new policies and the emergence of new norms often reflects knowledge—not necessarily new but often contested and thus requiring fresh repackaging. Typically then, more space is required for imagination, candor, and experimentation than is found

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in the confines of UN conference rooms, secretariat offices, and diplomatic missions. In brief, independent commissions and panels are a tool to facilitate a move beyond the lowest common denominator by not running the fool’s errand of trying to anticipate and dissipate the opinions of 193 UN member states and the entrenched bureaucratic positions of UN entitites. They often reflect the recognition that an issue or problem needs greater attention; they aim either to bring new ideas in response, or add greater visibility to ideas that may have already been aired but lack consensus or an institutional vehicle for their uptake. Commissions customarily present their findings to the secretarygeneral, even if the secretariat does not organize or pay for them. The 38th floor then makes decisions about follow-up, within the constraints of what it determines is feasible through daily multilateral diplomacy. A helpful device may be a handsomely presented and reader-friendly volume that contains what is supposed to be new-fangled wisdom in an independent group’s prose. A short, albeit incomplete history of such mechanisms would perhaps help the skeptics who dismiss such endeavors as gabfests and junkets for individuals who have spent their lives in conference rooms and on airplanes. Often, the final reports are named after their chairs. This custom began with Partners in Development, headed by former Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson.⁸ Commissioned by Robert McNamara as the new president of the World Bank to move beyond the confines of routine development thinking, the so-called Pearson Commission was followed by a host of others, including: the two commissions on development issues chaired by former German chancellor Willy Brandt;⁹ on common security by former Swedish prime minister Olav Palme;¹⁰ on environment and development by serving Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland;¹¹ on humanitarian problems by Iranian and Jordanian princes, Sadruddin Aga Khan and Hassan bin Talal;¹² on South-South cooperation by serving Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere;¹³ on global governance by former Swedish prime minister Ingvar Carlsson and Guyana’s Commonwealth secretary-general Shridath Ramphal;¹⁴ on humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and former Algerian ambassador Mohamed Sahnoun;¹⁵ on human security by Sadako Ogata and Amartya Sen.¹⁶ There are also commissions that are recalled by the names of their sponsors—for example, the report to the Club of Rome about the limits to economic growth¹⁷ and the Carnegie Commission on preventing deadly conflict.¹⁸

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66  “  ”  Some observers have argued that somewhat more official and less autonomous UN-backed panels—like the one chaired by Lahkdar Brahimi on peace operations—when properly composed and staffed, can also push out the envelope of ideas and norms.¹⁹ Other such efforts—for instance, the Highlevel Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change prior to the 2005 World Summit—get fewer high marks. The ideas in the reports from independent commissions and more official high-level panels help to alter worldviews and values, and they often lead to additional knowledge and creative framings as well as normative, policy, and institutional steps to fill the gaps in “an unfinished journey” of global governance.²⁰ Whether diplomats and decision-makers exploit such reports depends upon numerous exogenous factors that are often difficult to control. They include changes in the world economy (e.g., the financial and economic meltdowns of 2008 and 2020) and in domestic politics (e.g., regime changes and elections) as well as unforeseen events (e.g., the fall of the Berlin Wall or September 11). The use or abuse of such reports also depends on the follow-up by sponsors and on leadership by UN organizations. From interviews with many persons who served on them or observed their impact as well as our own personal experiences, three useful contributions by blue-ribbon groups are: heightened awareness and consciousness-raising; improved advocacy for particular ideas; and enhanced legitimacy for programs and ideas. Many observers qualify their judgments by arguing that commissions and panels could have greater impact if major powers backed them, and if the subject matter is narrow. Most agree that such groups and their blockbuster reports had some significance regardless of the backgrounds of participants and the timing of publications. “Such reports were certainly helpful,” argued the controversial fourth secretary-general Kurt Waldheim. “Prestigious people drafted them and underlined the importance and urgency of solving burning issues. Governments had to think about those problems.” Adebayo Adedeji—whose career included prominent positions in all three UNs at home in Nigeria as well as Addis Ababa as executive-secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)—indicated that it is often the broad brush strokes, not the details, of outside analyses that count: “I don’t think most people have ever read cover-to-cover Partners in Development. Nor did they read Brandt’s Common Crisis: North-South Cooperation for World Recovery. But the ideas put there—particularly as publicized by the media— stuck in the minds of people.”²¹ Behind the scenes, independent experts have constituted the research staffs or directorates for such commissions; they too have contributed to nourishing

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ideas and their dissemination, to vetting and sometimes actually drafting the reports and their supplementary documentation. Visible scholars and policy analysts often direct these research teams; they usually commission additional inputs from other analysts and commentators; and they are typically located “outside” the UN but sometimes temporarily employed through a UN contract. These researchers play an important role not only by supporting the deliberations by commissioners and panelists with the necessary documentation and administrative support, but also by providing an entry point for outside-the-box ideas that the participants and the published reports may eventually carry forward or may alternatively, resurface later in related publications. Professional teams also produce research that is helpful for scholarship and policy analysis after the conclusion of a commission’s or panel’s labors. Indeed, one recent overview suggested that whatever the actual pay-offs from commissions and panels, an essential but under-appreciated impact was that they were “a prime avenue for the UN to engage with academia and think tanks and to ensure that its policies and operations are informed by empirical research.”²² Commissions and panels have varying degrees of accomplishments, but there is evidence of their utility for advancing international public policy. They pull together visible individuals who have made careers as senior governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental officials. The inclusion of independent voices with creative minds is as salient as the emphasis on diversity (always nationalities and more recently gender). At least some of the participants, in particular the chairs, have customarily demonstrated a willingness to run risks and voice criticisms publicly and to take controversial stances. These commissions and panels are a key part of the Third UN even when the First UN or the Second UN establishes and partially bankrolls them. They can formulate ideas and policies beyond what would normally be politically acceptable for governments and secretariats.

Commissions and Panels, Knowledge and Norms: Three Cases Key efforts in each of the UN’s main areas of activity illustrate the potential for international experts to influence knowledge and norms, who “tend to be good at launching fresh ideas and coining appealing phrases,” observes Edward Luck, even if “their products usually lack the kind of tempering and rigor that comes from being tested in intergovernmental political forums.”²³ This part of

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68  “  ”  the Third UN has had a noticeable impact on peace operations (the Brahimi report of 2000 and HIPPO of 2015); the protection of human beings in war zones (the ICISS report of 2001); and sustainable development (the Brundtland report of 1987 and the ongoing work by the IPCC). As for the previous chapter, we remind readers that we opted for these examples because of their visibility and impact on essential problems as well as their distance from today. There are many historical accounts of these efforts that have altered conversations among the member states of the First UN and the international civil servants of the Second UN as well as their emphases, priorities, and funding.

Peace Operations The UN Charter’s Preamble summarizes the primary purpose of the United Nations, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Those lofty words remain aspirational. Their place in the Charter is perhaps as far off the mark as H.G. Wells and Woodrow Wilson in their billing of World War I as the armed conflict “to end all wars.” Despite the paralysis of the Cold War, the creation of the first UN peacekeeping force in 1957 by Lester Pearson, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Brian Urquhart is routinely recognized, by UN friends and foes alike, as a genuine invention and an asset on the organization’s balance sheet. The UN’s efforts over the years to maintain international peace and security have always been the most visible and arguably most important of its activities. In the words of the Brahimi report, they certainly are “the yardstick with which the Organization is judged by the peoples it exists to serve.”²⁴ As such, numerous groups of eminent individuals have been associated with rethinking the range of efforts, beginning with the idea of using soldiers to keep the peace that first emerged during the 1956 Suez crisis. Contemporary accounts credit Pearson, then Canada’s secretary of state for external affairs and later prime minister, with proposing to the General Assembly that Secretary-General Hammarskjöld organize an “international police force that would step in until a political settlement could be reached.”²⁵ Peacekeeping was the UN’s primary security activity during the Cold War; but the end of the East–West confrontation resulted in the opportunity for the world organization to become more active and eventually more robust in military deployments than in the preceding 45 years. At the outset of the period, then newly elected secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali put

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forward in June 1992 his bullish An Agenda for Peace. Three years later, he retreated and put forward a more modest vision in Addendum to “An Agenda for Peace.”²⁶ In the subsequent quarter-century, a veritable cottage industry of analyses has concentrated upon the pluses and minuses of more traditional (or consensual) versus more muscular UN peace operations.²⁷ The jury is still out and the results disputed. In addition, analyses of individual cases are more numerous than advances in IR theorizing.²⁸ As part of efforts to put forward new interpretations and data and elucidate new ways of proceeding in light of dramatically changed political or economic circumstances, the eminent individuals gathered in Secretariat-organized panels have played a role in defining what more, or less, could be accomplished. Two in particular concern us here in our effort to understand better the politics of UN of knowledge and norms: the 2000 Panel on United Nations Peace Operations and the 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations. After the tumultuous last decade of the twentieth century, it seemed symbolically apt for the onset of the new millennium to convene a panel in the year 2000 that was chaired by the UN trouble-shooter and senior diplomat from Algeria, Lakhdar Brahimi. He was joined by J. Brian Atwood (United States); Colin Granderson (Trinidad and Tobago); Ann Hercus (New Zealand); Richard Monk (United Kingdom); Klaus Naumann (Germany); Hisako Shimura (Japan); Vladimir Shustov (Russia); Philip Sibanda (Zimbabwe); and Cornelio Sommaruga (Switzerland). In March 2000 as part of preparations for the September Millennium Summit, Secretary-General Annan convened the panel to make a thorough, albeit extremely rapid, review of UN peace and security activities. The report appeared only five months later in mid-August with identical letters transmitting it to the presidents of the General Assembly and the Security Council. This overview began where Boutros-Ghali’s agendas from 1992 and 1995 left off. Indeed, the switch of that secretary-general’s analysis from bullish to bearish was the foundation for the Brahimi team’s quandary: “There are many tasks which United Nations peacekeeping forces should not be asked to undertake and many places they should not go.”²⁹ The report reaffirmed the foundational principles of UN peacekeeping: consent, impartiality, non-use of force except in self-defense (or in defense of the mandate). It also called upon member states to take their responsibilities seriously. Moreover, it clarified under which circumstances the use of force should become necessary, unavoidable, or useful for UN peace operations—thereby providing the basis for further studies about what constituted “robustness.”

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70  “  ”  Harsh and widespread criticism about perceived failures in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia meant that the central issue for the panelists—as for the secretary-general—was “whether UN peacekeeping could survive.”³⁰ The final 57 recommendations emphasized three prerequisites for successful peacekeeping operations: political support, rapid deployment with a robust force posture, and a sound peacebuilding strategy. The recommendations were organized in 20 clusters: prevention; peace-building strategy; peacekeeping doctrine and strategy; clear, credible, and achievable mandates; information and strategic analysis in New York; transitional civil administration; deployment timelines; mission field leadership; military personnel; civilian police; civilian staff; public information; logistics support and management; funding backstopping in headquarters; integrated planning; DPKO structural adjustments; operational support for public relations; Department of Political Affairs (DPA) support for peacebuilding; Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) peace operations support; and adaptations for the information age.³¹ Some recommendations have modestly influenced action by the First UN and the Second UN, including in the field, whereas others have had virtually no follow-up; still others have taken years to be implemented. Changing the direction of the UN supertanker is never easy. For instance, the idea of “conflict prevention” is again a rhetorical urgency for the Secretariat, as Guterres—even before assuming his duties—had underlined as a priority for his administration.³² The Brahimi report spelled out the need for effective strategies for conflict prevention—seemingly a priority for all secretariesgeneral, including Annan who early in his tenure had called for a “culture of prevention.”³³ It also influenced the 2009 New Horizon process to formulate a common vision and agenda for UN peacekeeping.³⁴ Two other key recommendations are still actively discussed. The first is the suggestion that the Secretariat should send a team to verify preparedness by potential troop-contributor countries (TCCs) and reject those that do not meet minimal standards. The 2017 report about Improving Security of United Nations Peacekeepers—led by former MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti) and MONUSCO (Mission de l’Organisation des Nations-Unies pour la Stabilisation en Republique Démocratique du Congo) force commander General Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz—made the same recommendation but in the context of improving pre-deployment training as a way to decrease casualties.³⁵ The second recommendation reflects the fact that, while modest institutional changes were implemented, a pilot peacebuilding unit was not created within the Department of Peacekeeping

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Operations (DPKO), although the 2005 World Summit instead created the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) and the Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO) outside the then-DPKO. The felt need for the function, however, helped make the summit’s action possible. The Brahimi glass is half-full; some clear and direct changes resulted in UN headquarters. In addition, the recommendation for more quick-impact projects has become an essential component of field missions. Likewise, the need for robust rules of engagement subsequently led to the Second UN’s formulation of the Capstone Doctrine.³⁶ In addition, geographic information system (GIS) technology now is a standard component of peace operations in the information age. Despite the considerable impact on practice on the ground, many recommendations were moribund, including two of the most obvious. On information and strategic analysis, for example, the most central and urgent recommendation was for the Information and Strategic Analysis Unit in the Secretariat (EISAS); as we discuss in Chapter 4, it was intended to address the need for analysis but was never implemented. As throughout the post-Cold War era, member states of all persuasions, including the P-5, opposed the creation of an independent intelligence capability in the Secretariat. Moreover, another priority recommendation was to develop a rapid deployment capacity; this too remains only on the Brahimi report’s pages—and in numerous earlier reports from a variety of sources. As usual on First Avenue, the gap between the Third UN’s recommendations and First and Second UNs’ implementation ultimately reflects power politics. In an ironic reversal of roles, after the end of the Cold War it has been primarily the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and not the West that has resisted providing the secretary-general and the Secretariat with the oftrecommended flexibility, resources, autonomy, and tools—including standby troops and intelligence. In addition, some staff members of the Second UN were uneasy that some of those tools would lead to additional mistrust, besides endangering the perceived neutrality of the Secretariat’s activities.³⁷ Yet, the Brahimi report was a landmark for peace operations and continues to influence intergovernmental conversations; in particular, the Third UN provided a renewed vision in a time of crisis. It recalled the proper autonomy for international civil servants at any time: “The Secretariat must tell the Security Council what it needs to know, not what it wants to hear, when recommending force and other resource levels for a new mission, and it must set those levels according to realistic scenarios that take into account likely challenges to implementation.”³⁸ David Malone and Ramesh Thakur, writing at the time, interpreted this statement as a criticism of the secretary-general’s

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72  “  ”  “bad recommendations”; he was more likely than not to recommend action based on P-5 interests rather than the needs of the situation on the ground.³⁹ The panel had a “shared vision” of a more effective UN; it remains a coherent and insightful document. The next comprehensive overview of UN peace operations—the 2015 HIPPO—began where the 2000 panel’s work ended, namely by pointing to a disappointing follow-up for sensible recommendations. The motivation behind another critical look by the Third UN at the time had the additional impetus of almost 130,000 staff in nearly 40 missions on four continents along with a growing number of so-called special political missions. The HIPPO pointed to “a widening gap between what is being asked of UN peace operations today and what they are able to deliver.”⁴⁰ However, by this point, the First UN of member states perceived UN peacekeeping as an essential tool, and the existence of UN military efforts was not questioned to the extent that it had been when the Brahimi panel addressed many of the same issues. An additional complication was the spread of violent extremism. Some observers viewed the HIPPO report’s findings, 15 years later, as an updated complement and compliment to the Brahimi report.⁴¹ The former president of Timor-Leste and Nobel laureate José Ramos-Horta headed the 2015 panel with former under-secretary-general Ameerah Haq (Bangladesh) as vice-chair. Then secretary-general Ban Ki-moon originally envisaged a small and in-house effort, but complaints about the lack of diversity among the commissioners quickly led member states to push for expanding it to more than double the number initially intended. Other members were Jean Arnault (France); Marie-Louise Baricako (Burundi); Radhika Coomaraswamy (Sri Lanka); Abhijit Guha (India); Andrew Hughes (United Kingdom); Alexander Ilitchev (Russia); Hilde F. Johnson (Norway); Youssef Mahmoud (Tunisia); Ian Martin (United Kingdom); Henrietta Joy Abena Nyarko Mensa-Bonsu (Ghana); B. Lynn Pascoe (United States); Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto (Brazil); Rima Salah (Jordan); and Wang Xuexian (China). In October 2014, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon convened this panel and inserted two adjectives (“high-level” and “independent”) in the title of this group, which took about twice as long to formulate its recommendations as its oft-cited predecessor. While the Brahimi panel’s members spent most of their time in New York, the HIPPO team held extensive consultations with member states and civil society worldwide; visited major capitals and UN peace operations; and conducted interviews and thematic workshops.⁴² In addition, the panel received over 80 written submissions from more than 50 member states,

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regional and other organizations, UN partner entities, civil society, academia, and think tanks.⁴³ The Center of International Cooperation (CIC), a small think tank based at New York University, coordinated many of the Third UN inputs. It also coordinated with the other parallel reviews taking place, namely the Security Council resolution 1325 Expert Study and the Advisory Group of Experts on the Review of Peace-building Architecture, which were being undertaken during the same period.⁴⁴ The challenge and gaps for the implementation of the 2000 Council resolution 1325 was clearly an essential related topic,⁴⁵ as was the latter’s review of the growing challenges of sustaining peace.⁴⁶ The overarching objectives for the HIPPO resembled those of the Brahimi panel: review the state of UN peace operations and provide recommendations about adaptation. Essentially, the HIPPO emphasized four essential shifts in establishing and conducting peace operations. First, political solutions should accompany military and technical engagements for lasting peace; in brief, the military component of peace operations had little value without political initiatives. Second, UN missions should be responsive to ever-changing situations on the ground. Third, stronger partnerships were required—the UN should have a vision to construct a more resilient and capable global and regional network of actors to respond to such threats. Fourth, the world organization should be field-focused and people-centered—the latter, in particular, was a reminder that the Second UN was primarily in the business of serving and protecting people.⁴⁷ The 166 recommendations were grouped into 14 clusters. Many reproduced those of the Brahimi panel: prevention; protection of civilians; use of force; rapid deployment; achievable mandates; sustaining peace; women; integrating human rights; addressing abuse and enhancing accountability; better support in the field; hybrid operations with the AU; leadership, capacity, and performance; special political missions; and aligning New York structures for supporting field operations. New UN resolutions and reform proposals customarily refer to previous efforts; but even so, the echoes of the Brahimi report were strikingly present in the HIPPO recommendations, particularly about more investment in the Second UN’s prevention and mediation capabilities. The earlier emphases on achievable mandates continues as well as the repetition of filling the gap between resources and mandates aiming at, for example, an improved capacity for the protection of civilians.⁴⁸ On the use of force, the HIPPO refers to the “absence of a peace to keep” and the importance of avoiding counter-terrorism operations. In short, it reaffirms the principles of traditional peacekeeping,

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74  “  ”  while indicating that such an emphasis should not provide an excuse for inaction. Moreover, as the report recognizes that excessive centralization in headquarters can hamper the implementation of mandates in the field, the requirement for a strategic analysis and planning capacity in New York were once again underlined as long-overdue priorities. Additional recommendations built directly or indirectly on the Brahimi report. On rapid deployment, capabilities, and performance, for instance, a stronger network of national and regional standby capabilities rather than a UN standby force was recommended. It repeated the call—first articulated by Trygve Lie in 1947 and repeated by numerous observers over the years—for a UN rapid-deployment capability. Another suggestion related to the sequence and prioritization of mandates, in particular the two-stage mandating process. HIPPO innovations included the packaging of clusters on sustaining peace, gender, human rights, abuse and accountability, and cooperation with and finance for the AU, as well as the connection to ideas found in the other parallel panels. “Sustaining peace” was the new conceptual language from AGE that the HIPPO adopted.⁴⁹ HIPPO also posited gender and women as central for success. In addition, human rights became a key and specific cluster, emphasizing the integration of human rights in field operations. Finally, it also highlighted that immunity for peacekeepers was not meant to provide impunity from prosecution for those guilty of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), and it recommended a series of measures to augment accountability. In short, the HIPPO report highlighted the primacy of politics in light of the militarization of peacekeeping and the reaffirmation of the foundational principles, together with cautious guidelines for the use of force. It broadened the scope and rekindled interest in several areas emphasizes by the Brahimi panel that had helped revive peacekeeping in the previous decade. The utility of calling upon the Third UN to highlight problems and possible solutions was, once again, clear. It is premature to evaluate HIPPO’s impact on the First UN and the Second UN; but it is clear that Secretary-General Guterres prioritized the implementation of key recommendations from a panel convened by his predecessor, particularly concerning the primacy of politics for peace operations. Some of the ideas within the Brahimi report and echoed again in the HIPPO report found their way into the peace and security architecture of the UN, and have since been institutionalized. The initial changes in the Guterres reform efforts in 2019 merged pertinent peacebuilding functions from the DPA, DPKO, PBC, and PBSO in a new consolidated Department of Political and

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Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and a rechristened Department of Peace Operations (DPO). This idea was actively championed by Ian Martin, the British former UN SRSG (special representative of the Secretary-General) in Timor-Leste and Libya, and one of the panel’s most visible and outspoken members. In speaking at a high-level Security Council debate in March 2018 on improving UN peacekeeping, Guterres said, “peace operations cannot succeed if they are deployed instead of a political solution, rather than in support of one.”⁵⁰ The normative shift away from the use of force and to the “primacy of politics” was welcomed by member states, including China, which had its views represented on the panel by retired Chinese diplomat Wang Xuexian. Shortly thereafter, Guterres launched the Action for Peacekeeping (A4P) initiative to develop a set of principles and commitments to help make UN peacekeeping operations “fit for the future.” A declaration of shared commitments was announced in August 2018, and in September, the SecretaryGeneral hosted a High-level meeting on Action for Peacekeeping in the margins of the General Assembly. “A4P” as it is known, provides a shared roadmap for strengthening peacekeeping; it integrates many of the recommendations of both Brahimi and HIPPO. Meanwhile, the Third UN continues its involvement by monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the recommendations, including a series of workshops on the sequencing of mandates led by the New York- and Washington DC-based think tanks IPI, Stimson Center, and Security Council Report.

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Much of international relations scholarship consists of attempting to determine whether continuity or change is a more accurate characterization of a dramatic event, approach, or era that seems path-breaking or even paradigmshattering.⁵¹ The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty catalyzed like-minded states, secretariats, and civil society. In the interests of truth-in-packaging, Thomas G. Weiss was the research director, and the ICISS Research Directorate was located at his institutional base, the CUNY Graduate Center.⁵² The result of the commission’s work was a significant reframing of state sovereignty: this foundation for UN Charter Article 2 became, under carefully defined circumstances, subject to interpretation as contingent, rather than absolute, and incorporated a modicum of respect for human rights.

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76  “  ”  This effective intrusion into sacrosanct state sovereignty and the development of a new norm began with Sudanese scholar Francis M. Deng. He was a member of the Third UN as an analyst based in various universities and think tanks, of the First UN as a Sudanese diplomat and later as the ambassador of South Sudan, and of the Second UN—first as the representative of the secretary-general on internally displaced persons from 1992 to 2004, and then as the UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide from 2007 to 2012. His recasting of “sovereignty as responsibility” took place while he and Roberta Cohen worked together from their base in the Third UN’s Brookings Institution.⁵³ The notion was novel because most governments customarily viewed “irresponsibility”—in the form of either state-sponsored repression or a failure to curb abuses—as their right as long as violations, no matter how egregious, remained within national boundaries. The change in interpretation is reminiscent of early social contract theorists’ conceptualization of sovereignty as popular legitimacy—the consent of the governed. Deng emphasized states’ responsibilities to their citizens, that human rights reinforce rather than undermine authority: “Sovereignty is to me a positive concept . . . one can even add that the best way to protect sovereignty is to discharge the responsibilities of sovereignty.”⁵⁴ Some Security Council actions in the early 1990s helped to buttress a push for a more responsible exercise of sovereignty. For example, in 1991 it determined that human rights repression within Iraq threatened international peace and security. In 1992, it identified the lawlessness resulting from the breakdown of order within Somalia as a proper area for UN enforcement action. From 1992 to 1995, the council argued that the dire situation within war-torn Bosnia was such that states and other actors should explore robust measures to ensure humanitarian access. Formerly, such situations would have fallen under the rubric of “domestic affairs.” However, the grisly reality of twentieth-century Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, and East Timor along with twenty-first-century Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, Mali, the Central African Republic (CAR), Myanmar, Yemen, and Syria are viewed as international concerns. UN-approved actions have varied from robust to anemic, once again reflecting the primacy of politics over principle. Nonetheless, absolute state sovereignty has on occasion yielded to a transnational demand for the protection of minimal human rights, or at least against mass atrocities. The fate of civilians trapped in the cross-hairs of violence emerged as a mainstream concern and accompanied a more widespread demand for better management of pressing transnational problems.⁵⁵ The ICISS provided the

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impetus for normative advancement; arguably, no idea has moved faster in the international normative arena than The Responsibility to Protect, the title of their 2001 report. The Government of Canada consistently championed ICISS and R2P,⁵⁶ at least until the election of Stephen Harper in 2006. This middle-power of the First UN was committed to multilateral diplomacy, accompanied by a history of close engagement with the world organization, political credibility in both the North and Global South, and a tradition of successful initiatives. Then foreign minister Axworthy initiated the commission following the 1999 public attacks in the General Assembly on Annan, who dared to suggest that individual sovereignty could trump state sovereignty.⁵⁷ This was Axworthy’s third key initiative—following the treaties on landmines and the ICC discussed earlier. He presided when the ICISS assembled for the first of its five sessions in Ottawa in November 2000 but retired from politics shortly thereafter. The commission’s work continued under his successors, foreign ministers John Manley and Bill Graham. When Paul Martin succeeded Jean Chrétien as prime minister, again there was no break in leadership. Several other likeminded countries, including Norway and Switzerland, as well as such major foundations as MacArthur and other actors like the ICRC, worked closely with ICISS; but Canada led the way. The commission was an autonomous norm broker. Its mandate sought to maneuver around the barrier between standing on the sidelines to respect non-intervention and state sovereignty, on the one hand, and military intervention to support human life, on the other hand. The commissioners went some distance to locate middle ground that reconciled humanitarian imperatives and sovereignty, with substantial conceptual, political, and operational consequences once the First UN and the Second UN consumed and digested the idea of limiting sovereign prerogatives. The wide range of actors that engaged with the issue during the commission’s deliberations and afterwards help explain the movement of sovereignty as responsibility from the periphery closer to the center of international relations in general and UN diplomacy in particular. The initiative provided an answer to Annan’s poignant, albeit not entirely rhetorical, question: “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to . . . gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?”⁵⁸ Given the wide disparity of views among the members on both sides of the so-called North–South divide—industrialized countries were more enthusiastic, and developing countries more wary—Ottawa asked a person from each

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78  “  ”  camp (Gareth Evans from Australia and Mohamed Sahnoun from Algeria) to act as co-chairs. A geographically (if not gender) balanced group filled the other ten spots as commissioners: Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa), Fidel Ramos (Philippines), Eduardo Stein (Guatemala), and Ramesh Thakur (India) from the Global South; Giséle Côté-Harper (Canada), Lee Hamilton (United States), Michael Ignatieff (Canada), Klaus Naumann (Germany), Cornelio Sommaruga (Switzerland), and Vladimir Lukin (Russia) from the North. The absence of Frances Deng was curious in that “sovereignty as responsibility” was the point of departure for the debate—indeed, it is a virtual synonym for “responsibility to protect.” Even though conversations about intervention, like virtually all international issues, are parsed as binary in UN circles, responsible sovereignty does not divide neatly or completely the North from the Global South.⁵⁹ Despite the fact that the bulk of contestation comes from developing countries, the first normative steps were initiated by the Deng. Extensive ICISS consultations offered evidence of how differences across and within Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as between governments and civil society had subtler hues than the black-and-white tones typical in stereotypes describing southern and northern perspectives. Ten consultations in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres sought the views of governments, scholars, intergovernmental and non-governmental humanitarian actors, and journalists in order to put them in the R2P hopper.⁶⁰ Nowhere did anyone argue that intervention to sustain humanitarian objectives was never justified or justifiable. After Rwanda’s gruesome tragedy, very few politicians, policymakers, pundits, or people could exclude intervention as a last resort in the face of mass murder. The basic idea of the R2P doctrine is that human beings sometimes count for more than the tenets of state sovereignty. As Kofi Annan told a 1998 conference, “state frontiers . . . should no longer be seen as a watertight protection for war criminals or mass murderers.”⁶¹ Domestic and international jurisdictions blur, which became more evident over the 1990s with the willingness to override sovereignty and apply military force to rescue menaced populations. The R2P rationale added to the four established characteristics of a sovereign state (territory, authority, population, and independence) in the 1934 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. The Third UN helped to alter the discourse and norms for a de facto incorporation of an enhanced respect for human rights and human life. The normative logic of R2P underscores a state’s responsibilities and accountabilities to domestic and international constituencies. Accordingly, a state cannot claim the prerogatives of a sovereign unless it lives up to

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internationally agreed standards, which include respecting the most fundamental human right, to life, and providing sustenance to citizens. Failure to meet such obligations could legitimize action by the international society of responsible states. Paragraphs 138–140 of the 2005 World Summit decision⁶² capture the extent to which The Responsibility to Protect now frames debates and state actions.⁶³ In what Gareth Evans correctly calculates to be “a blink of the eye in the history of ideas,”⁶⁴ the results of multilateral diplomacy since the release of the Third UN’s ICISS report in December 2001 demonstrate that R2P has moved from the passionate prose of an international commission’s report to a mainstay of international public policy debates. It is worthwhile to mention the vagaries of timing, as the commission’s report was withdrawn temporarily from production following the 9/11 attacks. While only modest changes were introduced, R2P was more in the shadows than it might have been otherwise. The evolving norm remains contested—how could it be otherwise when it confronts head-on the foundation of international relations and the foundation of Charter Article 2(7)? It has the potential to evolve further in customary international law and to contribute to ongoing conversations about the responsibilities of states as legitimate, rather than rogue, sovereigns. The multifaceted diplomatic follow-up process—a distinguishing feature of this Third UN undertaking—began when the ICISS chairs presented the report to the Secretary-General in December 2001. At that point and still nursing his wounds from the 1999 General Assembly, Kofi Annan praised the commission’s packaging: “I wish I had thought of that.” Prior to the World Summit’s agreement to R2P, in 2004 the UN’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (HLP)—with Evans as a member—issued A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, which supported “the emerging norm.”⁶⁵ Annan endorsed it in his 2005 report, In Larger Freedom.⁶⁶ The official blessing by the General Assembly followed in October 2005. Perhaps more significantly, the Security Council made specific references to R2P on two occasions immediately following the summit: the April 2006 resolution 1674 on the protection of civilians, and the August 2006 resolution 1706 on Darfur, which was the first to link R2P to a particular conflict. If we fast forward to September 2020, some 84 resolutions of the Security Council have made reference to it along with 52 from the Human Rights Council and 15 from the General Assembly.⁶⁷ ICISS identified two threshold cases for the legitimate use of international force, namely large-scale loss of life and ethnic cleansing, whether under way or anticipated. It also stipulated that humanitarian intervention should be

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80  “  ”  subject to precautionary conditions: right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects of success. Finally, the Security Council was the preferred authorizer of intervention. This Third UN reframing expanded the normative envelope in three ways. One, it insisted that sovereignty encompasses a state’s responsibility to protect populations within its borders. Two, it moved away from the rights of outsiders to intervene and toward the rights to protection of those who suffer from egregious violence. Three, it reframed responsibility not only to react in the face of mass-atrocity crimes but also to prevent reaching a stage when military force is required to stop carnage, and to rebuild societies following an intervention. The three-pronged responsibility to protect thus reflects a logic that attempts to placate those objecting to the use of outside military force because everything should be done to avoid it. However, in the face of mass atrocities, military intervention is an acceptable last resort. In essence, R2P specifies that it is shameful to do nothing when conscience-shocking events cry out for action. It also is shameful to intervene to protect civilians—for example, in Libya—but then not rebuild the authority destroyed in coming to the rescue. Amidst modest achievements on the 60th anniversary,⁶⁸ the First UN of member states at the 2005 World Summit provided a resounding endorsement for this emerging norm, more quickly than many had thought possible. As José Alvarez tells us, “traditional descriptions of the requisites of custom—the need for the passage of a considerable period of time and the accumulation of evidence of the diplomatic practices between sets of states reacting to one another’s acts—appear increasingly passé.”⁶⁹ The sine qua non of the Security Council’s imprimatur—holding action in Syria hostage because of the double vetoes from Moscow and Beijing—has led some to call the summit’s version “R2P lite.”⁷⁰ Nonetheless, sovereignty no longer includes a license for mass murder. Some NAM members continue to chant ritualistic rejections—among staunch opponents are Cuba, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Venezuela. Most countries of the Global South, however, have remained in the R2P fold and voiced commitments since 2009 during the annual interactive General Assembly dialogues and during the regular agenda of the General Assembly beginning in summer 2018.⁷¹ Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s “three pillars”⁷² reflected a soft-soaping of the military option, but support, or at least diminished hostility, exists across the Global South.⁷³ Ultimately, R2P is not linear but has the ups-and-downs of all political and normative developments.

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“Sovereignty is like one of those lead-weighted dolls you can never get to lie down,” writes Gareth Evans.⁷⁴ New high-water marks were R2P’s specific invocation in early 2011 by the Security Council to support military action for human protection purposes in both Côte d’Ivoire and, more controversially, Libya.⁷⁵ However, with high tides come high risks. The French battalion and air power in Côte d’Ivoire made possible a robust and rapid response that is uncharacteristic of UN operations; the rescue by the former colonial power was not unnoticed. While few doubted that extreme measures were necessary to forestall likely massacres in Benghazi, criticism grew that NATO had unduly stretched its protective mandate to pursue regime change in Libya. Post-intervention buyer’s remorse harkened back to earlier criticisms of humanitarian intervention and R2P as another Trojan Horse for Western imperialism. Replacing a regime in the name of preventing human rights violations was a bridge too far for even sympathetic supporters, let alone Russia and China, whose abstentions had permitted resolution 1973 that authorized the Libya intervention. Subsequent controversies, including a Brazilian initiative for “responsibility while protecting,”⁷⁶ which we discuss in Chapter 5, coincided with the Security Council’s paralysis over Syria, where the brutal suffering of civilians was far worse than in Libya. It will never be easy to reach agreement on how to handle the hardest cases. However, there is little evidence that the gains of the last decade, impelled dramatically by the Third UN in the form of the ICISS, are in danger of disappearing. Political will remains problematic—as Darfur and Congo, let alone Syria, Myanmar, and Yemen, clearly demonstrate. The threshold for military intervention remains high, requiring not merely substantial human rights abuses but mass atrocities (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing according to the World Summit’s decision). However, when a state is manifestly unable or unwilling to safeguard its own citizens—and when peaceful means fail—the resort to outside intervention, including military force (preferably with Security Council approval), remains a possibility. This represents a new middle ground in international relations: what constitutes state sovereignty has moved beyond the confines of the narrowest interpretation of the Westphalian order. The ICISS was another experiment with blue-ribbon international groups from the Third UN. It catalyzed a normative advance; we can whisper “never again” and occasionally mean it.

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Sustainable Development A continual evolution in thinking about the comprehensive and complex nature of development has characterized the UN’s policy trajectory since the earliest years. Walt Rostow’s mechanical theory about the stages of economic growth—including his famous crucial middle stage of the “take-off ” in moving from traditional to a more mature economic development⁷⁷—was present and would be on one end of the spectrum of UN approaches in the 1960s. In the middle of the spectrum could be the ILO’s World Employment Programme that added the previously ignored social dimension in the 1970s. At the other end would be Mahbub ul-Haq’s human development, added in the 1990s and grouped with Amartya Sen’s human security in which individual blossoming was key. At present, the mainstream vision of development reflects the multiple components of the adjective “sustainable,” which now routinely accompanies the noun, in particular for the SDGs and the 2030 Development Agenda. One of the comparative advantages of a group of eminent persons is their ability to reframe issues to bridge the political gap between entrenched camps. Instead of digging the trench deeper, they can build conceptual bridges if not completely fill in the chasm. “Sustainability” was one such construction between those (mostly in the West) who argued that conservation of resources and protection of the human environment was the top priority, and those (mainly in the Global South) who argued for the reduction or elimination of poverty. The latter group rejected notions about slowing or pursuing alternative paths to growth; they sought rapid economic development using the same approach that wealthy countries had utilized since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Three elements in any equation for the sustainability of the planet— resource management, environment, and population—have been topics on which UN ideas have contributed in essential ways to reframing global responses. Nico Schrijver, in The UN and the Global Resource Management: Development without Destruction, identifies three major ways that ideas have had an impact.⁷⁸ First, the UN has been instrumental in generating widespread interest in natural resource management by reflecting the economic, social, and environmental aspects of such management. Second, the world organization has introduced new concepts of resource management such as resource sovereignty, the global commons, the sustainable use of natural resources, and sustainable development. Third, the UN has given a major push to put

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population and environmental problems high on national development agendas through the world conferences of the 1970s and 1990s. Sustainable development has gained momentum in national and international political debates, especially since 1987 when the World Commission on Environment and Development issued its report, Our Common Future.⁷⁹ This commission was established by Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, three-time Norwegian prime minister (1981, 1986–89, 1990–96) and later WHO director-general (1998–2003). Before we examine the work of Brundtland and her Third UN colleagues, it is worth reviewing earlier UN activities, including advocacy by the Third UN before the term “sustainable development” became widespread. For this, as for many issues, the three UNs were not always singing in unison—indeed, their sheets of music often reflected atonal compositions whose harmonies were working at cross-purposes. In the area of the environment, sympathetic governments, especially Scandinavian countries, provided the initial motivation and financial support, backed up by leading scientists and well-organized INGOs. Again, their presence on the world stage was not new. Indeed, some of the main members of the Third UN were venerable voices that had long pointed to the fragility of the human environment: the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Friends of the Earth, Conservation International, and the Sierra Club. It was not until the 1970s, however, that they had such a visible and essential role in setting the UN’s normative agenda. In 1972 at the behest of Sweden, the UN organized in Stockholm the Conference on the Human Environment, the first of the global conferences of the 1970s. The “road”⁸⁰ traveled since then has followed an itinerary that went from preoccupation with scarcities of nonrenewable resources to pollution or destruction of renewable ones and then to climate change, a major and fundamental evolution in thinking, emphases, and priorities. The need for accelerated economic development has never faltered, although the weight of its component parts has varied. The first focus was on the sovereignty of natural resources, from the 1962 UN Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources to subsequent resolutions detailing the rights of countries, including the right to manage freely natural resources for the benefit of the population and national economic development.⁸¹ Later, at the Earth Summit in 1992, other countries (especially Brazil, India, and Malaysia) emphasized deforestation and resource sovereignty. The 2019 Climate

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84  “  ”  Action Summit, convened by Guterres on the eve of the UN General Assembly’s high-level week in New York, rang the alarm bells to draw attention at the highest levels of all three UNs to the planet’s climate emergency; it called for the immediate implementation of the Paris agreement.⁸² Over the years, the relevant concepts of resource management have shifted from ensuring national rights to encompassing a wider range of environmental problems for which state boundaries are visibly irrelevant. Very few observers—including the ones who created the Sierra Club in 1892 and Rachel Carson in 1962 with her polemic Silent Spring—emphasized that perspective until the 1970s.⁸³ The spotlight on global deterioration of the natural environment in Stockholm represented a quantum leap. Its political and conceptual advances, however, occurred after substantial initial resistance. The growing awareness of increasing pollution and environmental damage in industrial countries and rising fears about scarcities of raw materials logically led, in the words of the first report to the Club of Rome, to pondering “the limits to growth.”⁸⁴ As such, the initial plans for Stockholm met with massive criticism from the First UN (from several industrial countries) accompanied by skepticism (from many developing countries). To lead and organize its work, Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman and entrepreneur who later championed the environment and development in a number of UN assignments, was appointed secretary-general of the conference. As part of the preparations, he gathered 27 experts from the North and Global South at Founex (near Geneva) to explore the issues in June 1971.⁸⁵ Although less visible than later commissions or panels and together for only a week, the informal group demonstrated the Third UN’s value. It plowed new common ground in the conceptual clash by shifting the emphasis to a strategy that combined priorities for the environment and development, nationally and internationally. Indeed, Strong’s push for “eco-development” was an early version and foundational concept for what later became “sustainable development.” The Founex gathering sought to bridge the chasm between the seemingly clashing and unbridgeable priorities of developed and developing countries. The latter viewed environmental problems of developed countries as “very largely the outcome of a high level of economic development,” whereas their own were “predominantly problems that reflect poverty and the very lack of development of their societies.”⁸⁶ Building on the Third UN’s reframing at Founex, Strong insisted that NGOs be present at later conferences to expand the basis for addressing the problem. Thereafter, NGO parallel meetings, usually called “forums,” became a prominent part of global deliberations and have been an important force in pressing

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for more forward-looking approaches. For instance, thousands of NGOs attended the Rio and Beijing conferences. In brief, the Global South looked askance upon rich countries’ environmentalism as a threat to their interests. They stressed that most problems resulted from previous industrialization in the North. Building on the themes from Founex, developing countries explicitly proclaimed the right to development and rejected environmental concerns as an unwarranted limitation. At her opening speech in Stockholm, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi captured the difference in a memorable soundbite: “Poverty is the greatest polluter.”⁸⁷ The final conference report incorporated a call for the elimination of mass poverty and the creation of a decent human environment, echoing Strong’s argument during the Stockholm conference that long-term development was a prerequisite to combat poverty and protect the human environment.⁸⁸ Ignacy Sachs participated in Founex and Stockholm and summarized: “The Stockholm conference emphasized the idea that development and environment management are complementary. To those who claimed that to protect the environment it was necessary to stop growth, the conference replied that there was an alternative, namely to change the pattern of growth and the use of its benefits.”⁸⁹ That environmental problems could be minimized through appropriate policies was an advance in thinking. In addition, the conference recommended the establishment in Nairobi of a new component of the Second UN, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); many governments followed suit by creating ministries of environment.⁹⁰ Fifteen years later, consensus remained elusive. As a result, UN SecretaryGeneral Javier Pérez de Cuéllar called for the World Commission on Environment and Development to explore a more integrated approach to this issue. Determining what the General Assembly called a “global agenda for change” was once again handed to the Third UN for ideas and guidance. In addition to the Norwegian prime minister as chair—as noted earlier, such groups are frequently known by the last name of the chair—the other members of the Brundtland Commission were: vice-chair Mansour Khalid (Sudan); Susanna Agnelli (Italy); Saleh A. Al-Athel (Saudi Arabia); Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (Mexico, participated until 1986); Bernard Chidzero (Zimbabwe); Lamine Mohammed Fadika (Côte d’Ivoire); Volker Hauff (Germany); Istvan Lang (Hungary); Ma Shijun (China); Maragita Marino de Botero (Colombia); Nagendra Singh (India); Paulo Nogueira-Neto (Brazil); Saburo Okita (Jampan); Shridath S. Ramphal (Guyana); William D. Ruckelhaus (United States); Mohamed Sahnoun (Algeria); Emil Salim (Indonesia); Bukar Shaib

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86  “  ”  (Nigeria); Vladimir Sokolov (Soviet Union); Janez Stanovnik (Yugoslavia); and Maurice Strong (Canada). The commission’s report defined “sustainable” as the pursuit of “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”⁹¹ In 1987, the General Assembly welcomed the report. In 1989, it decided to convene another UN Conference on Environment and Development, in view of what General Assembly resolution 44/228 called “the continuing deterioration of the state of the environment and the serious degradation of the global life-support systems that could result in an ecological catastrophe.”⁹² The resulting 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro reviewed progress and produced the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.⁹³ Another decade later, in 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg had a mandate to take stock of the implementation of the measures agreed in Rio. Another follow-up conference took place, again in Brazil, called the “Rio+20” summit. Meanwhile, shifts in global thinking took place, along with a better understanding of the complex nature of environmental problems. The continual reframing owes much to the Third UN. It began with the small brainstorming session in Founex and received a quantum boost with the Brundtland Commission. By 1992, the emphasis had shifted from absolute scarcity of nonrenewable resources—the way most governments and individuals had interpreted environmental problems in the 1970s—to the pollution or destruction of renewable resources, especially water, air, soil, and forests. However, the central focus was about to shift again. As ever more evidence of climate change emerged, the vast majority of states and non-state actors acknowledged it as the most serious of environmental problems. Until the 1990s, the widespread view about environmental problems was how to survive in a closed system, a global fish bowl. In 1997, the UN conference in Kyoto introduced the problem of what to do when humans place that bowl into a microwave; the resulting protocol came into force in early 2005. Global understandings and perceptions of environmental issues have changed remarkably over the last half-century. For two decades after Stockholm, environmental matters were mainly concerned with questions regarding scarcity, pollution, desertification, deforestation, and the relation between environment and economic underdevelopment. Gradually, the planetary challenges of survival and sustainability arising from problems like climate change, have attracted more and more attention. The impact on government policy of the flow of ideas from the Third UN was reflected in

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the judgment of the former president of Slovenia and executive director of the Economic Commission for Europe, Janez Stanovnik: “The Brundtland Commission has had tremendous impact on governmental policy thinking. Documents of my little country’s government now always speak of ‘sustainable development’ . . . These I wanted to give as examples where ideas which are being germinated within the secretariat or with the secretariat’s wisdom by appointing the right persons from outside the world to write the right kind of reports, which then come on the governments’ table.”⁹⁴ The 1992 Rio conference was a landmark and led to further conventions not only about bio-diversity, transition costs, and desertification but also climate change. Further, it agreed to the creation of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to provide funding and technical assistance for shifting the locus of support from projects to the preservation of bio-diversity, the protection of forests, and the improvement of soils. In 1997, with ever more evidence of global warming, states adopted the Kyoto Protocol to strengthen the provisions of the convention on climate change. Nonetheless, because of the hostility of major powers—especially the United States and Russia—and the absence of restrictions on major polluters among developing countries— especially China and India—the ability of the Kyoto Protocol to respond adequately to these urgent and substantial environmental problems was limited. For climate change, a kind of “super” Third UN group—which is not a oneoff but rather an ongoing team—has advanced our understanding of the human influence on climate. Shortly after the publication of the Brundtland Commission’s report, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and UNEP created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with the mission of analyzing all aspects of climate change and formulating strategies to counteract them. As a result of the work by this group of some 2,000 world-class scientists from over 150 countries, the issue is squarely on the public policy agenda, including the 2015 Paris Agreement. The IPCC is open to member states and assesses the scientific, technical, and socio-economic information relevant to evaluate the risks of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation. While states nominate members for their scientific expertise (mainly Earth system science, meteorology, ecology, engineering, economics, and the social sciences), they act independently and in their personal capacities. The group’s deliberations proceed on a comprehensive, objective, open, and transparent basis; but it does not conduct basic research or monitor climate-related data. Its overall assessment reports, published every five to seven years, condense peer-

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88  “  ”  reviewed and published scientific literature.⁹⁵ More focused reports also appear in between the periodic, major assessments. The IPCC has had a major impact, beginning with its first assessment report that served as the basis for negotiating the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—which opened for signature at the 1992 Earth Summit. After entry into force of the convention, the panel remained the most important source for scientific and socio-economic information and had a distinct impact on further work. The relationship between the UNFCCC and the IPCC, in fact, serves as a “model” for interactions between scientists and decision-makers. One essential principle is being policy relevant without being overly prescriptive. Other important factors are its scientific integrity, objectivity, openness, and transparency, which a rigorous review process achieves. The panel’s adoption and approval process is open to all member states of the First UN, but the independent individual members write and approve the scientific findings in drafts. However, the IPCC’s overarching achievement is the overwhelming consensus among its scientific members about the unequivocal evidence of the human contribution to climate change. In the absence of drastic mitigation of emissions of greenhouse gases, the panel projects temperature increases between 2 and 4 percent by the end of the twenty-first century. These numbers provided a base line for the 2015 Paris Agreement. Furthermore, between 1988 and 2016, the panel issued five general assessments detailing the evidence for the scientific consensus; a sixth report will appear in 2022.⁹⁶ Each report from this Third UN team has presented a comprehensive overview of the existing stock of knowledge. The IPCC has also produced special reports on more specific issues—for instance, on the eve of the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland in December 2018, it produced a key scientific input by documenting the benefits from temperature increases of only 1.5ºC instead of the targeted 2ºC. A measure of global recognition was then IPCC chair Rajendra Kumar Pachauri’s sharing of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vicepresident Al Gore. The importance of epistemic communities is a key theoretical subject in international relations. The IPCC is one such community whose knowledge and normative impact are obvious. It is a powerful and pragmatic illustration of how a network of volunteer (unpaid) scientists from several disciplines can translate esoteric scientific findings into language that can be understood by policy makers and politicians. This network put to rest the legitimacy of doubts—except in the minds of unreconstructed ideologues, many of whom reside in Washington, DC, but have appeared elsewhere,

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including in Brazil—regarding the human role in climate change. It has become harder to ignore record temperatures: 19 of the hottest 20 years on record have occurred since 2001, and each successive decade starting with the 1980s has become hotter on average. In addition, storms and other extreme events have become commonplace. Agreement exists among virtually all knowledgeable experts that climate change requires urgent action.⁹⁷ If we move to the twenty-first meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP21) at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, we can see a culmination of the UN’s collective efforts that began seriously with the 1972 Stockholm Conference. At one of the largest international conferences ever held, almost 50,000 participants—split evenly between governments and nonstate actors—attended COP21, with agreement by 195 states and the EU.⁹⁸ The withdrawal by the Trump administration was a blow, especially as it provided excuses for other signatories to consider opting out—for example, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has threatened to do so, but to date has only withdrawn his country’s agreement to host the 2019 COP and widened deforestation of the Amazon. It is also worth noting that the Third UN’s impact has been felt beyond governments. Thus, many US corporations, states, and cities are pledged to respecting the agreement. Moreover, all the Democratic candidates running for the US presidency in 2020 had pledged to return to the Paris Agreement, a position embraced by the winner, Joseph Biden; the November 2020 presidential election occurred before the four-year legal withdrawal period takes effect. The tentative steps forward to battle this existential threat of climate change owe much to the Third UN’s knowledge and normative efforts. The recognition that environmental factors drive or exacerbate violent conflict in complex and non-linear pathways has prompted debates on this linkage within the academy.⁹⁹ In 2019, with support from Sweden and Germany during their Security Council tenures, the UN established a small Climate Security Mechanism in the Secretariat. The future may also lead to a more integrated effort to use mandates on peace and security and on human rights to include climate,¹⁰⁰ although resistance by some of the P-5 makes bringing climate-related issues to the Security Council contentious.

Conclusion This chapter has explored a particular type of expertise from a particular part of the Third UN—admittedly its most elite component—that effectively

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90  “  ”  combines knowledge and political visibility, and that has been influential in nourishing ideas and norms. The cases have suggested how commissions and panels can make a difference across the UN’s major substantive areas of work: the Brahimi report of 2001 and HIPPO of 2015 for international peace and security; the ICISS report of 2001 for humanitarian intervention; and documents from the Founex group, the Brundtland commission, and the ongoing IPCC for sustainable development. In significant ways, they all changed the vocabulary of intergovernmental debates and the emphases in UN projects and programs—that is, they altered how the First and the Second UN think, and what they do. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan articulated why going outside the confines of the Second UN is oftentimes preferable, even if inside expertise is available: There are certain issues that are better done outside . . . take a look at the intervention issue. I couldn’t have done it inside. It would have been very divisive. And the member states were very uncomfortable because, as an organization, sovereignty is our bedrock and bible—here is someone coming with ideas which are almost challenging it. So, I had to sow the seed and let them digest it but take the study outside and then bring in the results for them to look at it. I find that when you are dealing with issues where the member states are divided and have very strong views, and very strong regional reviews, if you do the work inside, the discussions become so acrimonious that, however good a document is, sometimes you have problems. . . . But if you bring it from outside . . . they accept it.¹⁰¹

The deliberations and publications from such groups—invariably with a high dose of former politicians, UN officials, and members of civil society—have been essential to the UN’s production of knowledge and norms. They can raise the visibility of particular global challenges and possible solutions; they often succeed in doing so with a consensus from prominent individuals who represent a spectrum of opinion and nationalities. Unlike official or semiofficial UN reports by the Second UN, commissioners and panelists speak in their individual capacities and may break new ground beyond what passes for politically correct or conventional wisdom in the more rigid diplomatic confines among member states of the First UN. In all four ways that ideas and norms matter, these cases illustrate the essential contributions by many blue-ribbon groups of the Third UN: they have changed the way that we talk

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about issues; that we frame agendas; that new coalitions coagulate; and that institutions act and policies form. Three factors differ across these changes. The first is the two rather distinct ways of proceeding: a multi-year effort that produces many monographs in addition to a final report—for example, the Brundtland Commission and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. This “model” was more frequent in the past when pressing topics were under-researched as was the case for sustainability in the mid-1980s or prevention in the early 1990s. More recently, a forced-pace march has become standard and produced a final report quickly (in a year or even less) on more researched topics—for example, humanitarian intervention by the ICISS and peace operations by HIPPO. The second factor is that commissions are either independent of UN secretariats—that is, sponsored by governments or foundations with the funders selecting participants and staff, like the Pearson or Global Governance commissions—or more directly controlled, financed, and staffed by the UN Secretary-General like the high-level panels of the last two decades. The commissions and panels that punch above their weight have often reflected their leadership—both of the chairs and key members—which is elusive. We have mentioned that the costs are incomparable because their direct and indirect costs are subsidized in so many ways by governments and foundations. The UN Secretariat and governments have improved their approaches to commissions and panels. The current template consists of cochairs (from the Global South and North), geographical diversity, gender balance, technical and political experience, and backgrounds from the public and private sectors. Usually a small professional staff is in charge of research and logistics. The First UN and the Second UN have gotten better at selecting, organizing, and processing this type of Third UN input. However, checking all the boxes does not guarantee success; chemistry and timing and exogenous events are hard to control. The third factor is that those with some distance from the Second UN—that is, feeding into the UN Secretariat’s work but not directly funded and thus controlled by it and with members not selected according to rigid geo-political considerations—can be more effective at bringing about change. That said, some more directly staffed and funded UN panels can also be blunt, especially under the right leadership. As the AGE chair of the group working on peacebuilding, Gert Rosenthal brought to bear his experience as a former ambassador and foreign minister of Guatemala who had also headed the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. This group of

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92  “  ”  the Third UN straightforwardly criticized the lack of strategic thinking by the Second UN and for making peacebuilding “an afterthought: under-prioritized, under-resourced and undertaken only after the guns fall silent.” Furthermore, the panelists pointed candidly to the First UN for continuing to aid and abet the continuing atomization of the UN Secretariat and UN system: “Member States are, themselves, part of the problem.”¹⁰² Ultimately, what has been the impact? Views diverge, even among individuals who have served with multiple groups. Brian Urquhart, on the one hand, warned that “the big commissions always claim a great deal of credit.” Rolling his eyes, he continued: “I just got a five-page letter from David Hamburg [then president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York that had funded the commission] saying how absolutely stellar the repercussions of the Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict have been. I am glad he thinks so, and I hope it’s true. But a high-level commission is a huge, heavy piece of machinery. It is enormously expensive. It takes a hell of a lot of time, and I wonder really how much effect it has. . . . I don’t really believe that these problems (globalization, poverty, etc.) are susceptible to thirty distinguished old fellows deliberating on them and producing a report.”¹⁰³ On the other hand, other veterans were more positive. “I happen to think that [they are] one of the things the UN does best,” Rosenthal opined, in pointing to the reports from commissions and panels and the need for the repetition of certain topics long before he chaired what could well have been another case study in success, the Advisory Group of Experts on Peacebuilding. Its 2015 report not only changed vocabulary—“sustaining peace” became a synonym for “peacebuilding”—but also led to a different Secretariat institutional configuration. “Sooner or later, people start repeating certain basic propositions. Usually they are born in the UN Secretariat, or the UN Secretariat buys in when they are developed somewhere else and popularizes them,” Rosenthal judged. “Oftentimes a report’s ideas find sudden wide repetition in public circles up to five years after a report’s release.”¹⁰⁴ The repetition of ideas by blue-ribbon groups, however unpalatable at first, can lead to wider acceptance. Many notions related to development priorities and ODA, in particular, seem to have benefited over time from this dynamic. Demand-driven commissions—when governments are searching for alternative approaches or new unplowed middle-ground—have more immediate impact. Sustainable development, the prevention of deadly conflict, and the responsibility to protect are helpful illustrations, whereas human security appears at the other end of the spectrum—supply-driven to reflect the priority of the sponsors with limited uptake by governments.

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Far more thought should be given to the shape, timing, demand, and frequency of commissions and panels; more research is required to determine the conditions under which they have reasonable chances of making a difference to policy and normative advances. “It is remarkable how many policy projects are launched on the equivalent of a wish and a prayer,” noted Edward Luck. He urged enthusiasts to stop and ask themselves candidly “a) whether a market exists for the product they intend to produce, and b) whether their commission or study will truly bring added value.”¹⁰⁵ There have been commissions and panels whose work quickly disappeared into filing cabinets with little or no trace. The United Nations has always had difficulty in telling its success stories, in publicizing the not inconsiderable good news of its contributions.¹⁰⁶ It has also been singularly inept in translating its contributions as part of a public relations strategy. At the same time, the world’s print, digital, and social media make instantaneously clear its visible failures. The examples discussed here suggest that some Third UN efforts, specifically commissions and panels, can make a substantial and substantive difference in the way that we talk about issues and frame agendas; and in the manner that new coalitions coagulate, institutions act, and policies take shape. As two well-placed analysts summarized, “High-level panels have a proven potential to drive the emergence of new ideas and norms as well as executive action and institutional renewal.” They also went on to caution, however, that: “The inflationary use of panels has arguably resulted in the depreciation of a tool whose value resides at least in part in its rarity. If highlevel commissions become routine, the audience will stop paying attention.”¹⁰⁷ Indeed, we agree but add another comment. It is difficult to imagine contemporary international public policy debates without them. People matter.

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4 The UN’s Knowledge Economy Academics, Think Tanks, and Knowledge Brokers

UN policy makers increasingly face complex policy problems that cut across regional, disciplinary, and thematic boundaries; this reality challenges the world body’s functional siloes evident in its organigram. The growing recognition of the convergence of the interrelated issues in what used to be three distinct pillars of activities—international peace and security; human rights and humanitarian action; and sustainable development—has raised the need for the UN system to better understand these intersecting issues. Complexity, and the emphasis by successive secretaries-general over the last three decades on the prevention of violent conflict, has elevated the Third UN’s knowledge brokers. Based primarily in the North but often with wider participation from analysts worldwide, they have become a key source of intellectual inputs into the First UN and the Second UN. This chapter explores both the persistent needs for solid operational and context-based analysis in governments and UN secretariats as well as the roles that external research, researchers, and research brokers play in addressing those needs.

The Need for Analysis As we have written elsewhere, the UN has a decades-long history of originating, incubating, consuming, and disseminating powerful ideas and social knowledge—from human rights to full employment, from climate change to the limits of GNP as a meaningful measurement of development.¹ The Third UN as a knowledge system² has been an important intellectual partner at various times within the intergovernmental machinery since the organization’s inception. The three UNs together can thus be usefully understood as a progressively evolving and symbiotic knowledge economy whose accumulated experience, over the last three-quarters of a century, has been harnessed, with a varying degree of success, to address some of the world’s most complex challenges. Key non-state components of the Third UN since the end of the The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0005

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 ’    95 Cold War have been the growing number of think tanks, research consultants, and university faculties that facilitate policy-making processes with substantive inputs for the First UN and the Second UN.³ It is essential to keep in mind that “expertise” is a relative and value-laden notion, and that outsiders certainly do not have a monopoly on wisdom. With her usual irony, the first woman UN under-secretary-general Margaret Joan Anstee recalled internal discussions in UNDP about what to call outsiders with knowledge who were called upon to provide technical advice: “Experts were, at first, called specialists. But, there was an American book called The Specialist, by a chap who was a specialist in country privies [toilets]! So it was decided that specialist was not a very happy name to give to people, and they were called experts. Somebody then pointed out that an expert is somebody who is a long way from home!”⁴ The United Nations is rarely the single actor in countries or regions where it is engaged, nor is it always the most influential; yet, its activities span the full range of outside involvement: from humanitarian assistance and development aid to political crisis management and intervention, from peacekeeping to peacebuilding. The UN development system is present worldwide. In some countries or regions, the UN may be a disproportionately significant actor. Moreover, when governments and private sector actors tire of involvement— whether through donor fatigue, domestic political concerns, or simply changing priorities—invariably some part of the UN system is asked to fill the vacuum or pick up the pieces from a failing experiment. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan often quipped, all too often the acronym (SG) for his position meant “Scape-Goat.” Nonetheless, these features and range of activities give the UN a rare opportunity to engage in the full spectrum of conflict prevention and management, and building sustainable peace, even if the organization may not always seize that opportunity wisely or fully. This makes the question of UN analytical capacity, its policy acuity, and its operational effectiveness a matter of especial importance to societies and peoples vulnerable to or recovering from armed conflict. That the UN’s unique legitimacy has been challenged in particular since the US-led war in Iraq and its aftermath only makes it more crucial for the world organization to fully appreciate the complexities of the social and political environments in which it operates. The need for the Secretariat’s staff in headquarters to improve its analytical capacity and strengthen its knowledge management has long been recognized among the most thoughtful and research-minded international civil servants of the Second UN. It is a subject eliciting frequent hand-wringing and consternation both inside and outside secretariats across the system. This need

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96  “”  figured notably in the 2000 Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel on Peace Operations (the “Brahimi Report”), which was tasked with improving the effectiveness of UN peace and security activities after a decade of perceived failures from Somalia to Rwanda, from Côte d’Ivoire to Srebrenica. Chapter 3 emphasized the Brahimi panelists’ contribution to the evolution of ideas about peace operations, but here we highlight their emphasis on how the Secretariat’s uneven analytical and policy-planning capabilities restricts effectiveness and situational awareness. Although an Executive Committee on Peace and Security (ECPS) had been established in 1997 to improve coordination of information and action within the UN system, the Brahimi Report concluded that ECPS “has not yet become the decisionmaking body that the 1997 reforms envisioned.” The panel members attributed the shortcomings of the ECPS to lack of staffing and time for analysis, and argued that the Secretariat needed “sharper tools to gather and analyse relevant information.” It noted that the Secretary-General and the members of the ECPS “need a professional system in the Secretariat for accumulating knowledge about conflict situations, distributing that knowledge efficiently to a wide user base, generating policy analyses and formulating long-term strategies. That system does not exist at present.” The Brahimi Report concluded that without increased capacity to carry out its mandated analytical tasks, the UN would necessarily “remain a reactive institution unable to get ahead of daily events.”⁵ This hard-hitting evaluation led the panel to recommend that the SecretaryGeneral establish an information and analysis unit to support the ECPS. The proposed ECPS Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat (EISAS) was to have a dedicated staff who would manage a Strategic Planning and Analysis Service, an Information Management Service, and a Peacebuilding Unit.⁶ While other panel recommendations were implemented, the EISAS proposal was abandoned in 2002 after two years of strong member-state opposition to the idea of strengthening the Secretariat’s analytical capabilities. Some governments, particularly within the Non-Aligned Movement feared that any attempt to build an intelligence-gathering capacity within the UN Secretariat would not only give too much power to the Secretary-General; but it also would further advantage the permanent members of the Security Council. Still others refused to agree to what they saw as diverting any resources from development activities.⁷ Unable to get support for the EISAS, senior UN officials helped establish a smaller but functionally similar initiative outside the UN to help build an analytical capability. In October 2000, the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF) was established as a program of the

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 ’    97 New York-based Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the context of these debates; aptly, Lakhdar Brahimi became its honorary chair. The EISAS experience illustrates the extent to which the notion of the Secretariat’s having an independent analytical capability has been politicized during and after the Cold War. This was but one in a series of failures to establish an internal analytical capacity. The dispute reflects a long history of the First UN’s opposition to the Second UN’s having too much agency; or as Simon Chesterman aptly put it, the need for member states to ensure that even the top of the Second UN is more “Secretary” than “General.”⁸ The opposition to the Second UN’s having an enhanced capacity for political analysis predates the Brahimi Report; in fact, it goes back to the early 1960s when Dag Hammarskjöld rejected what he saw as efforts to build an intelligence capacity within the Secretariat, believing that this was exclusively the realm of the First UN—he may have been particularly uneasy about ruffling superpower feathers at the height of the Cold War.⁹ In the 1990s, the outgoing head of the (then) UN Department of Political Affairs (DPA) and former under-secretary-general of the (then) Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), Marrack Goulding, highlighted the same need for analysis and proposed an Interdepartmental Policy Analysis Group in a report to Secretary-General Annan.¹⁰ This debate was revived due not least to the profound policy and operational challenges posed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq following the attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing Global War on Terror (GWOT), but also by the growing recognition about the complexity of policy challenges. More complex world problems require more complex and multidisciplinary analyses—linking political, security, economic, and social issues. Both Brahimi and Goulding argued that the effectiveness of the Secretariat’s analysis was limited by the narrow focus on political issues of what was then the DPA, neglecting, for example, questions of political economy. That UN policy makers place high priority on context-specific knowledge and analysis was further underscored by the conclusion of a 2003 DPA-led evaluation of knowledge management in relation to UN strategic planning. Among the conclusions of the “Knowledge Project”—a Rockefeller Foundation-funded collaboration between the UN’s DPA and the SSRC’s CPPF—was the need to streamline the internal policy process as well as to strengthen and expand the UN’s ability to draw on external expertise by calling upon research institutions and think tanks. It is unsurprising, therefore, that a decade and a half after the Brahimi Report, the 2015 reviews of UN peace and development operations and

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98  “”  architecture—the High-Level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations (HIPPO) and the Advisory Group of Experts on Peacebuilding (AGE)— both reiterated the continuing need for the Second UN to have a greater capacity to think. In their respective ways, these groups returned to questions about what the UN can effectively do in contemporary crises, and what resources, analytical and otherwise, are needed to do those things well. Their attention also focused on whether the UN’s knowledge resources drew on sufficiently diverse perspectives and were equipped to understand new and emerging issues that cut across regions and UN bureaucratic boundaries. The HIPPO report, in particular, noted: “Currently, the Secretariat has limited capacity to gather and assess UN reporting, married with external open source information, to underpin its conflict assessments, policy and strategy formulation and planning. This requires professional analysts with access to System-wide thematic knowledge, including on the economic, historical, cultural, anthropological and resource dimensions of a conflict, as well as gender and human rights analyses and assessment of threats to civilian populations. . . . The Secretariat’s cross-departmental Policy Committee and before it, the Executive Committee on Peace and Security, have not consistently provided the required decision-making on country strategies.” It argued further: “The Secretariat should introduce regular independent evaluations using external expertise to assist missions through objective assessments of progress.”¹¹ Echoing the HIPPO report, the AGE report noted that the PBSO has “little time for in-depth policy analysis on dealing with conflict-affected states, or on what drives the recurrence of conflict.”¹² On his appointment in 2017, Secretary-General António Guterres committed to seeking expertise from outside the normal insider UN channels: “We will be open to new ideas . . . drawing on and commissioning research and inputs from a wide variety of internal and external sources . . . [and] ensure that fresh thinking and outside perspectives are introduced into the policy-making process.”¹³ In modest ways, that has been the case. There is more integration and coordination within the UN today than there were two decades ago. The Secretariat has established a number of in-house mechanisms to improve information-sharing and decision-making among different parts of the UN system as well as between headquarters and the field. The SDGs have contributed by underscoring how interlinked are such seemingly disparate issues as politics, economics, human rights, public health, the environment, technology, and media; they have thus helped situate how necessary an integrated analysis is to better understand the combined risks that can lead a country or region to crisis. The aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis will only reinforce the

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 ’    99 requirement for inter-disciplinary perspectives because everything, from the rotation of peacekeepers to the priorities in terms of humanitarian and development projects, is affected. The Regional Monthly Review (RMR) was introduced as part of Guterres’s 2019 reforms and developed an internal horizon scanning process and riskframework methodology that maps on the SDGs. Other examples include the reorganized development system, in which UN Resident Coordinators (RCs) have an enhanced political and analytic mandate and report directly to the Secretary-General rather than to UNDP; the introduction of a shared analysis on each country, the Common Country Analysis (CCA), that draws inputs from a variety of sources and partners; and a small Climate Security Mechanism within the new (since 2019) Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) to enhance the UN’s capacity for better understanding climate-related security risks. The Second UN has progressively turned to a number of intellectual partnerships with external research institutions to help fill analytical gaps. For example, the Swedish International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Germany’s Adelphi were integral to the Climate Security Mechanism. These relationships, however, have grown in an ad hoc manner, and they vary from department to department. So, while various internal reforms since the Brahimi Report have strengthened the UN’s system-wide knowledge base and its internal capacities for analysis, remaining challenges include information management; capturing lessons from experience; conducting comparative and regional analyses; engaging academia and external expertise; and using research and analysis to inform policy planning and decision-making. Moreover, recent improvements in the UN’s strategic policy analysis, lessons-learning, and evidenced-based decision-making have tended to focus on technical and thematic mandates that follow pre-identified paths of inquiry and avoid more fundamental questions about history and context.

How Change Happens: The Impact of Ideas and Research Normative and operational change around the UN is complicated and nonlinear. In describing “how change happens” in a book by that title, Oxfam adviser Duncan Green notes: “In complex systems, change results from the interplay of many diverse and apparently unrelated factors. Those of us engaged in seeking change need to identify which elements are important and understand how they interact.”¹⁴ In thinking about how research helps

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100  “”  shape international public policy, the timeframe for impact is essential—in particular, the longer-term and the real-time impact of research. Virendra Dayal, the chef de cabinet for two secretaries-general and later head of an Indian NGO, pointed to the evolution of human rights discourse as having implications for future UN efforts to refine norms and policies: If you take, for instance, the ideas on human rights, there you can hardly say that the timing was perfect, nor could you say that there was a great deal of packaging that was done. In fact, the ideas managed to survive in spite of the bad timing, and in spite of the third-rate packaging. They survived in spite of the Cold War and the apprehensions they caused among despotic regimes the world over. And the circumstances, in a sense, could not have been worse. . . . Yet, because the ideas themselves were so remarkable, we have a body of normative law the likes of which the world has never seen before in respect of how human beings should be treated.¹⁵

In the longer term, as outlined earlier, research can have a substantial influence on policy in four ways. The first is that research can at times transform the intellectual environment, or at least change the nature of international public policy discourse and thereby help states to define and redefine their interests to be more inclusive of common concerns. For example, ideas about dependency and the concept of “center–periphery,” which were developed by Henrique Fernando Cardoso and other Latin American economists outside and within ECLA in the 1970s, fundamentally altered conversations about modernization. Or the growing emphasis on mainstreaming human rights partially reflects a redefinition of respect for individuals as part of the identity of responsible sovereign states. The “systemic failures” of the UN to prevent mass atrocities during the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009—as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s internal review, the 2012 “Petrie Report” put it¹⁶—showed that the UN had failed to sound the alarms due to, among other reasons, a lack of a shared understanding of the evolving situation. That report’s findings, blunt and embarrassing as they were for the UN system, transformed the intellectual environment and opened space in what had been member state resistance to a more activist organizational culture in the UN. In 2013, Ban Ki-moon established an early warning and crisis management system known as Human Rights Up Front (HRuF), which obliged staff at all levels to speak out about human rights abuses and looming crises. Thus, ideas can change the tenor of policy conversations.

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The second type of impact is that research can provide a tactical guide to policy and action when norms clash or when sequencing or priorities are disputed. The necessity to balance belt-tightening with a “human face” for structural adjustment was one such dispute, in which UNICEF’s ideas provided a road map to navigate between conflicting priorities and needs.¹⁷ Another was the need to override state sovereignty with military force in cases of genocide and mass murder and forced displacement, in which Kofi Annan’s controversial stance on intervention and two sovereignties drew upon intellectual debates of the 1990s. Another was the need to combine the imperatives of economic growth with the need to protect the human environment that led to sustainable development as a means to square that circle. Thus, ideas can set new agendas. The third type of impact is that research can make possible new combinations of political and institutional forces, thereby altering prospects for forming new coalitions of partners who may not previously have even recognized their affinities. For example, the early call by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) to take seriously the Prebisch–Singer thesis about declining terms of trade and the context of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) became the veritable glue of G-77 and NAM solidarity. Women’s reproductive rights and gender brought together coalitions of the willing—the initial, more visible and well financed groups from the North were joined by others from the Global South who had previously been absent or on the sidelines. Research showing compelling evidence of the devastating and accelerating effects of climate change helped to coalesce a movement around the Paris Climate Agreement, including the mobilization of youth worldwide. Thus, ideas can catalyze the formation of new coalitions and tip the balance in favor of modest, and even more dramatic, changes in policy. The fourth type of impact results because evidence-based research—and particularly the ideas contained in it—can become embedded in institutions and thus challenge not only the founding principles of those institutions but also set future agendas. The establishment of new agencies—for example, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), or the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), or UN Women, or the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC)—is a clear manifestation, as is the “mainstreaming” of issues and the creation of new units within such established organizations as the World Bank. Robert Cox noted that this is a double-edge sword because “institutions take on a life of their own, often outliving the original intention of

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102  “”  their founders.”¹⁸ The institutionalization of ideas in the UN system has an impact on policy formulation elsewhere, particularly in governments. The acceptance of an idea by key institutions gives power to ideas and imposes a consensus by facilitating their funding and sometimes their implementation. The emphasis on special measures for least-developed, land-locked, and island developing countries reflected a growing realization that something more had to be done to reverse the poor-getting-poorer-and-the-rich-richer. Thus, ideas can shape institutional responses and the resources devoted to addressing problems. The Third UN can thus help provide conceptual clarity to the First UN and the Second UN, as well as provide some epistemological direction around complex policy questions, particularly on how and what data need to be collected to understand what we need to understand. In so doing, the Third UN can provide new evidence and alternative roadmaps when directions are contested or shortcuts disputed; it can do so both over the long term and in real-time.

Think Tanks, Knowledge Brokers, and Knowledge Networks “Knowledge networks”¹⁹ have become an analytical concern for students of global governance because they create and transfer knowledge and influence to policy makers regardless of location; they have also become a preoccupation of the UN system in playing catch-up.²⁰ These networks often frame debates on a particular issue, provide justifications for alternatives, and catalyze national or international coalitions to support chosen policies and advocate change. What Peter Haas long ago called “epistemic communities” influence policy, especially during times of uncertainty and rapid change, which is when demand, especially for expertise, increases.²¹ Much of the literature relates to scientific elites with particular expertise in areas such as the environment and HIV/ AIDS.²² A related approach to knowledge networks is Peter Hall’s crossnational dissemination of ideas among experts in the postwar period, when Keynesianism spread largely because it “acquired influence over the economic policies of a major power and was exported as that nation acquired increasing hegemony around the world.”²³ In the late 1940s and early 1950s, three panels of outside experts—not then called “knowledge networks” but they functioned as such—produced pioneering reports for the United Nations that launched the world organization’s use of external expertise: National and International Measures for Full

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Employment; Measures for the Economic Development of Under-Developed Countries; and Measures for International Economic Stability.²⁴ These groups permitted the entry of outside expertise—including prescient thinking by such later Nobel laureates as W. Arthur Lewis and Theodore W. Schultz—as parts of teams of prominent economists from different parts of the world, supported by professionals from the UN Secretariat. In the 1960s, the UN Committee for Development Planning (since 1999, “Policy” has replaced “Planning” in the acronym CDP) was created and initially chaired by Jan Tinbergen, who later won the first Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The CDP usually comprised 24 economists, all unpaid and appointed in their personal capacities by the UN Secretary-General, without nomination by governments. The CDP met a few times a year to bring external expertise into the UN about development and international economic policy. These teams had a strong normative agenda—pursuing a world with greater economic and social justice with less poverty and inequitable income distribution. Nobel economics laureate Lawrence Klein, an eloquent member of the Third UN on disarmament and development, observed, “I believe that it would be quite valuable if the UN had a better academic world contact.”²⁵ Indeed, the import of new thinking, approaches, and policies from scholars in the Third UN remains vital to the world organization, as reiterated in later reports from Jeffrey Sachs and the UN Millennium Project.²⁶ The Second UN’s goal cannot be to know a country or thematic issue as well as academic experts. Instead, its role is to translate a range of scholarship into realistic and action-oriented policy options; then, on the basis of these options, to formulate medium- and longer-term strategies. Analyses from UN secretariats, even the most elegantly penned ones, are useful only if they provide decision-makers—senior international civil servants and government representatives—with clear strategic options, and identify the operational implications for each option. For this to be possible, the Second UN needs to be able to call and rely upon networks of external expertise in close to “real time.” The need for real-time intellectual inputs has given more prominence to, and elevated the range of potential expertise from, external partners—research institutions, think tanks, and knowledge brokers from the Third UN. While the definition of think tanks is as contested as think tanks themselves, they can be usefully understood as “public-policy research analysis and engagement organizations that generate policy-oriented research, analysis, and advice on domestic and international issues, which enable policy makers and the public to make informed decisions about public policy issues.”²⁷ Their number

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104  “”  worldwide has risen dramatically in the last 20 years, coinciding, not surprisingly, with the rise of the knowledge economy and a greater demand (and reliance) on intellectual and social capital. By one estimate, over half of think tanks globally are located in North America and Europe, but with Asia now registering the fastest growth in numbers. In fact, as of 2018, India and China follow the United States as the top three countries with the most think tanks.²⁸ The volumes depicted in Table 4.1 do not necessarily correlate directly with greater policy influence, but they are indicators of growing participation in global policy discourse. We revisit this topic in Chapter 5. Rather than a paucity of information, staff in the UN today suffer, like the rest of us, from information overload. They are bombarded with facts and figures that they often cannot contextualize. One reason why the UN responds to expert briefings by trusted brokers is that UN policy makers do not get the opportunity to dig as deeply into issues as they would like; daily firefighting invariably takes precedence. Demand for analysis is also high because civil servants rotate. While there may be benefits to having a broad range of experiences in multilateral diplomacy, staff movements make it harder to acquire and retain in-depth understanding of issues and places. At the same time, individual researchers and academics face a challenge in informing policy because they do not typically know how to navigate UN bureaucracies. The value of knowledge brokers is that they maintain active and ongoing contacts with both researchers and the First and Second United Nations. It is thus more useful for UN policymaking to speak about “knowledge brokers” rather than merely think tanks, as not all think tanks broker and not all brokers think. Knowledge brokerage at the UN comes in many forms, including the “revolving door” of human capital—that is, it is no longer unusual for former foreign ministry officials or military officers to assume positions within secretariats, or for NGO practitioners to assume similar posts, Table 4.1 Number of think tanks by region, 2018 Region

Think Tanks

Europe North America Asia South & Central America Sub-Saharan Africa Middle East & North Africa Total

2,219 2,058 1,829 1,023 612 507 8,248

Source: 2018 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report

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or for academics to serve on long- or short-term UN contracts. Many individuals are, in effect, “shape-shifters” whose membership at any moment in one of the three UNs reflects the extent to which they are embedded in larger social networks. As Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore observe: “Many UN staff and field personnel have varied careers and move back and forth between UN appointments, jobs within their own governments at home, and positions in the private sector, universities, and NGOs.” Work by sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of organizational behavior indicates that such backgrounds are important in explaining flows of information and individual behavior. They note, “Good network analysis and good ethnographic work on the UN would contribute greatly to our understanding of its behavior.”²⁹ While privacy legislation applying to personnel files is an obstacle to obtaining relevant data, a pertinent research task would be to track career movements and to explore whether exposure to the culture of an international secretariat, for instance, is an asset in career development in government or NGO service, and vice versa. The use of knowledge brokers has been on the rise in the last two decades in all sectors—by business executives and health professionals, by government ministers and UN policymakers. Knowledge brokers are “people whose job it is to move knowledge around and create connections between researchers and their various audiences.”³⁰ More specifically, they facilitate the transfer of knowledge between policy or academic researchers and practitioners, often moving back and forth between social spaces. They do more than merely “bridge the gap” between research and practice. This metaphor suggests that they merely serve up analysis when in reality they are often in the kitchen helping to negotiate what to cook and how and for which consumer. Such “insider-outsiders” face a challenge because their position inherently entails tensions. Systematic interactions with UN staff create opportunities for these actors to inform and shape policy; and understanding UN constraints can also help outside institutions and individuals shape their own policy work more effectively. Brokers need to be close enough to policy makers to understand in real time their requirements within a given policy process, but distant enough from the policy process to maintain analytical legitimacy and independence. Unlike advice from many “hired-gun” consultants, effective knowledge brokers are not there to tell the UN—to paraphrase the Brahimi Report—what it wants to hear, but what it needs to hear. Knowledge brokering, in any field, is multidimensional.³¹ In addition to producing knowledge through in-house research, knowledge brokers are responsible for moving knowledge across different spaces, from the academy

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106  “”  and NGOs to governments and UN secretariats. This often requires identifying and curating research products that might be useful to bring into UN policy discussions and facilitate the transfer of what brokers understand to be necessary knowledge for policy makers to effectively address specific problems. The Third UN’s knowledge brokers are considerable and variable—in numbers, quality, and location. There are several organizations in the proximity of the Second UN’s headquarters in New York City that figure prominently in helping the leadership of the Second UN think and facilitating intellectual interactions between its members and the government representatives of the First UN. Among those institutional brokers are the International Peace Institute (IPI), the International Crisis Group (ICG or Crisis Group), the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF) at the Social Science Research Council, the Security Council Report (SCR), the Center for International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, and the Washington-based Stimson Center. The UN’s specialized agencies can list similar examples in specific fields, for example, the US-based Guttmacher Institute’s work with UNFPA on women’s public health. The Second UN at the UN Office in Geneva (UNOG) is in close to a similar group of actors, from the Geneva Centre of Security Policy (GCRP), to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF), and the Small Arms Survey. These and others have helped shape thinking within the Palais des Nations as well as in New York. These institutions perform a broad range of key functions that add to the UN’s ability to think, although not all perform all of the functions summarized in Box 4.1, nor do all perform them equally well. The cases analyzed in Chapter 2 covered the advancement of major international norms and knowledge by large coalitions of international non-governmental organizations. These INGOs are organizations whose specific efforts focus on knowledge production, curation, and translation. Some also participate in the UN’s knowledge economy as active producers of policy research reports and purveyors of evidence-based policy recommendations. Our emphasis is on organizations that offer real-time analytical support to secretariat staff, or as UNU’s Adam Day calls it, “live support.” The International Crisis Group is a significant knowledge producer for the UN; it was founded in 1995 by a group of statesmen led by retired US diplomat Morton Abramowitz, former UNDP administrator Mark Malloch-Brown, and former US senator George Mitchell in the aftermath of the tragedies in

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Box 4.1 The functions of knowledge brokers Knowledge production Identification and curation of knowledge Knowledge translation Facilitation of knowledge transfer Convening around shared analysis Capacity building for learning and analysis Coordination and policy alignment Advocacy

Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Its objective was and remains to “serve as the world’s eyes and ears for impending conflicts.”³² The Crisis Group maintains seasoned researchers in the field worldwide who conduct intensive field-based research and produce policy reports with recommendations to governments, the UN, other multilateral institutions, and civil society. Its reports are the goto policy research for stakeholders working on conflict management or trying to understand country and regional dynamics across all three UNs, including even those scholars who have less access to the front-lines. While focused since its founding in 1989 on such issues as space security and global political demography, the Stimson Center became a leader in the 2000s on how best to protect civilians in armed conflicts. Its policy research on the protection of civilians (PoC) was instrumental in producing guidance for UN peace operations as the numbers of UN peace interventions were exploding, and as fighters in new wars increasingly targeted civilian populations. Given the extent of its work on protection issues in UN operations, it was unsurprising that the head of Stimson’s PoC project at the time, Victoria Holt, was appointed US assistant secretary of state for international organizations— the branch of the US State Department that follows UN Security Council affairs—during the Barrack Obama administration. Security Council Report (SCR) helps international diplomats in New York and in their foreign ministries at home, understand how policy is made during the secretive deliberations of the UN’s security body. The SCR’s What’s in Blue series sheds light on the inner workings of Security Council debates. These reports are widely read, and it is not unusual to see them recycled directly into diplomatic mission reports sent back to capitals.

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108  “”  The Second UN has internal think tanks and policy units that serve knowledge production and brokerage functions. For example, the Policy and Mediation Division (PMD) within DPPA and the Department of Policy, Education, and Training (DPET) in the Department of Peace Operations (DPO, since 2019) are the repository of lessons learned and guidance for the UN Secretariat on various political processes and peace interventions; they are, perhaps more importantly, a key entry point for external research and expertise. The Geneva-based UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) was the first of a handful of internal United Nations think tanks; the core fourteen research entities of the UN University (UNU), together with its New York-based Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), are now collectively the largest. While the staffs of these units have somewhat more autonomy than most international civil servants, UNRISD and UNU remain part of the Second UN. Their research agendas are subject to subtle and not-so-subtle financial pressures as well as requirements for the geographical distribution of posts. However, they often provide a convenient backdoor channel for external academic and analytical expertise. In addition to producing, identifying, and curating research, two key functions of knowledge brokers are the twin processes of translating and convening. These often go hand in hand with mobilizing evidence. Academic research often needs to be “translated” for policy makers in order to effectively inform practice. Practitioners are not unable to read—although some often do too little by claiming that they have no time. Rather, too often academics fail to write clearly and succinctly so that practitioners can quickly grasp the proverbial bottom line, “so what?” Cornelio Sommaruga, the former president of the ICRC and member of several expert groups, expressed his impatience with scholarly jargon and abstractions: “Academics have also to understand that l’art pour l’art [art for art’s sake] may be of interest for them but not necessarily for governments and for organizations. . . . We need texts with sex appeal.”³³ At the same time, his plea is not a call to write in the stilted, anodyne, UN-ese style that so often characterizes documents. Richard Gowan, who for six years wrote a column on multilateralism for the World Politics Review, suggests that international institutions themselves “churn out unreadable prose.” In fact, Gowan is convinced that “The U.N. and bodies like the World Bank were set up after World War II precisely to make international affairs a little less interesting than they had been in the early 20th century.”³⁴ He counsels fellow commentators to keep their analyses short, and to “write like human beings” rather than in the deadly institutional prose of the First and Second UN that they seek to influence. Ultimately, “the experts

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who adopt the language of the officials they cover mostly end up affirming what those officials want to hear.” We could not agree more. Moreover, good research does not have to be long to be good. Good writing is good writing. It is also jargon free. A contemporary example of an academic paper, based on sound evidence and rigorous field work yet capturing the complex history of a conflict in just 14 pages, was written by eight historians and anthropologists—not usually reputed for brevity. “One Hippopotamus and Eight Blind Analysts: A Multivocal Analysis of the 2012 Political Crisis in the Divided Republic of Mali”³⁵ illustrates how researchers and think tanks do not have to sacrifice complexity to inform policy makers. Shortcuts—like ignoring or shortchanging the historical antecedents of current events— often explain bad policy decisions. An effective broker translates the nuance and complexity necessary in academic scholarship to the need for brevity and precision in policy work, especially given its fast-paced nature with immediate demands. Evidence-based policymaking should not compromise on the quality and rigor of research. The process of translation has two elements. First, it requires taking complex ideas and jargon and making them readable, digestible, and operationally relevant for practitioners. Such “translations” are often done through research digests and literature reviews, expert briefings and convenings, and policy notes. Second, translation requires reframing ideas in research papers and academic books and articles into actionable recommendations. It is often said that scholars are good at telling practitioners what is broken but terrible at helping them think about how to fix it and what would work better. The translation function of the knowledge broker is critical in effectively bridging basic research and practice. Some observers have argued that successful brokerage, in fact, produces a new type of knowledge. “Brokered knowledge” produces “more robust, more usable; knowledge that ‘serves locally’ at a given time; knowledge that has been de- and re-assembled.”³⁶ Thus, knowledge brokers can effectively become the midwives of new knowledge. The ability to bring actors together and facilitate conversations that are otherwise difficult to have in more formal settings is another crucial brokerage function. Too often, cynics dismiss UN gatherings as empty talk shops. Yet, ideas are precursors for action. “It is useful to have words, even if they are not followed by deeds,” according to Stéphane Hessel—a concentration camp survivor, member of the resistance, one of the first UN junior staff and later UNDP deputy administrator as well as French ambassador to the UN in New York and Geneva. His observation is worth citing in some depth. “There is a tendency . . . to say that it is better not to have words if you don’t

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110  “”  have deeds. . . . People who are not capable of having their words followed by deeds, should they therefore shut up? I would say the opposite. I would say that words carrying ideas have a long-lasting effect. If it had not been for people like Socrates or Hegel, we would not have the kind of view of the possible future of humanity that we do have.”³⁷ Convening UN policy makers around a shared analysis is thus critical to making research and external ideas accessible. It also contributes to coordination and policy alignment. Everyone agrees with the need to transcend UN bureaucratic silos, but it remains as hard as ever, despite numerous so-called reforms to bring the system together. Effective convening cannot be done by just any organization. Personal relationships matter in both translation and convening, as does the reputation of being a so-called honest broker. Some, like CPPF and IPI are well positioned because of their historic role as insideroutsiders and of facilitating conversations that are often difficult to have on UN real estate. Moreover, both have a system-wide view of policy processes, challenges, and needs across the UN. As IPI’s Adam Lupel notes, the ability to see across the system helps provide “innovative policy responses that otherwise get bogged down in bureaucratic turf battles.”³⁸ What works in effective knowledge brokering around the UN? Effective brokers target relevant audiences. They know whom they are talking to and helping to inform, including the policy makers’ absorptive capacity for new information at any moment. Part of this task is understanding timing and knowing precisely the itinerary of a policy process. Is the activity aimed to help inform a major decision, to review a current mandate, or to develop new strategy? Has the decision already been made and now is the time to help think through its implementation? Answering such questions requires regular contact with policy makers; many of the think tanks and knowledge brokers around the UN maintain active relationships with both the First and Second United Nations. Physical proximity matters, which is one reason why we focus on the organizations near New York headquarters. Having good research and evidence available, and access to policy makers, however important, are insufficient ingredients to help inform UN decision-making. It is critical to link an activity—whether a policy paper or an expert convening—to an active policy process at the UN; otherwise, it may be an interesting read or discussion but will be of little use. This also means ensuring proper buy-in. Individuals in the First UN or the Second UN must want an input, or appreciate the value in new evidence. In short, there should be a felt need and willingness to consider new ideas. Despite widespread stereotypes to the contrary, there are many research-minded consumers among government and UN officials.

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That said, there is a reason for the proverb about leading a horse to water and the inability to force it to drink. There are limits to the impact of research on UN policy, which is why impact is often difficult to measure. There is much that goes into making UN policy sausages that is beyond the reach of mere mortals; ideas and knowledge are but one ingredient. As Karen Bogenschneider and Thomas Corbett remind us, “Science will never fully replace values and power in the development of policy or in the ways that public matters are managed. The role of research in shaping policy debates and informing public decisions seldom matches the level that its importance warrants. . . . Still, science can play a much bigger role than it does now.”³⁹

Three Not-so Blind Mice: Two Outsider-Insiders and One Insider-Outsider The terrain of idea-mongering around the UN on issues of global concern is congested. As noted, there are dozens of institutions in the Third UN currently working on concerns of the First and the Second United Nations. The activities of two outsider-insiders (IPI and CPPF-SSRC) and one insider-outsider (UNU-CPR) illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the knowledgeproduction and brokerage functions in the interactive space in which these three members of the Third UN interact. In working to advance thinking and inform international public policy at UN headquarters and the field, they enjoy privileged access to the First UN and the Second UN—based on past performance and their staffs’ personal credibility with international civil servants and governmental representatives. The oldest and largest of the New York-based think tanks working near First Avenue in New York City is the International Peace Institute (IPI), which was founded as the International Peace Academy (IPA) in 1970 by a group of prominent individuals, including its first president, the former UN military adviser and retired Indian major-general Indar Jit Rikhye. Its initial purpose was to train military officers and diplomats for UN peacekeeping.⁴⁰ After the Cold War and the UN began its own training through the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and other parts of the system, IPA focused more on political analysis. In 2005, IPA began hosting annual ministerial dinners on the Middle East during the General Assembly’s high-level week; it also enlarged its think tank capacity, which had been expanding over the previous two decades. In 2008, IPA became the International Peace Institute to reflect its identity beyond

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112  “”  training and capacity building to encompass a broader range of activities aimed at “managing risk and building resilience to promote peace, security, and sustainable development.”⁴¹ In the area of peace and security, IPI’s Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations focuses on supporting and improving policies, including, for instance, research on UN reform and the African Union–UN partnership.⁴² Its primary emphasis is policy research and publications along with public events and closed-door, strategic discussions that bring together all three UNs in both public and non-public formats. There are few platforms that bring together mid-level diplomats from government missions, UN Secretariat staff, researchers, and civil society representatives to discuss pressing issues. IPI’s public events also serve a networking function across the three UNs, allowing informal exchanges that are otherwise difficult to have in the official and bureaucratic environment at headquarters. At the other end of the visibility (and budget) spectrum is the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum. Founded in 2000 as a program of the SSRC and emerging from a recommendation in the Brahimi Report, CPPF provides UN decision-makers timely and discrete access to external expertise. CPPF’s small and flexible team works with a diverse and global network of leading scholars, experts, and practitioners outside the UN system, with an emphasis on researchers and research institutions located in regions and countries in which the UN is engaged. If IPI is a think tank, CPPF describes itself as the UN’s “think bridge,”⁴³ providing access to context-based knowledge at key moments during policy processes. Its links with the academy and a range of research communities worldwide led the UN Secretariat to ask CPPF to host an “academic network” on peace, security, and the United Nations. The SSRC launched the Academic Network in 2018 to bring scholarly research and debates into more UN conversations. As important as the external analytical inputs are, a key dimension of CPPF’s bridging function is as an “honest-broker,” which helps augment internal policy coherence across the Second UN’s programs and divisions around shared analyses. While IPI convenes meetings across all three UNs and provides some public visibility, CPPF brings together the Second UN and the Third UN in smaller, more discrete, and off-the-record settings. Today, CPPF’s best-known products are well-curated, high-level expert meetings, often “under the radar” and under the Chatham House rule—participants are free to use any information but can divulge neither the identity nor affiliation of the speaker. This intimate format, away from UN offices and daily firefighting, opens a space for UN officials to learn and reflect with external experts. Such inputs are used by UN officials to deepen their

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understanding of the histories, political economies, and societies in countries and regions in which they work; look to past operations for lessons learned; think creatively and out loud about what can be done to prevent or respond to a crisis; and receive reality checks on policy directions. Perhaps most importantly, UN staff can air bureaucratic differences without worrying that they will offend or embarrass powerful member states. The location of CPPF outside the Second UN allows it to ensure that relevant stakeholders across the system are represented; it is not always guaranteed that if one part of the UN is convening that another side of in-house differences will either be invited, or participate if invited. CPPF’s engagement with the First UN is low-key and strategic; its outputs help member states, especially those on the Security Council or running for membership, deepen their own analytical capacities. In one example of CPPF’s bespoke and flexible approach, in 2008 CPPF convened an expert brainstorming session on Guinea Bissau at the request of the country-specific configuration chair, then Brazilian ambassador Maria Viotti, who also wanted the experts to brief the ambassadors of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) following the internal brainstorming for UN decision-makers.⁴⁴ It was a first for the PBC, and has been replicated since, including at the height of the 2014 crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR). At that time, experts at the informal CPPF brainstorming recommended the release of PBF rapid financing to pay civil servants’ salaries to avoid the collapse of the nascent transitional government. President Samba Panza’s speech to mark her first 100 days in office referenced the implementation of this recommendation. An internal UN review noted the utility of the policy alignment around key areas that resulted from an iterative process of early substantive exchanges between UN staff and external experts. The UNU-CPR relocated from the UNU’s base in Tokyo to New York in 2018 to enable it to contribute more effectively to strategic policy debates between all three UNs at headquarters. The CPR is a UN internal think tank. Through collaborative research and education, dissemination, and advisory services, the broader UNU’s mandate is to help resolve pressing global problems. The UNU established the CPR to move beyond the constraints of being part of the Second UN, to approach functioning as a UN think tank. It should be no surprise that former Canadian diplomat David Malone, who built up IPA’s think-tank capacity while leading that organization between 1998 and 2004, later constructed the CPR as UNU’s rector. The comparative advantage of CPR as an inside-outsider brings its own challenges and limitations, despite having “guaranteed academic independence

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114  “”  under the United Nations University’s Charter.”⁴⁵ However, its internal status positions CPR to exert influence, especially with its location as part of the UN Secretariat, to deepen the UN’s own capacity for learning and analysis. The CPR can thus take on some of the longer-term, strategic policy research tasks that are beyond the scope of the Secretariat’s resource-stretched personnel. In addition to producing its own policy research, CPR also serves as a knowledge broker like IPI. In this case, CPR brokers conversations largely across the First and Second UNs by using its position of insider-outsider located in the Second UN. A relative newcomer to the list of New York-based think tanks, the CPR is staffed with seasoned UN policy professionals with experience working in UN operations at headquarters and in the field. In short, the IPI convenes all three UNs across large, visible, and often public events and issues public reports. The CPPF bridges the analytic gap between the Third and Second UNs through discrete, off-the-record expert meetings and largely confidential commissioned analyses. The CPR-UNU is an intermediary on strategic issues between the First UN and the Second UN. While to the casual observer these organizations may appear to undertake comparable tasks, they demonstrate how the family of knowledge brokers around the UN serve complementary and necessary functions. Collectively and in different ways, they all help the UN think.

The Future and the Dark Side of Knowledge-Brokering The Second UN is a knowledge consumer, producer, and disseminator. UN practitioners are not simply passive recipients of knowledge. They mobilize evidence to inform not only policy direction and strategic thinking and planning but also international norm-setting; they often participate in the co-production of knowledge and experimentation with think tanks and scholars. There is growing recognition across all three United Nations of the need to strengthen the evidence base of international policy, and to inject new ideas, particularly on “what works.” Of particular importance are UN responses to growing numbers of complex challenges and to the variable geometries of armed conflicts and global crises. The politics of the UN’s knowledge economy—what is produced, consumed, transferred, and valued, and how member states and staff are informed and by whom—reflects the tensions and competition between different types and sources of knowledge. Output is important not only for UN policymaking but also for international norm development and dissemination. Whose

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knowledge is most valued, and why? The push for evidence-based policymaking in recent years has raised the political stakes of who exactly within the Third UN gets to help the First UN and the Second UN think. A testament to that reality is the outcry in some quarters about the “influence” of the alternative voices from emerging powers on UN thinking.⁴⁶ We revisit these criticisms in the next chapter. That knowledge and power are linked is not new. The bulk of scholarship about the United Nations and the main substantive issues on the world organization’s agenda emanates from universities, specialist research institutes, and learned societies in North America and Western Europe.⁴⁷ During World War II, the notion that the UN would be a major instrument of Washington’s foreign policy attracted support from US foundations. For example, before, during, and after the world conflict, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace actively followed and promoted research on the new organization by scholars and by officials from the League of Nations. A recent history argues that the post-war expansion of multilateralism was possible because of the lessons drawn from the trial-and-error experience of previous decades,⁴⁸ which recalled the sound bite from Lord Robert Cecil at the League of Nations’ last session in April 1946: “The League is dead, long live the United Nations.”⁴⁹ Such private support has continued in fits and starts since, including the $1 billion gift from the business leader Ted Turner in 1997 to create the UN Foundation and Better World Fund. Two professional associations, the Society for International Development (founded in 1967) and the Academic Council on the United Nations System (founded in 1987), emerged as part of the policy research networks focused on the problems and prospects of the UN and multilateralism more generally. As Hans N. Weiler reminds us, “Just as power, knowledge must have a claim to credibility, and recognition of which it must be ‘worthy.’” This “reciprocal legitimation” between power and knowledge is clear with the “ever-increasing degree to which political decisions are justified by reference to a particular body of knowledge—from environmental policies to the location of new industries and from the redistribution of wealth to decisions on the investment of public funds.”⁵⁰ Also, not all knowledge is produced with the same goals in mind. Research agendas and advocacy are often intertwined—sometimes driven by the preferences of staff or of funders. The impact can be beneficial or noxious. Advocacy without knowledge or evidence amounts to ideology. This reality is especially essential in today’s “post-fact” era of toxic dis- and misinformation. In thinking about her involvement in the Third UN prior to

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116  “”  assuming the helm at UNIFEM, Noeleen Heyzer recalled some of the challenges and rewards of pushing out the envelope on women’s rights: I wanted to bring academic rigor to the activism that was developing from the ground. At one stage, there was a big divide between research and activism, and I wanted to bridge that gap. I felt that it was important to have very solid analysis to influence activism. Activism without knowledge and without analysis can go astray. But at the same time, research without the kind of activism and commitment that I saw on the ground could not bring about the transformation needed to improve the lives of people marginalized by development.⁵¹

The disparities in approaches toward research as the basis for advocacy can be illustrated by comparing two groups working on protecting human rights. At one end of the spectrum are such advocacy NGOs as the large and wellendowed Human Rights Watch, which in recent years has produced Crisis Group-like research reports for rights-based advocacy. At the other end is the Washington, DC-based Enough Project, which was established initially in 2007 within the Crisis Group by former Clinton administration officials John Pendergast and Gayle Smith with the aim of ending genocide. The Enough Project, which made its name initially by launching the international “Save Darfur” campaign, quickly spun off from the Crisis Group as their methodologies were fundamentally incompatible. In contrast to the Crisis Group’s practice of “research-based advocacy”—the use of rigorous field research to hone targeted policy recommendations—the Enough Project instead championed “advocacy-driven research,” a practice that has not gone without criticism.⁵² The prominent African intellectual Mahmoud Mamdani and others judged the Enough Project’s Darfur advocacy to be misdirected and counter-productive. In a New York Times interview about his book on the Save Darfur movement, Mamdani distinguished his analysis as “a brief against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.”⁵³ The line between advocating and informing can be thin, but it exists. This gray area raises challenges because think tanks and knowledge brokers around the UN have an ethical responsibility to be particularly attuned to the politics and hierarchies of knowledge, and also to their own positions in the knowledge hierarchy. Those think tanks that produce policy research are obliged to engage current debates across academic research communities about the relations between researchers and the researched, existing power

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differentials, the ethics of representation, and researcher “positionality”—the location of the researcher in relation to the social and political context of the objects and subjects studied. These discussions also include ethical considerations of reciprocity, equity, and collaboration, especially concerning the role of research brokers, assistants, and fixers, and input of the researched into the research process, including access to and co-ownership of findings. Those who perform a brokerage function cannot simply be passive conduits of knowledge, nor can they ignore their own role in curating the knowledge that they transfer to decision-makers. They have a moral and practical obligation to diversify their networks of experts and go beyond the “usual suspects” in elite universities. This does not mean blindly privileging “local” perspectives and approaches as some have argued, but rather genuinely diversifying perspectives. A key challenge for brokers is how to make locally produced or situational research relevant to the UN globally, while bearing in mind that locally produced research can be as biased and subjective as any other. Hierarchies of knowledge are found in all contexts across the North and the Global South. It is particularly challenging when evidence does not support actual or emerging UN norms—for example, the principle of inclusivity in peace agreements is a desirable goal but not always practical or effective when negotiating peace settlements in some contexts. Self-reflection is as essential to the credibility of the Third UN as it is to social research—that is, the process of continually questioning the research process, and of examining and consciously acknowledging the assumptions and preconceptions that the researchers (or their funders) bring to any study. Knowledge brokers work at the edges of the academy and of policy arenas. They should therefore constantly analyze their practices, their brokering devices, and the benefits and drawbacks of their “‘double peripherality,’ that is, from the fact that they are partially connected to the two worlds they bridge.”⁵⁴ The macro trends for funding research make reflection problematic. Increasingly, philanthropic foundations no longer fund basic research. Member states that have been generous donors of applied research are tightening their belts and are under pressure from their own institutions and taxpayers to justify investments in research. There is a growing trend to call upon consultants and research-on-demand. This “consultification” of research has dire repercussions on research design and practice. Research contractors compete with academic institutions for dwindling research funding. Donordriven research and high-impact philanthropy are setting agendas and demanding quick results that are often incompatible with the pace and process

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118  “”  of scientific inquiry. For instance, the UK government’s Research in Excellence Framework (REF), which evaluates the “impact” of publicly-funded research to ensure accountability to taxpayers, has been widely criticized for encouraging mediocrity in university research by focusing on the short-term impact favored by parliamentarians while discouraging research and analyses with longer-term potential. Fundamental changes are facing all knowledge institutions. Funding challenges, together with the information revolution, mean that research institutions need to change how they do business. If research institutions and think tanks are forced to abandon multi-year research and respond to narrower, short-term donor requirements, what will happen to longer-term perspectives and to independence, and to the relationship between evidence and policy? Where will funding come from to support a variety of research, especially if evidence runs contrary to donor wishes and perspectives? One cannot solve problems if they cannot be studied honestly. The Third UN will need to create a demand for research from within the First and the Second UNs and make a persuasive case to funders for the value of evidence and basic research. The Third UN, and in particular its think tanks and knowledge brokers, are essential; they serve not only as bridges between knowledge and policy, but increasingly between policy makers and their publics. A crucial contribution by the Third UN will continue to be new ideas and innovative policies and programs; but the audiences, products, and means to communicate have changed. All three UNs have to be faster, smarter, subtler, and more mobile. The nature of funding shapes institutions, which are obliged to rebalance their budgets and priorities to better link policy research and advocacy with their publics, and to produce and communicate ideas with greater impact. The Third UN will need to balance the rigor and demands of scientific research with the demand for shorter products and formats for communicating research and evidence. IGOs have not done well in the knowledge–policy–politics nexus. If there is one institution that should be more effective in communicating about the world’s problems and possible solutions, it is the United Nations. The First and Second UNs have been more silent than they should have been in the COVID-19 crisis, which has accentuated and magnified the gap in their credibility. The UN system requires more sophisticated strategic communications to push back against the nationalist-populist naysayers about the value— indeed, the necessity—of multilateralism.⁵⁵ Being a reliable and credible source of information is a necessity.

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Conclusion The functions of think tanks and particularly knowledge brokers in the Third UN merit more scrutiny and analysis than they have received to date. They are essential to the First UN and the Second UN, not only to help deepen understanding of complex problems but also to help communicate with publics. Despite the rhetoric and good will for evidence-based policymaking, the world body has a poor track record of establishing knowledge networks. Normative change reflects existing power relations. In the United Nations, international norms have largely reflected Western liberal ideas and been funded largely by Western governments and philanthropies. Knowledge institutions around the UN are themselves part of the contested terrain of evidence, which reflect global disparities in the production of and access to knowledge. One promising area is the increased role of regional organizations with their own “Third AU,” “Third ASEAN,” and “Third OAS.” They may help to correct some of the power imbalances.⁵⁶ Indeed, as Hans N. Weiler notes, “this paradigmatic hegemony of knowledge norms, which has its origins in Western societies and their scientific institutions, has . . . not gone unchallenged.”⁵⁷ We turn to these challenges.

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5 Alternative Voices Challengers of the Normative Postwar Order

Chapter 5 details the burgeoning inputs into UN deliberations from “Alternative Voices”; the sub-title indicates the sources, the growing number of “Challengers of the Normative Postwar Order.” Two distinct sets of “voices” appear here: The first emanates from within emerging powers, particularly China; they were formerly absent or barely audible in UN conversations. The second comes from the for-profit sector, particularly new media and technology, which simultaneously raises challenges for global governance and the work of all three United Nations. The information revolution and emerging powers with geopolitical realignments are not disconnected. In this chapter, we explore the anxieties circumscribing current debates before analyzing the impact of two rising non-western powers on UN thinking, and the effect of the geopolitics of technology.

Multilateral Anxieties and the Postwar International Order Politicians, pundits, professors, and people on the street have remarked that multilateralism is in crisis, and that while it may not yet have collapsed, the rules-based international order is increasingly untethered. In addition to assaults from the new nationalists and populists, much of the Global South, in particular emerging powers, have benefitted from the UN system but view postwar multilateral organizations as relics of an order made by and for the West. The host of multilateral institutions that emerged immediately after World War II, or in response to discrete problems in the postwar period, therefore are struggling. At the same time, we are enduring a crisis of liberalism. The postwar order was borne of liberal values; but it has produced not only benefits but also deep structural inequalities both within and among states. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic made an already uncertain world more disordered.

The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0006

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What is unclear is whether we are witnessing a collapse of the liberal international order or international order itself. Have we lost faith in collective action or just in existing institutions? The noise from aggrieved voices on many streets has forced all three United Nations not only to rethink received wisdom but also to consider alternative ideas, particularly about inequality and participation. Among the considerations circumscribing the way that challengers are challenging the United Nations are the following realities: • First, we can debate whether the United States and the West are declining, absolutely or relatively, but agree that the post-Cold War unipolar moment was short-lived.¹ At a minimum, what George Magnus has described as the “uprising” conveys that we are in the midst of a period of extraordinary change in the organization and structure of the international system.² We can discard the labels—including multipolar, apolar, G-zero, and the list goes on—but nonetheless Amitav Acharya’s “multiplex cinema” remains an apt image with a choice of plots (ideas), directors (power), and action (leadership) available to observers under one roof.³ We cannot ignore the impact of emerging powers in global governance, and how all three UNs approach the organization’s business in international peace and security, human rights, humanitarian action, and sustainable development. • Second, generalizations about the Third UN or about new voices are problematic because every category is contested—including “Global South” or the “North” or the anachronistic “Third World.” Any conversation about new challengers is fraught, as Canadian political scientist Andrew Cooper observed: “No one acronym has the field to itself.”⁴ Much has been made of the appearance and virtual disappearance of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) as a bloc, but there are also a host of other abbreviations: BRIICS (BRICS plus Indonesia); BASIC (the BRICS minus Russia); IBSA (BRICS minus Russia and China); BRICSAM (BRICS plus Indonesia and Mexico); and MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey). And we should not forget the G-20 (South Africa, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the European Union),⁵ or the 3G Coalition that exists as part of an informal variable geometry to get the G-20 to better reflect nonmember views.⁶

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122  “”  • Third, the multiplicity of such structures lends weight to ongoing critiques of Western dominance in global governance. Deep alterations within the international system and the possibility of multiple orders have emerged, as well as challengers to the current normative mainstream. Of especial note have been debates about how to update the architecture of the global governance of security, finance, and information technology. Again, contestation has only increased following the global economic depression and the COVID-19 disasters. • Finally, part of the conversation concerns appropriate participation in the rule-setting processes of global governance, especially because many former “rule-takers” aspire to be “rule-makers.” To date, however, “emerging economies appear to have preferred the status quo and working within existing institutions created by Western states,” write David Held and Charles Roger. “Yet, as they have grown in power and seek to ensure that their needs and values are reflected at the global level, their assertiveness and dissatisfaction with existing institutions may rise.”⁷ Robert Wade, on the other hand, argues that “the standard narrative about an emerging new global political order shaped by ‘the rise of the South’ is misleading” and that “the primary responsibility for mobilizing cooperation around those global commons problems remains with the Western states, which continue to hold the commanding heights.”⁸ • In this period of flux, it is imperative to listen to the counter-hegemonic voices in UN ideational and normative debates. They take a variety of forms, from blocking normative proposals viewed as promoted by the West to altering existing norms and proposing new frameworks altogether. We live amidst profound normative changes; and the United Nations has become a major arena for the clash of ideas.

Alternative Voices on the Battleground of Ideas and in the Third UN Over the last two decades, emerging powers from the Global South, and members of the Third UN based there, have contributed to normative advances in the United Nations. Many directly challenge the Westernsponsored “liberal” approaches to peace, justice, and development that provided the original foundations for the UN system and the basis for normative and operational activities over much of the last three-quarters of a century. The eruption of alternative voices since the end of the Cold War helps

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attenuate a notorious and perceived shortcoming in the Third UN: the predominance of NGOs, media, philanthropies, civil society, and business from western industrialized countries. Elise Boulding, an academic and long-time Quaker peace activist with links to UNESCO and other UN bodies, long ago remarked: “It has been too often a one-way traffic of ideas from the West to those ‘backward’ countries of the South, rather than a dialogue with a mutual listening and learning as a result.”⁹ Developing countries have joined forces at different stages throughout history—including through the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77 (G-77)—to increase the decibel levels of their voices within the international arena. In fact, the UN has at various parts of its history been the incubator of counter-hegemonic ideas, as in the 1970s when UNCTAD served as what enthusiasts then called “the Third World’s secretariat.” This counterhegemonic role has waxed and waned. Over the past two decades, a new twist has been added, the increased visibility and geo-political weight of emerging or rising powers in what is now usually referred to as the “Global South.” Whether that category itself makes sense with the inclusion of the emerging powers is contested. This reality not only reflects their growing role as providers of investment and development cooperation, of peacekeepers and intellectuals, but also their criticism of the existing architecture and standard operating procedures of global governance. Both individually and through new alignments such as the BRICS, emerging powers are engaging more directly in key normative debates about how accelerated development and poverty alleviation, as well as how international interventions could and should be conducted, and how major UN organizations could and should contribute. Research shows the extent to which Southern agency has been a source of global norms, not merely of late¹⁰ but even before rapid decolonization at the time of the UN’s founding in 1945.¹¹ To what extent the phenomenon of emerging powers reinforces the North–South divide or increases the diversity of positions, ideas, and alignments within the international system, however, remains very much open to debate.¹² Often working in tandem with their governments, the range of actors depicted in Chapters 2–4 are increasingly visible and influential outside the West. Alternative voices from “the Rest” frequently challenge the predominance of the dominant liberal approaches to peace and development.¹³ We are beginning to see the seeds of deep normative shifts. What kind of new world order and what kind of multilateralism will emerge from this normative competition? What values and approaches will take priority? The replies to

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124  “”  such questions will in part be determined by who is setting the rules, by who specifically will contribute new ideas to help shape those new rules. Will earlier champions like the United States or the like-minded Nordics and the EU attempt to preserve the current multilateral system and its normative underpinnings? Or will they try to reinvent it? Alternatively, will rising powers shape the UN in their image? Will new types of multilateralisms help encourage more open societies, or shut them down? How will global governance change after COVID-19? Speculations about possible responses underscore the need for a more granular analysis of the Third United Nations. Over the past three decades, international peacebuilding (including peace operations across the spectrum, with relevant post-conflict and sustainable development activities) has been entrenched in the rules-based international order established in the aftermath of World War II. This approach has become the primary response to violent conflict, and a core function of many IGOs, INGOs, and states that are central to world order. While the UN has often been the most visible peacebuilder, emerging powers are increasingly playing crucial roles. As Charles Call and Cedric de Coning note, “The failure of peacebuilding to deliver sustained peace has combined with a push from rising powers against Western dominance, to produce a turn to the Global South as a source for more legitimate and effective responses to mass organized violence in the world.”¹⁴ It has also led to various UN reviews of the organization’s performance—the 2015 HIPPO and AGE reports, for example—to underline the need for comprehensively “sustaining” peace rather than “peacebuilding.” Many think tanks, NGOs, and academics, especially in developing countries, have criticized the dominant “models” as insufficient and ineffective as well as serving elite interests and not those of impoverished and conflict-prone populations. The expanded role of NGOs, corporations, academics, and think tanks based in emerging powers contributes to re-shaping the twentyfirst century’s rules of the game. Visible and essential alternative voices arose in Brazil, a member of the rising power club that has sought to position itself as a norm entrepreneur especially since the early 2000s, when it scaled up its role in UN peace operations, specifically in Haiti¹⁵ and in Lusophone Africa.¹⁶ Although Brazil has participated in peacekeeping since the UN Emergency Force (UNEF I) in 1956, its role was modest until the end of the twentieth century.¹⁷ It increased deployments in Africa and Central America in the 1990s, but a substantial increase occurred in 2004 with the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).¹⁸ Brazilian foreign policy during Luiz Inacio Lula da

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Silva’s two terms (2003–11) was driven by its expressed policy of more representative IGOs, which reflected not only its engagement in multilateral coalitions such as the BRICS and the IBSA but also in UN peace operations.¹⁹ Brazil became active in a range of peacebuilding activities, focusing on technical cooperation with other Lusophone countries (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and East Timor) and on development projects in Haiti through MINUSTAH. During the thirteen years of MINUSTAH’s deployment, Brazil contributed over 37,000 uniformed personnel²⁰ and held the position of the Force Commander. The country aimed to advance its regional and security interests by ensuring that most other peacekeepers were from South American countries. This was an opportunity to increase bilateral and multilateral cooperation across the region²¹ and raise Brazil’s visibility to strengthen its case, as India sought to do as well, for a permanent seat on the Security Council.²² In addition, Brazil—through its government megaphones and a demand for research from its think tanks and universities—used its operational visibility to actively help shape UN peacebuilding ideas and norms. Brazil’s two most important contributions to the peacebuilding debate were to define a “Brazilian way”²³ and to lead on debates about the use of force and military intervention—or what it called “Responsibility while Protecting” (RwP).²⁴ While Brazil assumed a leadership role in the PBC, especially for Guinea-Bissau, its peacekeepers developed infrastructure projects in Haiti (for example, by building roads). Brazilian NGOs such as Viva-Rio began operating in the country, focusing on development and humanitarian assistance after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The Brazilian government, supported by analyses from its own scholars and think tanks such as the Igarapé Institute, promoted a peacebuilding approach focused on development, which aimed to reflect the principles of solidarity, demand-driven cooperation, nonconditionality, non-interference, and national ownership.²⁵ Brazil’s contribution to UN normative debates was a direct challenge to calls for more muscular, militarized interventions to stop mass atrocities. The concept was introduced in the immediate aftermath of the UN-approved intervention in Libya that assassinated Muammar Qaddafi, which in turn prompted an outcry by China, Russia, and others that R2P had been coopted by NATO to justify regime change. Proponents of RwP argued that the concept modified rather than replaced the R2P norm approved by the 2005 UN World Summit; clarified how R2P could best be implemented; and strengthened the preventive dimensions of humanitarian protection.²⁶ While “R2P emphasizes the limits of state sovereignty” when states fail to protect

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126  “”  their populations, “RwP reimposes limits on the international community’s ability to override sovereignty in order to protect populations.”²⁷ The “Brazilian way” of peacebuilding was not without its critics. Some pointed out that Brazil interpreted the principle of “national” ownership of initiatives simply as host government agreement, rather than broader participation and support from the political opposition and civil society.²⁸ Despite substantial support for RwP and the “Brazilian way,” particularly in the Global South, Brazil’s advocacy for these ideas waned, reflecting the drawdown of MINUSTAH in 2017 and a change in Brazil’s leadership and priorities. The debate around balancing RwP and R2P remains, yet another indication of the global order in flux. Emerging actors are competing with established ones for influence and ideas around the UN as new geopolitical dynamics seek to define and redefine the rules of international action. That said, intellectual leadership does not always follow leadership in material contributions to the UN. India, for example, is one of the largest troop- and police-contributing countries to UN peacekeeping²⁹ and has consistently participated in UN peace operations since the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) in 1949.³⁰ During the Cold War, according to Alan Bullion and Frank Van Rooyen, India’s participation in UN peacekeeping was a way to show its solidarity with and commitment to the UN as well as the NAM and the G-77. During those early years, Indian scholars and India’s international civil servants at the UN played an outsized role in introducing new ideas on poverty eradication and development. With the end of the Cold War, India’s objectives shifted to seeking recognition and influence as a major power and leader in UN peace operations,³¹ while advocating for a permanent seat in a more representative Security Council. While its outsized role during the development decades of the 1960s and 1970s included a contribution to UN economic ideas, some analysts today point to India’s inability to translate its leadership in UN peace operations into normative change.³² Despite being a reliable peacekeeper, India has not contributed new thinking to the debates around the terms of when UN peacekeepers can and should use force—debates that have defined the organization since its inception. Richard Gowan adds that India’s failure to provide new ideas on the use of force has left the country marginalized at major debates on the issue and opened the door to other alternative voices.³³ The emergence of China as an alternative voice to the dominant liberalism of the international order, starting with Deng Xiaoping’s announcement of China’s new “going out” policy in 2001, is a significant change in the world order.³⁴ This expansion into international markets was to help the Chinese

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economy better absorb sudden market shocks like the 1997 Asian financial crisis. This outward-looking economic policy was accompanied by a more internationalized and aggressive Chinese foreign policy, which was part of a broader change in its engagement with IGOs, from antagonism to “appreciating and sharing the working of common institutions of international society.”³⁵ Beijing has enjoyed its status as a P-5 member of the Security Council since 1971—Taiwan had occupied the Chinese seat since 1949—but China’s more recent rise has considerably broadened its multilateral engagements, with the UN in particular. The hostility of the US Trump administration toward the UN and international cooperation more generally unexpectedly opened a space for China to position itself as a defender of multilateralism. In the first decade of the millennium, this relative newcomer to international diplomacy was satisfied to play by the rules of the game. In the second decade, China began flexing its normative muscles. Not satisfied with what it perceives as the shortcomings of the dominant liberal peace model, it looks to reshape the rules, particularly the norms of collective action for security and sustainable development. China’s engagement with UN peacekeeping has been the most visible shift in policy, complemented by its growing acceptance of “peacebuilding” as a priority. Earlier, China had opposed many UN peacekeeping operations as violations of sovereignty and interference in domestic affairs by the West; it typically refused to participate in voting on resolutions.³⁶ Chinese engagement, however, has grown dramatically since its participation in the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor in 2000. Beijing switched from condemning peace operations to growing its participation in them.³⁷ In 2020, China was the largest troop contributor among the P-5, and tenth overall, and the second largest (after the United States) funder of peace operations.³⁸ China opened a Civilian Peacekeeping Police Training Center in Langfang, outside Beijing, in 2004,³⁹ and established a military peacekeeping training center in the Beijing suburb of Huairou in 2009. These centers provide predeployment training and serve as venues for international exchanges.⁴⁰ The Center in Langfang also offers a Master’s degree for police officers, and its faculty includes some of China’s leading scholars on UN peace operations. This shift reflects a growing appreciation in Chinese policy circles of the utility of multilateral peace operations for addressing insecurity, through peacekeeping and peacebuilding.⁴¹ Participation in peace operations serves as a conduit through which China can promote its reputation for good citizenship, leadership, and responsibility on the global stage.⁴² The earlier

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128  “”  policy of strict non-interference has given way to a subtler approach that recognizes peacebuilding both as a critical development priority and a key goal of Chinese engagement in Africa, where it stands as Africa’s second-highest trading partner, behind the United States but ahead of France and Britain. Its approach to peacebuilding has been characterized as “top-down,” privileging state institutions over local or community-level ones, which is consistent with the official emphasis on sovereignty and host country cooperation.⁴³ China continues to balk at “mission creep,” in which peacekeeping operations take on what it sees as traditional responsibilities of the state, and it categorically rejects democratization language in mandates.⁴⁴ However, it has dramatically increased its support for multilateral peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict situations over the past 20 years. For example, in 2013, it deployed combat troops for the first time in the UN’s enforcement mission in Mali, and played an important role in facilitating the peace process in South Sudan and Darfur, a shift from its typical low-profile diplomacy.⁴⁵ China’s engagement with UN peacekeeping sheds light on two key interrelated dimensions. First, although Beijing has contributed to missions with robust mandates and even sent an infantry battalion to South Sudan in 2015, it continues to support traditional peacekeeping principles (consent, impartiality, and non-use of force). Moreover, although it also endorsed the norm of R2P at the 2005 World Summit and that of the protection of civilians, it has vetoed (with Russia) resolutions about R2P in Syria and refused to endorse the Kigali Principles on the Protection of Civilians. Second, some scholars argue that Beijing’s opposition to interference in others’ domestic affairs became more elastic due to its growing economic interests and investments in Africa, the setting for most UN peace operations.⁴⁶ Others highlight additional considerations that shape China’s behavior in peace operations: the image of a responsible power, operational benefits, protection of national interests, and a One China policy.⁴⁷ Regardless of the underlying motivations, as Miwa Hirona and Marc Lanteigne note, China’s growing role in peace operations has reflected the belief that multilateralism can address strategic threats;⁴⁸ and that the UN is the most legitimate forum for international peace and security.⁴⁹ Beijing’s policy shift to a more visible role in the UN Security Council has been accompanied by a growing body of Chinese scholarship on peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Such Chinese scholars as Li Dongyan at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, Xue Lei of the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies, He Yin of the Chinese Peacekeeping Training Center, and Liu Tiewa of Beijing Foreign Studies University were among those tasked

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with helping Chinese policymakers better understand the United Nations; increasingly, Chinese scholars have sought to explore options that differ from Western liberal ideals.⁵⁰ One is the idea of “developmental peace,” which stands in contrast to the liberal peace, although they note that the concepts are complementary and not antagonistic. While the liberal peace begins with the assumption that stability must come first before development can advance, the developmental peace idea assumes that development is foundational and will lead to stability. The idea is evolving from China’s own experience of emerging from poverty through rapid economic growth, which reflects inadequate development as an underlying cause of armed conflict and political instability. Rather than focusing on liberal values of good governance, democratic institutions, free markets, and human rights, Beijing’s approach—shared by other states in the Global South—prioritizes economic and social development for conflict-affected states.⁵¹ This approach to peace operations emphasizes military logistical services and disaster prevention and reduction, which are complemented by civilian deployment for health, education, and economic development. What is emerging as a distinctive approach highlights China’s self-declared position as part of the developing world and focuses on the need for long-term plans, from infrastructure to economic development.⁵² As China has intensified its investments abroad from Asia to Latin America, especially its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), Western anxieties about the appeal of the “China model” of development and the so-called Beijing Consensus are acute. A key difference concerns Chinese trade and aid versus Western ODA.⁵³ Critics of the Washington consensus argue that development assistance, conditioned on governance reforms, has undercut home-grown economic activity,⁵⁴ and that the rapidly-growing economies of East and Southeast Asia have dramatically reduced poverty and improved living standards without significant external assistance. Moreover, many policy makers in the Global South interpret any emphasis on conditionality linked to Western aid as unnecessarily limiting economic and fiscal policy. Historically, it is the other permanent members of the Security Council who have showned normative heft and helped shape thinking at the United Nations through funding UN programs and research from the Third UN. Until recently, Chinese officials and analysts have had little normative influence. In fact, the first time that Chinese scholars interacted substantively with UN Secretariat staff since China’s increased engagement in the UN was in 2012 at a small workshop organized by the Quaker UN Office and CPPF-SSRC in New York.

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130  “”  Moreover, the other P-5 members maintained political and normative influence by lobbying for key leadership positions. For example, the United States has long led political affairs in UN headquarters and the top post in the World Food Programme (WFP); France has laid unofficial claim to UN peacekeeping; and the United Kingdom and Russia have claimed senior spots in the UN Secretariat and elsewhere. Beijing has long complained about its lack of senior leadership positions and of Chinese inputs into UN agendas and ideas—what Li Dongyan calls a “discourse power deficit.”⁵⁵ Increasingly over the last decade, Chinese scholars, analysts, and diplomats have become more visible, regularly serving on high-level panels and responding to requests for inputs and insights into UN agendas. In recent years, China has been advocating for more posts at all levels in IGOs, including in the UN. Colum Lynch reported that since 2018, there are more Chinese nationals in internships at the UN than from any other country, and that China fielded three times as many overseas diplomatic postings in 2019 than the United States.⁵⁶ While it is difficult to measure how influential Third UN voices from China have been in debates about sustaining peace and the primacy of politics, the emerging normative consensus in UN reports about the need to link development and peace resonates well with thinking in China and across other rising powers. China’s operational and normative rise in the UN has created unease in the West about Beijing’s motivations and the international consequences.⁵⁷ Many in the West view the new activism as an expression of China’s international ambitions and a strategy that threatens the existing international order. Mathieu Duchâtel, Richard Gowan, and Manuel Rapnouil argue that China’s peacekeeping participation reflects China’s great power status and interest in protecting its economic interests abroad.⁵⁸ This anxiety is reflected in growing US–China trade and ideological wars and competition for influence, accompanied by Washington’s withdrawing from some IGOs and cutting funding to others. The election of a senior Chinese government official to head up the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in June 2019, which was followed a few months later by the appointment of a former Chinese diplomat as the UN Special Envoy to the Great Lakes of Africa, set off alarm bells in Western capitals. It led a former US diplomat to comment that the FAO election “ultimately just showed . . . how far American influence at the U.N. has fallen.”⁵⁹ As long-time UN observer Colum Lynch noted, “China’s race to lead the FAO provides a stark example of how it has been gradually chipping away at the United States’ dominant position at the U.N. and other international

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organizations, prompting fears among U.S. diplomats and lawmakers that it will use its new power to advance Chinese interests over international ones.”⁶⁰ Jonathan D. T. Ward argues that China seeks total dominance, not just a share of the pie, and a restoration of China’s stature.⁶¹ Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s comments on the 70th anniversary of the revolution did not reduce anxiety: “China would strive for a lead role in reshaping the post-cold war international order led by the United States, while vigorously protecting its expanding national interest and warding off foreign interference in its affairs.”⁶² Indeed, as Xu Lei noted, “China’s deeper involvement in UN peacekeeping operations will inevitably lead to comprehensive change in the UN conflict management system.”⁶³ Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi argue that the coronavirus pandemic is adding additional fuel to this competitive fire; it has the potential to accelerate the reshaping of the global order, as China takes advantage of Washington’s missteps and failure of leadership and emerges as the global leader.⁶⁴ It is hard to imagine a more dramatic illustration of a challenger to the postwar normative order. While some believe that China will successfully capitalize on Washington’s disastrous response to COVID-19, others argue that neither China nor the United States will “win” the blame game.⁶⁵ President Xi raised the bar at the 75th UN General Assembly in 2020 when he pledged that China would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060—a step that environmental activists called groundbreaking; and announced that China would contribute $50 million to the UN COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan on top of its earlier contributions, and $50 million to the China-FAO South-South Cooperation Trust Fund.⁶⁶ He also announced a five-year extension of the Peace and Development Trust Fund between the UN and China, and that China would create a UN Global Geospatial Knowledge and Innovation Center and an International Research Centre of Big Data to advance the 2030 agenda of the SDGs. President Trump’s sevenminute General Assembly speech made no such commitments and instead berated China over the Covid-19 pandemic. While China’s approach is still experimental, it is unsurprising that Beijing has shifted from norm follower to norm setter, and that Beijing expects its decision-making power to reflect its financial and military contributions. The clash of ideas, values, and approaches, with the UN as battleground, will undoubtedly grow with the increasing global influence of China and other emerging powers. The UN’s knowledge ecology should better reflect the official and private voices of the new thinking.

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The New Geo-politics of Technology In October 2017, President Xi’s government announced that Chinese citizens would be required to participate in a “Social Credit System” to be rolled out in 2020. This system was described in the Western media as an Orwellian attempt by an undemocratic government to measure and intimately control its 1.4 billion residents.⁶⁷ The US system of private credit bureaus does something similar using a secret, proprietary formula to determine someone’s ability to buy a house, afford a car, and obtain the kind of liquidity necessary for modern comforts.⁶⁸ These financial reputation systems are paired—and eventually may be formally linked—with private social media that contain dossiers on everything from users’ shampoo preferences to their political beliefs, sexual orientation, and friendships. To the degree such technologies should exist at all, these systems interact with nationality, sovereignty, caste, race, and class. Do they reify and harden categories, or do they make them more permeable? How might reputation systems based in or controlled by one country be used to exercise soft power on another? What are the possibilities or implications of a “dual power” system in which reputation management systems compete with the power of states? The growing ideological competition between Beijing and Washington is reflected in the race for dominance in the digital economy. This has ushered in an era of “techno-nationalism,”⁶⁹ in which security interests are inexorably linked with economic ones, and technological innovations have dual uses. It is no longer possible—if it ever was—to disaggregate security politics from trade and technology. Siloes—either conceptual or operational—are neither helpful for nor reflective of twenty-first century geo-politics. Business in general, and TNCs in particular, were once anathema in UN circles because of the perception, within the dominant ideologies and poplar rhetoric of the Global South and the Soviet bloc, of their exploitative nature. After the 1973 assassination of Chilean president Salvatore Allende, corporations were nowhere to be heard or seen in UN conversations and deliberations except to lambaste them; actions by such bodies as the UN Centre for Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) aimed to regulate and isolate TNCs.⁷⁰ However, by the new millennium, it was no longer desirable to keep for-profit non-state actors at arm’s length, but it was seen to be preferable to bring them closer to intergovernmental deliberations. Since 2000, the UN has distanced itself from an outmoded hostility about the market and TNCs; it has sought instead to foster responsible corporate citizenship and business perspectives as part of the solution to globalization’s downsides. “Cooperation with the

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private sector has become politically feasible and operationally desirable,” wrote Georg Kell who directed a program within the secretariat.⁷¹ The main normative shift, in the words of its intellectual midwife, Harvard University’s John Ruggie who was a member of the Second UN at the time, was the shift away from efforts to regulate the private sector to a “learning model” of how to make the most of the private sector’s potential.⁷² The Global Compact is a voluntary initiative to catalyze actions in support of UN goals, and to mainstream human rights, labor, and environmental principles. It is not a regulatory instrument and thus does not police, enforce, or measure the behavior of businesses. Rather, it relies on public accountability, transparency, and the enlightened self-interest of companies, labor, and civil society. Empty squabbles of the twentieth century gave way to finding desirable contributions and investments in the new millennium. Corporate social responsibility (CSR)⁷³ for the some 70,000 TNCs as well as ten times that number of subsidiaries and millions of suppliers is an essential normative element of global economic governance.⁷⁴ Over 10,000 companies in almost 170 countries have accepted the UNGC’s ten core principles to guide best practices: support of internationally proclaimed human rights; uphold such labor rights as freedom of association and collective bargaining as well as eliminate compulsory, child, and discriminatory practices; promote environmental practices and eco-friendly technology; and work against corruption.⁷⁵ While the harshest critics of the Third UN lament “blue wash”—that is, the world organization has lost its soul in embracing for-profits—the Third UN has attracted additional and powerful participants. What began as a lukewarm effort to associate TNCs has burgeoned into an endeavor to mobilize business and enhance accountability. Earlier we saw the dramatic increase in the numbers of parent TNCs and foreign affiliates; all indices of activity—sales, total assets, employment—have grown significantly.⁷⁶ Perhaps, most importantly, the seemingly ever-growing resources from foreign direct investment (FDI) and remittances are welcomed not shunned as far more consequential development inputs than ODA or soft loans. Moreover, technology and media companies now mean that these longignored partners from the Third UN bring additional resources, expertise, technologies, and energy to international problem-solving. They, too, challenge standard operating procedures and lead to additional calls for a new architecture of global governance. What exactly is the impact on the ecology of knowledge around the United Nations, and the function of think tanks and knowledge brokers in the Third UN? How do the Second and Third UNs persuade domestic populations,

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134  “”  parliaments, and ministries of the value of investing in multilateralism when so much of the economic populism rampant across the United States and Europe is fueled through disinformation? The deafening noise from aggrieved voices, which began in earnest during the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” amidst the WTO’s Ministerial Conference, continues in many forms and on many streets worldwide. All three United Nations, but especially the Third UN, have been motivated not only to rethink conventional wisdom but also to ponder radical alternatives—for example, ideas linked to poverty alleviation, inequality, justice, and participation. Early in his tenure as the seventh Secretary-General, Kofi Annan already recognized the growing range and influence of the Third UN, which the information age fostered: “What is important is that, through information technology and the . . . IT revolution, they are coordinated and linked up in a way that we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. So you have a global civil society that is connected by the web and can really move issues.”⁷⁷ The growth and popularity of social media platforms has had substantial consequences for human communications, access to information, and the strategies to share, convince, and mobilize others. Yet, the potentially equalizing role of this new digital ecosystem has been mixed. It is now also a powerful space for pushing partisan and false content to millions of users, and the latest tool for the dissemination of hate speech, wedge issues, and violence. Big tech companies have come under scrutiny for not acting more aggressively to limit the spread of false or extremist content on their platforms, and many platforms and governments are struggling or resisting their regulation. Some feel constrained by free speech concerns while others simply benefit from the effects of what is generically called “information disorder.”⁷⁸ Paul Graham, computer scientist and co-founder of the tech incubator YCombinator, presciently wrote about the growing problem of online disinformation: “If you optimize for engagement, it turns out you optimize for lies.”⁷⁹ His insight was that some of the most profound dangers of technology do not reflect malfunction but incomplete understanding of the consequences of success. Unintended consequences, unpredictable network effects,⁸⁰ and other scenarios in which technology works as intended but the impacts on society are not fully appreciated are as damaging and, arguably, more prevalent than malfunctions. The pernicious effects of social media in societies have become most visible during electoral campaigns and other high-stakes political processes, especially in the United States, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. Both domestic and external actors have used such forums to influence public opinion and exacerbate polarization. Anyone trying to rescue multilateralism today faces a

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dramatically challenging information environment. It is no exaggeration that we are moving toward a post-truth, post-fact era. Public mistrust of institutions is often accompanied by doubt about the power of evidence and data to help arbitrate disagreements and guide public policy. The target of disinformation campaigns is the social cohesion that institutions create and the norms surrounding bodies such as the UN. The success of these campaigns is not necessarily the destruction of the institution or norm, but rather undermining them. The United Nations has not been immune to the effects of disinformation, which not only further complicate the prevention agenda but also run contrary to Charter values. In February 2019, in his address at the opening of the 40th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, SecretaryGeneral António Guterres characterized misinformation and hate speech as global threats, and a menace to democratic values, social stability, and peace: “With each broken norm, the pillars of humanity are weakened.”⁸¹ In June 2019, he introduced an action plan to combat hate speech that aimed to improve preventive efforts, develop counter narratives, and respond more effectively to hate speech occurring across member states. To advance these goals, there is a need to engage intensely with research communities and the tech sector in order to understand better the impact of these technologies on efforts at sustaining peace; to help inform policy responses; and to shape new, policy-relevant research and policy agendas. Another challenge facing all three United Nations is the changing nature of armed conflict and violence facilitated by new technologies. Across the globe, concentrations of expertise in certain technologies are being carved out—such as combat drones in the Middle East, artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe and Asia, bots and influence-driving technologies in Eastern Europe. These exclusive clusters of knowledge and development create a kind of global arms race, which necessitates examining their impacts in peacetime and in wartime. One of the biggest military revolutions has been the rise of drones. Recent developments enable them to be autonomous and operate without human control. Artificial intelligence runs some of these autonomous machines, which allows them to learn and improve through experience. Drones have been utilized both in combat and for information gathering. The ready accessibility of relatively inexpensive electronic and mobile communications technology has also fueled the growth of non-state violence as it gives belligerents instant media access, the ability to launch devastating disinformation campaigns, and facilitates longdistance transactions with arms dealers and commercial networks.⁸² Net wars and cyber wars are not science fiction but contemporary reality.

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136  “”  In recognition of these challenges, in July 2018, António Guterres, established the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, co-chaired by household names from the IT world: Melinda Gates from the United States (and Microsoft) and Jack Ma from China (and Alibaba). The overall purpose was to “advance proposals to strengthen cooperation in the digital space among Governments, the private sector, civil society, international organizations, academia, the technical community and other relevant stakeholders”; “to raise awareness about the transformative impact of digital technologies across society and the economy”; and to “contribute to the broader public debate on how to ensure a safe and inclusive digital future for all, taking into account relevant human rights norms.”⁸³ After a year-long process of consultation with the private sector and civil society, visits to Silicon Valley and the Chinese equivalent, and participation in tech and digital events, the panel issued a report with a series of recommendations for working cooperatively to address challenges in the digital age.⁸⁴ It was intended to serve as a foundation for future multi-stakeholder discussions about digital cooperation and global governance. However, will it? In thinking about the possible future configurations of global governance, it is essential not to gloss over the US–China digital trade, and now, in the age of COVID-19, medical rivalry. The geo-political consternation in Washington and Brussels over the West’s considering 5G from Huawei and ZTE illustrates the unknown security and surveillance consequences that loom in the commercial choice of the next generation of technology. These decisions will be transformative, as tech innovation has already begun to change how we work, how we communicate, how we treat diseases, and how we fight. It will create winners and losers; it will build employment and dislocate work forces. For example, China’s “digital Belt and Road”—in which connectivity is the next step in infrastructure building—is poised to transform at least as many lives as asphalt roads and steel bridges.⁸⁵ Some see technological innovation as driving techno-nationalist competition, while others view it as necessary progress. These interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Richard Gowan and Anthony Dworkin argue that it provides a leadership opportunity for such actors as the EU to carve out a third way from the United States and China, especially because the EU is one of the few remaining regulatory superpowers.⁸⁶ Indeed, its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) demonstrates that the EU is not reticent about the values of regulation. But if it is to provide refuge for the ideological competition between Beijing and Washington, what are the spaces of competition that the EU would need to occupy to use its economic weight and create

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an alternative rules-based order? What values would underpin any new governance or regulatory frameworks? Who would get to decide? What innovations would be geo-politically significant, and how would particular innovations shift global power relations? Key to this competition of ideas will be the ability to both innovate and regulate especially because regulatory regimes are usually outpaced by new technologies. The digital networking technologies that evolved into the modern internet were designed to radically decentralize information storage and increase complex communication speed by orders of magnitude. Both were achieved; as of 2018, half the global population used the Internet. While this access is important information for consumer services, it is also important from a geopolitical perspective: high internet adoption affords governments the ability to monitor, communicate with, and control populations with unprecedented precision and speed. The tactical deployment, maintenance, and censorship of information systems are a means to, and a reason for, governments’ investments in everything from intercontinental transportation infrastructure to new educational initiatives. Contact tracing apps in the COVID-19 response are further blurring the lines between scientific advancement and threats to privacy. The philosopher Paul Virilio, in Speed and Politics, put forward “dromology,” the study of speed, as the defining logic of the modern era. Overcoming the terrain of a battlefield or sending information at near-light speed is essential to projecting power. Speed is a tactical advantage that can determine the outcome of wars, trade disputes, and other competitions central to vital interests. In addition to speed, advances in different technology sectors bring about new levels of control, precision, and complexity that can be brought to bear in addressing long-standing social problems.

Conclusion The challenges in this chapter speak to the need for new coalitions and partnerships among all three United Nations. If the “whole UN” is to reflect the complexity of actors necessary to address global problems, the experience of the Global Compact in many ways provides a helpful illustration. By aggressively building an array of partnerships with civil society and several thousand firms, the UN moved in largely uncharted international waters. It could not rely on the non-functioning compasses provided by previous ideological cartographers; it had to be prepared for smooth seas and shoals.

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138  “”  The requirement for new thinking and approaches is evident from the discussion of new technologies and the information economy, in particular of the obvious need to mitigate negative impacts and to harness the potential to improve people’s lives.⁸⁷ What kinds of partnerships with academia, NGOs, and the private sector are required today and tomorrow in order to build a multilateral system that can respond adequately to pernicious challenges? Does the whole UN have a comparative advantage in idea-mongering? If so, why are so few core and voluntary budgetary resources (at most, 10 percent⁸⁸) devoted to global norms, standards, policy, and advocacy? What frontiers are opened and closed for the UN as a result of advances in digital technologies? Learning lessons is not customarily listed as an asset on the UN’s balance sheet. As long ago as 1969, for example, Robert Jackson and Margaret Joan Anstee lamented the absence of a “central brain” for the development system,⁸⁹ a shortcoming that remains true for the UN’s development machinery and for the UN system more generally. Can we make the whole UN “fitter for purpose?” The answer to that query, emphasizing the comparative advantages of the Third UN, is our final challenge.

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6 Fitter for Purpose? The UN’s Normative Future

Struggling to polish the final draft of this book during a global economic meltdown resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, a startling fact was impossible to ignore: the planet will remain hard pressed to respond to current and future threats without greater cooperation across borders and more robust intergovernmental institutions.¹ The end of the unipolar moment and the rise of the digital age had already ushered in paradigm shifts in how we work, communicate, and think in a complex, interconnected, and anxious world. As a result of the turmoil in 2020, people worldwide are suffering from what Alvin Toffler described a half century earlier in his blockbuster Future Shock²— populations disoriented, dislocated, and stressed from rapid social, economic, and technological upheavals with accompanying violence. We are in the midst of a period of extraordinary change in the organization and structure of the international system, not unlike the transformational periods ushered in by the first two world wars. Antonio Gramsci’s classic observation is apt: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”³ The COVID-19 pandemic has etched in stark relief the extent of our increasing interdependence, and how very small this planet is. In the face of national failures to respond to the pandemic and rising deaths, it was to the World Health Organization—a specialized but weakened specialized agency of the United Nations—that many looked for guidance and credible information, and for answers about a globally coordinated response. The already anemic organization was further hamstrung by a schoolyard fight between the United States and China. The pandemic could and should be a wake-up call for the need of greater cooperation on a whole range of global threats. Not to put too fine a point on it, we are flummoxed that anyone would question the need for a more robust United Nations. Yet, that is precisely what Donald Trump did as the pandemic was spreading worldwide in spring 2020, when he made good on an earlier threat and announced withholding part of The “Third” United Nations: How a Knowledge Ecology Helps the UN Think. Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss, Oxford University Press (2021). © Tatiana Carayannis and Thomas G. Weiss. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198855859.003.0007

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140  “”  the US contribution to the WHO and withdrawing in 2021. His tantrum sought to distract from his own mismanagement, but the pretext was to review the WHO’s role in “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the corona virus.”⁴ The actual explanation for depriving the organization of 22 per cent of its resources was that WHO was a convenient scapegoat for his own slow and ineffective responses to what he had earlier called a “hoax.” This device to deflect criticism from his wildly irresponsible and erratic behavior followed earlier targets that included the media, Democrats in Congress, state governors, and Barack Obama. That said, one could justifiably criticize the politicization of the WHO’s activities and appointments but lament its unrealized potential. At the same time, one cannot ignore the proven value of its medical expertise, even given the dearth of untied resources in its budget. While the middle of a global fight to halt a pandemic was not the ideal moment to evaluate performance, nonetheless the AC (after-corona) moment should provide the occasion to test the received wisdom that only world wars provide sufficient motivation and political will to transform the international system. Could a $ 8-10 trillion drop in global GDP in 2020–2021 and widespread death and deprivation provide the basis to revisit the 75-year-old multilateral experiment and rethink its problems and prospects?⁵ The COVID-19 pandemic is arguably a worldwar equivalent, albeit with an invisible enemy. The United Nations and many of the other current generation of multilateral organizations reflect an era when consensual cooperation among states could address many problems needing international collective action. The pandemic and climate change are threats of a type and scale that not only defy action by a single state, or even a group of states working in concert. Indeed, the 2020 pandemic gave us some sense of what a truly global crisis means, one that disrupts everything from going to work or shopping, from visiting parents or other countries, from attending schools to weddings. As such, it demonstrated that the UN has reached the limits of its structure, which could solve transnational problems only when the most powerful sovereign states assented. In fact, at this juncture those very states and even minor powers are circling the wagons, the very opposite organizational principle required to address the transnational existential threats to public health and the human environment. If the United Nations and the UN system are to become fitter-for-purpose, or even survive, the thinking to re-imagine and redesign contemporary global governance undoubtedly will come from the Third UN. In fact, in April 2020, as the virus was ravaging western economies and the rhetorical battle between

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states escalated, scientific communities worldwide came together. “While national leaders play the blame game,” Francis Fukuyama wrote, “scientists and public health officials around the world are deepening their networks and connections.”⁶ Patrick Soon-Shion—the surgeon, inventor, scientist, and owner of the Los Angeles Times—brought back this fundamental reality: “The Covid-19 pandemic is a health nightmare but also a scientific dream. It has prompted scientists from across the world to collaborate in real time as never before with the understanding that we are all in this together.”⁷ Or as two journalists from the New York Times summarized: “While political leaders have locked their borders, scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history. Never before, researchers say, have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single topic and with such urgency.”⁸ If the trend lines are governments’ flexing their sovereign muscles and escalating popular nationalisms, it is research institutions, intellectuals, and epistemic communities across the globe who will need to come together to define the new global order that we want and need. Many small and even major businesses will disappear in the aftermath of Covid-19; which parts of the UN system are so essential and enjoy such a comparative advantage for ideas or operations that they should continue if member states substantially cut funding for the system? That tough and uncomfortable question must be asked, and answered. In many ways, research collaborations and conversations are already underway. The global project to redefine multilateralism, however, must be more interdisciplinary and internationally inclusive; it must also avoid the politicization of critical issues that has impeded cooperation, and lately even conversations, by governments. The decision-makers from UN-friendly member states and philanthropies who believe in the multilateral project would do well to fund research cooperation and access to knowledge, and to do so urgently. We began by indicating an unprecedented growth in the number of nonstate actors accompanied by dramatic changes in the scope of international connectivity. Because UN activities are so diverse, non-state actors play a wide range of roles—as implementing partners and contractors, lobbyists and catalyzers, delegated agents and intermediaries, knowledge producers and brokers. With reference to only one of the main components of the Third UN, for instance, there are networks of operational NGOs, engaged primarily in project design and implementation; advocacy NGOs, whose main objective is to promote a specific cause; and knowledge NGOs, which produce, curate, or translate evidence that can be used to inform policy. To reiterate,

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142  “”  the Third UN is anything but monolithic; it does not have the clear and coherent definitional identity of member states or international civil servants. Membership in the Third UN varies, depending on topics and timing. The International Olympic Committee is not active in the development of a Covid19 vaccine, but the Gates Foundation is. FIFA is not engaged in follow-up to the Paris Agreement, but the Earth Institute at Columbia University is. For many actors in the Third UN, informing UN decision-making is not their only, or even their primary mandate; but for us, it is an essential feature. The Third UN’s non-state-led governance in its various forms has much to offer the UN in terms of ideas. Rather than explore the myriad ways that non-state actors engage the United Nations, our objective was ambitious but feasible. We have demonstrated how a sub-set of the Third UN—particularly think tanks, academics, research NGOs, and other thought-leaders and “norm entrepreneurs”—generate ideas, and how ideas (good and not such good ones) come to influence UN policy agendas and decisions. We have examined the many ways that the Third UN helps the First and Second UNs think. The future is increasingly defined by speed and interdependence. Significant innovations in technology accompany an era of increasing inequality, new security threats, and looming environmental and health disasters. Understanding the cause-and-effect results of information technology, inequality, and insecurity will be crucial to understanding the geo-politics of the coming decades. How we research, collaborate, mobilize, and organize will all be shaped by technology and the digital age, what some call the “fourth industrial revolution.” The COVID-19 era has ushered in new forms of association and raised the need for a new kind of citizen politics. Is the UN, as a state-based institution, currently structured to meet the crises of the day, which are increasingly transnational? Is it nimble enough to adapt and confront new realities? The short, yet generous, answer is “not yet.” How can the UN be made fitter for future purposes, especially when that future is moving at warp speed? The UN Charter has proven flexible for many changing realities—for instance, the invention of peacekeeping as a response to threats to international peace and security. However, adaptation let alone transformation will require creative thinking to help turn the UN tanker fast enough to adapt to global challenges and the velocity of change. As inveterate optimists, we are able to hold out the possibility for success. As social scientists, we certainly know better than to predict outcomes, although we can anticipate some possible futures.

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The evidence in the preceding pages suggests that the Third UN is more relevant than ever. If the world organization is to survive and remain relevant, the vast bulk of ideas necessary to meet these challenges will come from the outsider-insiders of the Third UN. Like NGOs, the private for-profit sector engages with the UN in a variety of ways—it has exposed outmoded international governance and regulatory mechanisms in finance and AI and challenged us to think about new ones; it has also partnered with the UN to provide ideas, financing, equipment, and humanitarian relief. We are reminded that the Global Compact—an earlier effort to engage the private sector in new and progressive ways—was driven and designed to a large degree not by business but by an academic on leave and working in the Secretariat, John Ruggie. The Third UN must aim at this foundational level, where business and technology amplifies, transforms, projects, and constrains governance and power. In brief, we need greater attention to the ideational forces around the UN. Successful international cooperation increasingly will be perched on a three-legged stool, which we have detailed for the United Nations. Member states and their governments remain essential, as do international secretariats. However, it would be myopic and wrong to ignore the complementary analytical and advocacy skills of actors and mechanisms of the Third UN. There is no alternative: states and international civil servants simply must collaborate with the bevy of non-state performers on the world’s stage. Indeed, in a networked world, the lines dividing state from non-state actors are blurring and blurred. That said, we should be cognizant of the limitations of non-state actors. NGOs and corporations by themselves will not eliminate poverty, fix global warming, or halt mass murder. Governments need to take their responsibilities seriously. But they will not do so on their own, either due to a lack of political will, the absence of new ideas, or both. The Third UN can both nudge and help governments think and act. As noted, knowledge institutions increasingly serve not only as bridges between knowledge and policy, but also between policy makers and their publics. As a result, and given the burgeoning numbers of non-state actors—many with impressive resources and problemsolving energies dwarfing those of small countries—robust IGOs now often seem an afterthought, even in “cutting-edge” thinking about international relations, organization, law, and political economy. They should and cannot be. The Third UN can—as it has historically—play not only a significant but also a greater role in shaping international public policy and monitoring

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144  “”  commitments made by states—the Second UN by itself cannot do either adequately. Many actors in the Third UN are smaller, more flexible, networked, and less bound by the kinds of constraints that dictate deliberations in the forums attended by senior and junior officials from both the First and Second United Nations. The current context is grim. The onslaught against multilateralism is a fact of current international life, and it will continue and perhaps become more intense and widespread. The new nationalisms and new populisms are metastasizing not diminishing. Nativist-populist “ages” are everywhere: of Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Xi, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Netanyahu, al-Sisi, Orban, Maduro, and rising right-wing cabals everywhere. In addition, an ancient, and newly pernicious, challenge is the relationship between the First and Second United Nations. The P-5 control discourse and purse strings; their ideological competition impedes cooperation and innovation. The temporary respite immediately after the end of the Cold War and prior to China’s rise has given way to growing polarization in the Security Council and a tighter grip on the UN Secretariat. These geo-political constraints are unlikely to dissipate any time soon; moreover, we are unlikely to see a UN Secretary-General with any degree of independence in the near term. Yet, optimism is a prerequisite for this business. We take heart from the Mexican anthropologist and former UNESCO deputy director general Lourdes Arizpe: Someone once said that the United Nations is a dream managed by bureaucrats. I would correct that by saying that it has become a bureaucracy managed by dreamers. Certainly you have to be a dreamer to work in the United Nations with conviction. It is only if you have this sense of mission that you can withstand the constant battering by governments who are afraid that the United Nations will become a world government. . . . So in the end, someone who works in the United Nations has to be a magician of ideas, because working for the United Nations is like working for a government in which all the political parties are in power at the same time. You have to be a magician of ideas in order to try and find that particular idea around which you can build the greatest consensus.⁹

All three United Nations can help nourish optimism in several ways. All can recognize the absolutely essential roles played by the others—and reach out where appropriate to encourage and assist them to play their roles more effectively. The First and the Second UNs, in particular, can provide better

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information about proposed action and progress, along with easier access to meetings and facilities, which can often help the Third UN to circulate, rattle bureaucratic cages, and mobilize support. More particularly, the Second UN can make much better use of the knowledge networks in the Third UN, as demonstrated conclusively by the visible work since 1987 of the IPCC. It is crucial to draw on networks of first-class analysts and intellectuals in developing and developed countries alike who understand international public policy’s impacts. Following the IPCC model, three principal organs (the Security Council, General Assembly, and ECOSOC) should have established in 2020 an intergovernmental panel on health, inequality, and the economy—and they still could pull together worldclass scientific expertise from across the planet and the UN system to advise governments on the problems and prospects in these areas and chart potential paths forward. Gatherings need not be as visible as the IPCC to make a difference—indeed, private sessions with small numbers of outside analysts can be more effective for certain conversations and topics. In particular, the Second UN should maintain a clear focus on the original vision and the logic of careful analysis towards the solution of key global problems—their oath of office specifies remaining true to Charter values. There is the ever-present danger within secretariats of self-censorship, of restricting analysis to what is anticipated to be acceptable, of holding back conclusions that might offend important governments or regional groups. It is impossible to keep all of the 193 member states happy all of the time. Political correctness is out-of-place for knowledge and norms. This is where the Third UN has value-added because it can often say what the Second UN cannot or will not. There is an ongoing requirement for UN secretariats to regularly open their proverbial windows and let in more fresh air. If Annan and later Guterres tried to foster a culture of prevention, what we now need is a culture of evidence and innovation—not just in the use of digital technologies, as Guterres has advocated. It demands data for decision-making, and innovation in how the system catalyzes, mobilizes, advocates, and consumes evidence. The Second UN must create a demand for knowledge. Policy cannot be informed through reductionist approaches from disciplinary or organizational silos. In no context, let alone global problem-solving, can there be business as usual. The United Nations should engage in what French sociologist Edward Morin called la pensée complexe; “political strategy requires complex knowing.”¹⁰ We are not suggesting the need to create yet more formal mechanisms. In fact, far from it. The process of social knowledge production especially about

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146  “”  complex issues is customarily ad hoc, messy, iterative, and cumulative. This is often how research and ideas are born. Rather, we need a shift to a postbureaucratic, less hierarchical, more networked organizational policy model that decentralizes thinking to all levels of the policy-making process. Such approaches would permit coordination rather than centralization of strategic thinking; they would encourage a system-wide consumption of fact-based knowledge. As has been the experience in some national bureaucracies, they would “devalue hierarchy and strengthen horizontal relations,” and “require a rich knowledge-based environment to function successfully.”¹¹ Like prevention, evidence-based thinking and policy-making in the UN should be everybody’s business. As we argued above and elsewhere, the power of ideas is an underappreciated UN legacy. Ideas change the way that we perceive and talk about issues. They permit the redefinition of interests—that is, what matters and why—as part of setting agendas and prioritizing actions. They provide the basis for the formation of new coalitions and networks. They find homes in institutions and are reflected in budgetary and personnel allocations. Former UN undersecretary-general Maurice F. Strong led the Canadian International Development Research and Policy Task Force, which over two decades ago determined that such networks of think tanks, academics, and research NGOs contribute to knowledge production and more effective development policy in at least three ways: [T]hey generate new knowledge; they generate “operational” knowledge; and they disseminate knowledge locally. The first contribution is a function of the interdisciplinary quality of the networks. . . . The second is related to the mixture of academic and non-academic work that the networks perform. And the third is related to the constant interaction between distant colleagues and global disciplines . . . and local activities. . . . These three qualities of interdisciplinarity, operationality, and contextualization are each important to the production of knowledge.¹²

The most fundamental step forward in what is bound to be a long journey, therefore, is to strengthen partnerships among the First, Second, and Third United Nations. How best can the Third UN itself become fitter for purpose? What have we learned about what works in evidence-based policymaking, and how intellectual inputs from the Third UN have helped inform UN policy over the last 75 years? What could ensure that there will be a UN centenary to celebrate in 2045?¹³

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There is a compelling need to strengthen partnerships with actors located not just in states that have been traditional supporters of multilateralism but also among challengers to the liberal status quo. The impetus for this will not come from member states; so UN secretariats in close collaboration with the Third UN will have to jump into the fray and rethink orthodox notions of what kinds of partnerships can make a difference. The underlying principles, approaches, and values that will shape global governance and multilateral cooperation will in part be determined by who is setting the rules, and more specifically who is contributing new thinking to help shape and respect those rules. Earlier we noted the substantial pushback from the West, where some officials fear opening floodgates to ideas “not invented here.” Diversifying the voices within the Third UN with access to UN policy debates is necessary, not only because ideas put forward should reflect the planet’s diversity, but also because Third UN actors can help build bridges between pertinent stakeholders in the First UN and the Second UN. These bridges span secretariats and governments, and governments and their publics. The overlap between policy and academic roles in these networks is not only evident in Western capitals but across much of the developing world. An increasingly important role for knowledge brokers will be this bridging function. The evidence-collection abilities of policy actors have vastly improved in the digital age; but in order to reap the benefits, decision-makers require assistance from academics, think tanks, and knowledge brokers in navigating today’s information overload to make better informed decisions. In discussing how to train US defense industry analysts, an insider essay summarized: “The paralyzing issue for today’s policy leaders is how to figure out which data-driven claims are credible and which are not.”¹⁴ This generalization certainly applies as well to decision-makers in UN member states and secretariats. Governments require research, which is why many have used their operational visibility in the UN (including increased investments and troop contributions) to grow the demand for research from their own nationals and provide greater visibility and a bigger platform for research to be consumed by all three United Nations. Augmented funding for those members of the Third UN that help the world organization think should be based on the fundamental reality that ideas matter for the four essential reasons that we have documented. Investments by members of the Third UN in improving the collective capability to act as a knowledge-brokers are justified because of how ideas have power. In this regard, not only do ideas matter, but so do their repetition as well as patience by their inventors and advocates. An idea that appears outlandish at one

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148  “”  moment can become the new normal, even a procedural idea. The evolution of the Arria formula for informal sessions of the Security Council is a case in point. These sessions were initially an experiment with many skeptics but are now a routine part of council deliberations. The Canadian development economist Gerry Helleiner, an active participant in many UN expert groups, agreed: “If you put the right kind of group together, a mixed kind of group, it does have an impact on people. It is like social scientific research. The impact may not occur for twenty-five years.” Gert Rosenthal issued his own judgment: “It takes time. No single document, no single conference is a watershed event.”¹⁵ A compelling need is to rethink how research is funded. Private philanthropy needs to get back into the business of funding basic and applied research rather than abandoning this critical function to powerful states that prioritize pay-offs for their foreign policies. The increasingly onerous conditions governing policy research are often at the opposite end of the accountability spectrum of public funding linked too often and too closely to the nearterm objectives of national security and economic growth—for which few questions are asked or answered. We say this while recognizing that private and corporate philanthropy is not devoid of self-interest and can be as opaque and unaccountable to the public interest as government funding. Instead, a new “research compact” among research institutions, governments, philanthropies, and business would better harness the potential of the social sciences for improving human lives¹⁶—particularly if it is guided by what preeminent sociologist Alondra Nelson calls “anticipatory social research” (ASR)—a social research paradigm that is “agile, nimble,” and that would “identify emerging social phenomena and direct research toward situating, contextualizing, and translating events into understandable concepts and . . . actionable outcomes.”¹⁷ It could help set agendas, guide funders, and encourage more equitable research collaborations, while accounting for political realities and agendas. This research compact could also be leveraged by Third UN actors across the Global South to mobilize resources at the regional and international levels to help shed light on the enormous power imbalances between their national governments and the wealth and influence of science and technology companies. Moreover, as repositories of massive amounts of social data and key actors in the new ecosystem of research, social media companies have a particular responsibility to participate in supporting research by the Third UN and making their data widely and freely available for social research; while at the same time, the Second UN needs to open itself up, as well as its data, to researchers who can help with experimentation and

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new thinking, and help develop research agendas. The move to improve and integrate the UN’s data collection systems would make such partnerships more plausible and feasible. Vehicles for ideas also matter. For example, commissions of eminent persons and high-level panels are best demand-driven so that there are ready-made consumers for the products. The most effective ones have occurred when governments were searching for alternative approaches. For example, the concrete normative and operational decisions about the “responsibility to protect” by the 2005 World Summit were based on ideas launched by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which was supported by a research directorate. That experience was distinct from blue-ribbon groups that focused on disarmament, prevention, or human security whose research and interpretations had little immediate policy impact. Less visible and off-the-record deliberations also have their place in helping the UN think; often they have been crucial and out of the limelight. A crucial and never-ending challenge for the United Nations—indeed, a bottom-line for any evaluation of successful reform—is to establish and maintain an environment in which creative, multi-disciplinary thinking and policy analysis can flourish at every level. As such, the First UN would do well to provide the resources and have the intellectual (that is, non-ideological) strength to confront new knowledge, even when it contradicts long-standing perceptions of the vital interests of prominent member states. For the culture of evidence and innovation to take hold, the Second UN must recruit and retain professionals of outstanding quality and give them the space to think and write independently; support research adequately; reward originality as opposed to routine report writing or diplomacy; strengthen multidisciplinary and multi-agency dialogue; enrich analysis with field experiences; and avoid political correctness and orthodoxy of all kinds. Such experiences and skillsets are absent from the numerous personnel reports that emphasize geographic distribution, gender parity, and age profile only. In short, the Second UN needs to return to intellectual leadership. As such, intellectual partnerships with Third UN actors will be essential. The International Commission on Multilateralism (ICM) sought to understand where the UN fits in the broader multilateral system on the eve of the current Secretary-General’s mandate.¹⁸ More important than the sets of concrete ideas proposed by this group is the portrayal of a humbling reality and a point of departure for this book: the United Nations is often a minor player in this system, which includes numerous other multilateral actors and operates in many spaces. With the Security Council deadlocked—as it was in the face of

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150  “”  the political and humanitarian disasters in Myanmar and Syria, and then the Covid-19 pandemic—the search for other multilateral solutions is inevitable, as with the proliferation of new organizational forms, including informal institutions, transgovernmental networks, and private transnational regulatory organizations (PTROs).¹⁹ To what extent will these alternative forms of authority undermine the UN? Enthusiasts who have celebrated, even if remotely, the 75th anniversary must ask: if the future needs of global governance are determined within multilateral spaces outside the United Nations, what are the implications for the UN at 100? If it exists, will it be more a relic than a vital part of the world order? We should recall that a rump League of Nations functioned between 1939 and 1946. Hopefully this does not provide a “model” for the United Nations. We write as a lethal pandemic has fundamentally challenged both contemporary thinking about what global governance is—its constitutive elements, internal constitution, and outcomes—as well as how it can be improved. Some of the earliest efforts for global health governance through public international unions came in response to outbreaks of cholera along trade routes in the nineteenth century.²⁰ So, in the midst of an economic calamity and fears about additional waves of the coronavirus, it is hard to imagine that one needs to make the case for urgent rethinking of global problem-solving. But we do because current efforts, in both the scholarly and policy worlds, are too bound to the constraints of the contemporary international system—including the feeble UN system. The world has figuratively if not literally shut down; but the twenty-first century is not the nineteenth or twentieth; there will not be significantly less interdependence and globalization, and certainly not fewer pandemics. We could envision collaborations across the social sciences, philanthropy, and business at a moment when the need to reimagine more just, more representative international institutions could not be greater. The next decades are likely to bring unprecedented economic, political, social, health, and ecological upheavals; they will bring both opportunities and complications. New evidence and new insights necessitate calling into question shibboleths about what works and what does not. The “whole UN” should keep constantly in mind the comment reportedly made by John Maynard Keynes when asked about inconsistencies in his thinking: “When I get new information, I change my views. What do you do, Sir?” Consistency and rehashing formulas from the past in the face of new problems or new data is the hobgoblin of little multilateral minds wherever they exist—in the First, Second, or Third United Nations.

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Notes Frontmatter 1. “Tribute to WFUNA from the U.N. and Calder,” New York Times, Section D, February 8, 1976.

Introduction 1. For instance, Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, eds., The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Thomas G. Weiss, David P. Forsythe, Roger A. Coate, and Kelly-Kate Pease, The United Nations and Changing World Politics, expanded and enlarged 8th edn. (New York: Routledge, 2019). 2. Thomas G. Weiss and Leon Gordenker, eds., NGOs, the UN, and Global Governance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996). 3. Inis L. Claude Jr., Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Prospects of International Organization (New York: Random House, 1956); Claude, “Peace and Security: Prospective Roles for the Two United Nations,” Global Governance 2(3) (1996): 289–98. 4. Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Richard Jolly, and Louis Emmerij, UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). 5. For the project’s capstone book, see Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, and Thomas G. Weiss, UN Ideas That Changed the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). For a review, see Robert J. Berg, “The UN Intellectual History Project,” Global Governance 12(4) (2006): 325–41. For other volumes and information, see http://unihp.org/ [unihp.org]. 6. Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, and Richard Jolly, “The ‘Third’ United Nations,” Global Governance 15(1) (2009): 123–42. 7. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 393. 8. Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, Rethinking Global Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 9. Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 10. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Robert C. Cox, The

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

New Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 376. This summary draws on Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, Rethinking Global Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). James Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds., Governance without Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Timothy J. Sinclair, Global Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 16. Aseem Prakash and Jeffrey A. Hart, eds., Globalization and Governance (London: Routledge, 1999); David Held and Anthony McGrew, eds., Governing Globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); and Robert W. Cox, “The Crisis of World Order and the Challenge to International Organization,” Cooperation and Conflict 29 (2) (1994): 99–113. Richard B. Falk and Saul H. Mendlovitz, eds., A Strategy of World Order, volumes I–IV (New York: World Law Fund, 1966–67); and Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn, World Peace through World Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). Joseph Preston Barrata, The Politics of World Federation, two volumes (Westport, CN: Praeger Publishers, 2004), quote from vol. 2, 534–5. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, eds., Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. Michael Zürn, A Theory of Global Governance: Authority, Legitimacy, and Contestation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 263. Liliana B. Andonova, “Public-Private Partnerships for the Earth: Politics and Patterns of Hybrid Authority in the Multilateral System,” Global Environmental Politics 10 (2) (2010): 25. Anne Marie Goetz, “The New Competition in Multilateral Norm-Setting: Transnational Feminists & the Illiberal Backlash,” Daedalus 149 (1) (2020): 166. Thomas G. Weiss and Ramesh Thakur, The UN and Global Governance: An Unfinished Journey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Weiss and Wilkinson, Rethinking Global Governance; Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, eds., International Organization and Global Governance, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2018); and Thomas G. Weiss, Global Governance: What? Why? Whither? (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). Lawrence Finkelstein, “What Is Global Governance?” Global Governance 1 (3) (1995): 367–8. Tatiana Carayannis, “Webs of War in the Congo: The Politics of Hybrid Wars, Conflict Networks, and Multilateral Responses 1996–2003” (2017). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2153. James G. McGann, 2018 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Scholarly Commons, 2019), 12. James G. McGann and Richard Sabatini, Global Think Tanks (London: Routledge, 2011).

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28. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 5 and 59–78. 29. Thomas G. Weiss, “The UN and Multilateralism under Siege in the Age of Trump,” Global Summitry 5 (1) (2019): 1–17.

Chapter 1 1. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); David Held and Anthony McGrew, with David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 2. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1996), 500. 3. J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2003), 178. 4. Barry Carin, Richard Higgott, Jan Aart Scholte, Gordon Smith, and Diane Stone, “Global Governance: Looking Ahead,” Global Governance 12 (1) (2006): 1–6; Michael G. Schechter, ed., Innovation in Multilateralism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); “complex multilateralism”: Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); “polylateralism”: Geoffrey Wiseman, “ ‘Polylateralism’ and New Modes of Global Dialogue,” Discussion Paper No. 59 (Leicester: Leicester Diplomatic Studies Programme, 1999); and “plurilateralism”: Philip G. Cerny, “Plurilateralism: Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post-Cold War World Order,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 22 (1) (1993): 27–51. 5. Steve Charnowitz, “Two Centuries of Participation: NGOs and International Governance,” Michigan Journal of International Law 18 (2) (1997): 183–286. 6. Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003), ch. 6. 7. Ibid., ch. 7. 8. Dorothy Robins, Experiment in Democracy: The Story of U.S. Citizen Organizations in Forging the Charter of the United Nations (New York: Parkside Press, 1971). 9. Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2006). 10. Thomas Davies, ed., Routledge Handbook NGOs and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2019); and William E. DeMars and Dennis Dijkzeul, eds., The NGO Challenge for International Relations Theory (London: Routledge, 2015).

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Earlier efforts included Weiss and Gordenker, eds., NGOs, the UN, and Global Governance; Peter Willetts, ed., The “Conscience” of the World: The Influence of Non-Governmental Organisations in the UN System (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1996); Jan Aart Scholte, Civil Society Voices and the International Monetary Fund (Ottawa: North-South Institute, 2002); and Bob Deacon, Global Social Policy and Governance (London: Sage, 2007). Mary Kaldor, “Civil Society and Accountability,” Journal of Human Development 4 (1) (2003): 5–27. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, eds., Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Graham Allison, “The Truth about the Liberal Order,” Foreign Affairs 97 (4) (2018): 124–33. Gideon Rose, “The Fourth Founding: The United States and the Liberal Order,” Foreign Affairs 98 (1) (2019):19–20. Wolfgang R. Reinicke, Global Public Policy: Governing Without Government? (Washington, DC; Brookings Institution, 1998); and Wolfgang R. Reinicke, Francis Deng, Thorsten Benner, and Jan Martin Witte, Critical Choices: The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Governance (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2000). Jan Aart Scholte suggested that it may be more useful to distinguish between “conformist,” “rejectionist,” “reformist,” and “transformist” orientations rather than focus on sectors, in Democratizing the Global Economy: The Role of Civil Society (Coventry: Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, 2004). We are aware but cannot pursue how private individuals, acting alone or collectively, shaped international organizations prior to the UN and continue to do so. See Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850 (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); and JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Quoted by Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly, UN Voices: The Quest for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 410. Ibid., 371–2. Ibid., 375. Cited by Mahbub ul Haq, Reflections on Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 204. Victor Hugo, Histoire d’un crime: “One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.” Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 415.

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25. Michael Ward, Quantifying the World: UN Contributions to Statistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 2. 26. OECD/DAC, Development Policy and Finance Trends, https://www.oecd-ilibrary. org/docserver/dcr-2017-12-en.pdf?expires= 1,539,294,454&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=286E649A32F8EE939B06C1D F2CA5288C. 27. Morten Bøás and Desmond McNeill, Global Institutions and Development: Framing the World? (London: Routledge, 2004). 28. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 29. Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Argentina and Brazil (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 30. Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46 (1) (1992): 1–36; and Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 31. Peter A. Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 32. Ernst B. Haas, When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); and see Peter M. Haas and Ernst B. Haas, “Learning to Learn: Improving International Governance,” Global Governance 1 (3) (1995): 255–84. 33. Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 34. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 35. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 36. John G. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity (New York: Routledge, 1998). 37. Robert W. Cox, ed., The New Realism: Perspectives on Multilateralism and World Order (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith, eds. and trans., Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). 38. Ngaire Woods, “Economic Ideas and International Relations: Beyond Rational Neglect,” International Studies Quarterly 39 (2) (1995): 164. 39. See, for example, “Principles from the Periphery: The Neglected Southern Sources of Global Norms,” a special section with contributions by Eric Helleiner, Martha Finnemore, Michelle Jurkovich, Kathryn Sikkink, and Amitav Acharya, Global Governance 20 (3) (2014): 359–481. See also, Thomas G. Weiss and Pallavi Roy, eds., The UN and the Global South, 1945 and 2015 (London: Routledge, 2017). 40. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 397.

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156  41. Woods, “Economic Ideas and International Relations”: 168. 42. See Ramesh Thakur, ed., What Is Equitable Geographic Representation in the Twenty-first Century? (Tokyo: UN University, 1999). 43. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960). 44. See Albert Yee, “The Causal Effects of Ideas on Policies,” International Organization 50 (1) (1996): 69–108. 45. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 373. 46. John Toye and Richard Toye, The UN and Global Political Economy: Trade, Finance, and Development (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 110–36. ECLA became ECLAC in 1984. 47. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 407. 48. Roberta Cohen and Francis M. Deng, Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998); and Roberta Cohen and Francis M. Deng, eds., The Forsaken People: Case Studies of the Internally Displaced (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1998). 49. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001). 50. Kofi A. Annan, The Question of Intervention: Statements by the Secretary-General of the United Nations (New York: United Nations, 2000). 51. Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). 52. Don Hubert, The Landmine Ban: A Case Study in Humanitarian Advocacy (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, 2000), Occasional Paper No. 42; Richard Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Landmines,” International Organization 52 (3) (1998): 613–44; Motoko Mekata, “Building Partnerships Toward a Common Goal: Experiences of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines,” in The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society, ed. Ann M. Florini (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2000), 143–76. 53. Fanny Benedetti and John L. Washburn, “Drafting the International Criminal Court Treaty,” Global Governance 5 (1) (1999): 1–38; see also Richard Goldstone and Adam Smith, International Judicial Institutions: The Architecture of International Justice at Home and Abroad, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2015). 54. Roberto Bissio, “The ‘Third UN’: Civil Society and the World Organization,” in Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development, ed. Stephen Browne and Thomas G. Weiss (London: Routledge, 2021), 184–97. 55. Craig N. Murphy, The United Nations Development Programme: A Better Way? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 232–62. 56. Ramesh Thakur, Andrew F. Cooper, and John English, International Commissions and the Power of Ideas (Tokyo: UN University Press, 2005).

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57. Max-Otto Baumann and Silke Weinlich, “Funding the UN: Support or Constraint?”; and Barbara Adams, “Private Finance and Partnerships at the UN,” in Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development, ed. Browne and Weiss, 151–64 and 165–83. 58. Data in Tables 1.1 and 2.2 and Figure 1.1 are from Union of International Associations, Yearbook of International Organizations, edition 54, volume 5 (Brussels: Union of International Associations, 2018). They use the year closest to the end of the decade and include all INGO and IGO categories. 59. Karsten Ronit, Global Business Associations (London: Routledge, 2018) and Global Consumer Organizations (London: Routledge, 2015); and JoAnne Yates and Craig Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 60. Sarianna M. Lundan, “The Coevolution of Transnational Corporations,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 18 (2) (2011), http://www.repository.law.indiana. edu/ijgls/vol18/iss2/3/. 61. UN Conference on Trade and Development, “Structure of TNCs,” available at http://unctad.org/en/Pages/DIAE/Investment%20and%20Enterprise/Structureof-TNCs.aspx. 62. UNCTAD, The World Investment Report 2009, available at http://www.unctad. org/en/pages/PublicationArchive.aspx?publicationid=743, was the last one (at least until the publication of this book) that included specific data on the number of Parent TNCs and Foreign Affiliates. 63. According to UNCTAD, “A parent enterprise is defined as an enterprise that controls assets of other entities in countries other than its home country, usually by owning a certain equity capital stake”. UNCTAD, Transnational Corporations, available at http://unctad.org/en/Pages/DIAE/Transnational-corporations-(TNC). aspx 64. According to UNCTAD, “A foreign affiliate is an incorporated or unincorporated enterprise in which an investor, who is resident in another economy, owns a stake that permits a lasting interest in the management of that enterprise.” UNCTAD, Transnational Corporations, available at http://unctad.org/en/Pages/ DIAE/Transnational-corporations-(TNC).aspx. 65. Data in Figure 1.3 are from UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2018, available at http://unctad.org/en/Pages/DIAE/World%20Investment%20Report/WIR-Series. aspx. 66. P. W. Anderson, “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science,” Science 177 (4047) (1972): 393–6. 67. Kenneth W. Abbott, Jessica F. Green, and Robert O. Keohane, “Organizational Ecology and Institutional Change in Global Governance,” International Organization 70 (2) (2016): 247–77. 68. Deborah D. Avant, Martha Finnemore, and Susan K. Sell, “Who Governs the Globe?” in Who Governs the Globe? ed. Avant, Finnemore, and Sell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 5.

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158  69. Peter Willetts, Non-governmental Organizations in World Politics: The Construction of Global Governance (London: Routledge, 2011). 70. Timothy Sinclair, Global Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 57. 71. The number “100,000” is an approximation based on Peacekeeping Open Data Base Portal for Troop and Police Contributions (available at https://peacekeeping.un.org/ en/data-troop-and-police-contributions) and Civilians section of peacekeeping website (available at https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/civilians). The UN does not maintain an accessible database for the number of civilians, as it does for military, police, and fatalities. 72. Danielle Zach, D. Conor Seyle, and Jens Vestergaard Madsen, Burden-Sharing Multi-level Governance: A Study of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (Broomfield, CO: One Earth Future Foundation, 2013). 73. Oliver Williams, Corporate Social Responsibility (London: Routledge, 2014). 74. High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development (New York: UN, 2013), http://www.post2015hlp. org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/UN-Report.pdf. 75. Simon Chesterman, “How ‘Public’ Is Public International Law? Toward a Typology of NGOs and Civil Society Actors,” Global Governance 24 (2) (2018): 163. 76. UNRISD, UN World Summits and Civil Society Engagement, UNRISD Research and Policy Brief 6 (Geneva: UNRISD, 2007), 2. See also Michael G. Schechter, United Nations Global Conferences (London: Routledge, 2005). 77. ITU—United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies, https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/geneva/newsroom/index.html. 78. ITU—United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies, https://www.itu.int/net/wsis/tunis/newsroom/index.html. 79. United Nations, “Rio + 20 em números,” June 25, 2012. Available at https:// nacoesunidas.org/rio20-em-numeros/. 80. Rephael H. Ben-Ari, The Legal Status of International Non-governmental Organizations: Analysis of Past and Present Initiatives (1912–2012) (Leiden, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 2013). 81. Moisés Naím, “Democracy’s Dangerous Impostors,” Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2007. 82. “INGO Accountability Charter,” www.ingoaccountabilitycharter.org. 83. Lester M. Salamon, et al., Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, 1999). 84. List of non-governmental organizations in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council as of 1 March 2020. Available at http://undocs.org/E/2016/INF/5. 85. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “NGO Branch, Consultative Status with ECOSOC and Other Accreditations,” http://esango.un.org/civilsociety/ displayConultativeStatusSearch.do?method=search&sessionCheck=false. 86. Cited by David MacFadyen, Michael D. V. Davies, Marilyn Carr, and John Burley, “Epilogue,” Eric Drummond and His Legacies: The League of Nations and the Beginnings of Global Governance (New York: PalgraveMacmillan, forthcoming).

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87. Chesterman, “How ‘Public’ Is Public International Law?” 162. 88. Peter Waterman, “Global Civil Society: A Concept Worth Defining, a Terrain Worth Disputing,” www.nigd.org/docs/GlobalCivilSocietyPeterWaterman November2005. 89. “Overview by Cyril Ritchie, Secretary of CONGO,” www.ngocongo.org/index. php?what=doc&id=1121. 90. Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor, “Introducing Global Civil Society,” in Global Civil Society 2001, ed. Anheier, Glasius, and Kaldor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17. 91. Ann M. Florini, ed., The Third Force: The Rise in Transnational Civil Society (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2000), 3. 92. Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson’s Rethinking Global Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 2019) and their earlier essays “Rethinking Global Governance: Complexity, Authority, Power, Change,” International Studies Quarterly 58 (2) (2014): 207–15; “Global Governance to the Rescue: Saving International Relations?” Global Governance 20 (1) (2014): 19–36; “Change and Continuity in Global Governance,” Ethics & International Affairs 29 (4) (2015): 391–5 and 397–406; and the 55 chapters in their edited International Organization and Global Governance, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 2018).

Chapter 2 1. James N. Rosenau, The United Nations in a Turbulent World (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992). 2. Thomas Davies, ed., Routledge Handbook NGOs and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2020); Liliana B. Antonova, Governance Entrepreneurs: International Organizations and the Rise of Global Public–Private Partnerships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Sarah S. Stroup and Wendy H. Wong, “The Agency and Authority of International NGOs,” Perspectives on Politics 14 (1) (2016): 138–44; William E. DeMars and Dennis Dijkzeul, eds., The NGO Challenge for International Relations Theory (London: Routledge, 2015); and Thomas Davies, NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Two older books began the debate: Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998): and Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed., Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3. Dan Plesch and Thomas G. Weiss, eds., Wartime Origins and the Future United Nations (London: Routledge, 2015). 4. Kim D. Reimann, “A View from the Top: International Politics, Norms and the Worldwide Growth of NGOs,” International Studies Quarterly 50 (1) (2006): 45–68.

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160  5. Steve Charnovitz, “Two Centuries of Participation: NGOs and International Governance,” Michigan Journal of International Law 18 (2) (1997): 190. 6. Kjell Skjelsbaek, “The Growth of International Nongovernmental Organization in the Twentieth Century,” International Organization 25 (3) (1971): 429. 7. Mike Schroeder and Paul Wapner, “Non-governmental Organizations,” in The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, ed. Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 347. 8. Thomas Davies, “Understanding Non-Governmental Organizations in World Politics: The Promise and Pitfalls of the Early ‘Science of Internationalism’,” European Journal of International Relations 23 (4) (2017): 884–905. 9. Quoted by Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly, UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 387. 10. Kersten Martens, NGOs and the United Nations: Institutionalization, Professionalization and Adaptation (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 11. Kofi A. Annan, “Introduction,” “We the Peoples”: A UN for the 21st Century (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014), 11. 12. Panel on United Nations-Civil Society Relations, We the Peoples: Civil society, the United Nations and Global Governance, UN document A/58/817, June11, 2004. For a discussion, see Peter Willetts, “The Cardoso Report on the UN and Civil Society: Functionalism, Global Corporatism, or Global Democracy?” Global Governance 12 (3) (2006): 305–24. 13. Ibid., 387. 14. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 416. 15. In trying to develop a legal typology, Simon Chesterman—concerned with civil society accountability in conflicted zones—proposed a matrix of NGOs based on their activities (a spectrum from advocacy to operations) and drivers (a spectrum of motivations from supply to demand). His idea of a spectrum for NGOs activities simplifies two broad categories. We use “knowledge production” as the key for advocacy and education. See Simon Chesterman, “How ‘Public’ Is Public International Law? Toward a Typology of NGOs and Civil Society Actors,” Global Governance 24 (2) (2018): 163–5. 16. Thomas G. Weiss, ed., Beyond UN Subcontracting: Task-Sharing with Regional Security Arrangements and Service-Providing NGOs (London: Macmillan, 1998). 17. Oxfam, Expenditure Reporting period: 1st April 2016–31st March 2017, https://www.oxfam.org/en/annual-report-2016-2017/income-and-expenditure/ expenditure. 18. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 388. 19. International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), Who We Are, http://www.icbl. org/en-gb/about-us/who-we-are/the-icbl.aspx. 20. ICBL, About Us, http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/about-us.aspx.

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21. ICBL, A History of Landmines, http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/problem/a-history-oflandmines.aspx. 22. Ibid. 23. ICBL, Why the Ban, http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/problem/why-the-ban.aspx. 24. ICBL, The Treaty, http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/the-treaty/treaty-status.aspx. 25. Don Hubert, The Landmine Ban: A Case Study in Humanitarian Advocacy (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, 2000), Occasional Paper No. 42; Richard Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Landmines,” International Organization 52 (3) (1998): 613–44; Motoko Mekata, “Building Partnerships Toward a Common Goal: Experiences of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines,” in The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society, ed. Ann M. Florini (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 2000), 143–76; and Kenneth Anderson, “The Ottawa Convention on Banning Landmines, the Role of International Non-governmental Organizations and the Idea of International Civil Society,” European Journal of International Law 11 (1) (2000): 91–120. 26. ICBL, Timeline of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (1992–2017), http://www.icbl.org/en-gb/about-us/who-we-are/the-icbl.aspx. 27. Ibid. 28. Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, September 18, 1997, http://www. un.org/Depts/mine/UNDocs/ban_trty.htm. 29. Lloyd Axworthy, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada “AP Mine Ban: Progress Report, February 1997,” quoted by Kenneth R. Rutherford, “The Evolving Arms Control Agenda: Implications of the Role of NGOS in Banning Antipersonnel Landmines,” World Politics 53 (1) (2000): 74. 30. Nobel Prize, The Nobel Peace Prize 1997 Summary, https://www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/peace/1997/summary/. 31. Rutherford, “The Evolving Arms Control Agenda,” 74–114, at 76. 32. Price, “Reversing the Gun Sights.” 33. Chesterman, “How ‘Public’ Is Public International Law?” 162. 34. Maxwell A. Cameron, Robert J. Lawson, and Brian W. Tomlin, “To Walk Without Fear,” in To Walk Without Fear: The Global Movement to Ban Landmines, ed. Maxwell A. Cameron, Robert J. Lawson, and Brian W. Tomlin (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5 35. ICBL, A History of Landmines. 36. CMC, About Us, http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/en-gb/about-us.aspx. 37. CMC, The Treaty, http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/en-gb/the-treaty/globalban.aspx. 38. ICBL, Who We Are. 39. ICBL-CMC, Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, http://the-monitor.org/engb/home.aspx. 40. Coalition for the ICC, http://www.coalitionfortheicc.org/.

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162  41. Fanny Benedetti and John L. Washburn, “Drafting the International Criminal Court Treaty,” Global Governance 5 (1) (1999): 1–38; Heidi Nichols Haddad, “After the Norm Cascade: NGO Mission Expansion and the Coalition for the International Criminal Court,” Global Governance 19 (2) (2013): 187–206; and Marlies Glasius, The International Criminal Court: A Global Civil Society Achievement (London: Routledge, 2006). For the larger international judicial context, see Richard Goldstone and Adam Smith, International Judicial Institutions: The Architecture of International Justice at Home and Abroad, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2015); and David Bosco, Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 42. WFM-IGP, Coalition for the International Criminal Court, http://www.wfm-igp. org/slide/coalition-international-criminal-court. 43. Resolution ICC-ASP/2/Res.8,11 September 2003, http://www.legal.un.org/icc/asp/ 2ndsession/report/.../part_iv_res_8_e.pdf. 44. Program in Law and Public Affairs, The Princeton Principles on Universal Jurisdiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2001); Council on Foreign Relations, Toward an International Criminal Court? (New York, Council on Foreign Relations, 1999); and Steven R. Ratner and James L. Bischoff, eds., International War Crimes Trials: Making a Difference? (Austin: University of Texas Law School, 2004). 45. William Schabas, The International Criminal Court: A Commentary on the Rome Statute (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 46. Barack Obama, National Security Strategy (Washington, DC: The White House, 2010), www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strat egy.pdf. 47. Yuval Shany, “Assessing the Effectiveness of International Courts: A Goal-Based Approach,” American Journal of International Law 106 (2) (2012): 225–70. 48. David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 49. Martin J. Burke and Thomas G. Weiss, “The Security Council and Ad Hoc Tribunals: Law and Politics, Peace and Justice,” in Security Council Resolutions and Global Legal Regimes, ed. Trudy Fraser and Vesselin Popovksi (London: Routledge, 2014), 241–65. 50. For instance, the ICC has opened investigations into Northern Uganda, the DRC, and the CAR upon requests by those governments, into Darfur and Libya with requests from the Security Council, and into Kenya from the prosecutor. The investigation of post-election crimes in Côte d’Ivoire in late 2010 and early 2011 continue in the trial of Laurent Gbagbo, the first head of state to be taken into custody by the ICC. The court has issued arrest warrants for three other heads of state, but has not successfully prosecuted any: Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir (fugitive), Libya’s Muammar el-Gaddafi (dead), and Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta (charges withdrawn).

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51. Tatiana Carayannis, “Making Justice Work: The Bemba Case and the ICC’s Future,” Foreign Affairs, 5 April 2016. 52. Pascal Kambale, “A Story of Missed Opportunities,” in Contested Justice: The Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 171–97. 53. Ramesh Thakur, “Atrocity Crimes,” in Why Govern? Rethinking Demand and Progress in Global Governance, ed. Amitav Acharya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 31. 54. Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, Dharam Ghai, and Frédéric Lapeyre, UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 247–75. 55. Roberto Bissio, “The “Third UN”: Civil Society and the World Organization,” in Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development, ed. Stephen Browne and Thomas G. Weiss (London: Routledge, 2021), 184–97 For a depiction of earlier influences, see Paul K. Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 56. This theme is prevalent throughout the essays in Browne and Weiss, eds., Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development. 57. “Unsustainable Goals,” The Economist, March 28, 2015. 58. Stephen Browne and Thomas G. Weiss, “The UN’s Post-2015 Development Agenda—New Goals, New Leadership,” Great Decisions 2016 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 2016), 63–74. 59. Natalie Samarasinghe, “Human Rights and Sustainable Development: Together at Last?” in Routledge Handbook on the UN and Development, ed. Browne and Weiss. 80–95. 60. “Development Aid in 2015 Continues to Grow despite Costs for In-donor Refugees,” OECD, 13 April 2016. 61. “Unsustainable Goals,” The Economist, March 28, 2015. 62. Elisabeth Hege and Damien Demailly, “How Do NGOs Mobilize around the SDGs and What Are the Ways Forward? A French-German Comparison,” IDDRI Working Paper, July 2017, https://www.iddri.org/en/publications-and-even ts/document-de-travail/how-do-ngos-mobilize-around-sdgs-and-what-are-ways. 63. Teresa Whitfield, Friends Indeed? The United Nations, Groups of Friends, and the Resolution of Conflict (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2007), 9 and 2. 64. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 407. 65. Quoted by Weiss, et al, UN Voices, 390. 66. Kofi A. Annan, “What Is the International Community? Problems without Passports,” Foreign Policy, no. 132 (September/October 2002): 30–1. 67. Robert O’Brien, Anne-Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 68. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 398. 69. Jessica T. Matthews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs 76 (1) (1997): 50–66.

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Chapter 3 1. High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (New York: United Nations, 2004). 2. High-level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian aid, and the environment, Delivering as One, UN document A/61/ 583, November 20, 2006. 3. UN, Report of the High-Level Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (hereafter HIPPO), UN document A/70/95-S/2015/446, June 17, 2015; Advisory Group of Experts for the 2015 Review of United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, The Challenge of Sustaining Peace (hereafter AGE), June 29, 2015, http://www.un.org/pga/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/07/ 300615_The-Challenge-of-Sustaining-Peace.pdf; and UN Women, Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace (New York: UN Women, 2015). 4. https://www.icm2016.org/ and at http://www.stimson.org/content/reportcommission-global-security-justice-governance. 5. Sebastian von Einsedel and Alexandra Pichler Fong, The Rise of High-Level Panels: Implications for the New UN Secretary-General (Tokyo: UN University, 2017), UNU Centre for Policy Research, Occasional Paper 9, 2. 6. Quoted by Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly, UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 409 and 384. 7. Ramesh Thakur, Andrew F. Cooper, and John English, eds., International Commissions and the Power of Ideas (Tokyo: UN University Press, 2005); Unta Vesa, ed., Global Commissions Assessed (Helsinki: Edita Publishing, 2005); and Edward C. Luck, “Blue-ribbon Power: Independent Commissions and UN Reform,” International Studies Perspectives 1 (1) (2000): 89–104. 8. Commission on International Development, Partners in Development (New York: Praeger, 1969). 9. Independent Commission on International Development Issues, North–South: A Programme for Survival (London: Pan Books, 1980); and Common Crisis North-South: Co-operation for World Recovery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 10. Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). 11. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 12. Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, Winning the Human Race? (London: Zed Books, 1988). 13. South Commission, The Challenge to the South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 14. Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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15. ICISS, The Responsibility To Protect (Ottawa: Canadian International Development Institute, 2001); and Thomas G. Weiss and Don Hubert, The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, and Background (Ottawa: Canadian International Development Institute, 2001). 16. Commission on Human Security, Human Security Now (New York: Commission on Human Security, 2003). 17. D. H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report to the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972). The analysis was reviewed two decades later by D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows, and J. Randers, Beyond the Limits: A Global Collapse or a Sustainable Future (London: Earthscan, 1992). 18. Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Preventing Deadly Conflict (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1997). 19. Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, UN document A/55/305S/2000/809, August 21, 2000. 20. Thomas G. Weiss and Ramesh Thakur, Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 21. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 383. 22. Von Einsedel and Fong, The Rise of High-Level Panels, 4. 23. Edward C. Luck, Cultural Genocide and the Protection of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Trust, 2018), Occasional Papers in Cultural Heritage Policy Number 2, 15. 24. UN, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, UN document A/55/ 305 – S/2000/809, August 21, 2000, viii. 25. Max Harrelson, Fires All around the Horizon: The UN’s Uphill Battle to Preserve the Peace (New York: Praeger, 1989), 89. 26. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York: UN, 1992); and Addendum to “An Agenda for Peace” (New York: UN, 1995). 27. Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joachim A. Koops, Norrie MacQueen, Thierry Tardy, and Paul D. Williams, eds., Oxford Handbook of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, Understanding Peacekeeping, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); Paul Diehl and Alexandru Balas, Peace Operations, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity, 2014); and Sebastian von Einsedel, David Malone, and Bruno Stagno, eds., The United Nations Security Council: From Cold War to the 21st Century (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2016). 28. Roland Paris, “Broadening Peace Operations,” International Studies Review 2 (3) (2000): 27–44. 29. UN, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operation, viii. 30. Jaïr van der Lijn and Timo Smit, “The State of Peace Operations: An Interview with Lakhdar Brahimi, 31 October 2016,” https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topicalbackgrounder/2016/state-peace-operations-interview-lakhdar-brahimi.

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166  31. UN, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operation, ix–xiv. 32. Faye Leone, “Conflict Prevention Is ‘The Priority,’ Says UN Secretary-General, 12 January 2017.” IISD, SDG Knowledge Hub. http://sdg.iisd.org/news/conflictprevention-is-the-priority-says-un-secretary-general/. 33. UN, “Press Release SC/6759—UN Secretary-General Says Global Effort against Armed Conflict Needs Change from ‘Culture of Reaction to Culture of Prevention,’” November 29, 1999, at https://www.un.org/press/en/1999/19991129.sc6759.doc. html. 34. UN, A New Partnership Agenda: Charting a New Horizon for UN Peacekeeping, July 2009, available at https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/newhorizon_ 0.pdf. 35. Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, William R. Phillips, and Salvator Cusimano, Improving Security of United Nations Peacekeepers: We Need to Change the Way We Are Doing Business, https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/improving_ security_of_united_nations_peacekeepers_report.pdf. 36. UN, United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines, UN document DPKO/DFS2008, https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/blog/document/unitednations-peacekeeping-operations-principles-and-guidelines-the-capstone-doctrine/. 37. Thomas G. Weiss, David P. Forsythe, Roger A. Coate, and Kelly-Kate Pease, The United Nations and Changing World Politics, 8th edn expanded and updated (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2019), ch. 4. 38. UN, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, x. 39. David M. Malone and Ramesh Thakur, “UN Peacekeeping: Lessons Learned?” Global Governance 7 (1) (2001): 14. 40. UN, HIPPO, vii. 41. van der Lijn and Smit, “An interview with Lakhdar Brahimi.” 42. Ibid., 8. 43. UN, Information note on High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations, June 16, 2015. https://www.un.org/undpa/en/speeches-statements/16062015/HIPPOreport 44. UN, HIPPO, 67–9. For an overview of the effort to emphasize the political, or deemphasize the military, aspects of UN peace operations, see Louise Riis Andersen, “The HIPPO in the Room: The Pragmatic Pushback from the UN Peace Bureaucracy against the Militarization of Peackeeping,” International Affairs 94 (2) (2018): 343–61. 45. Radhika Coomaraswamy, Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing The Peace: A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (New York: UN Women: 2015), http://wps.unwomen.org/index. html 46. UN, AGE. 47. UN, HIPPO, 9–15. 48. UN, HIPPO, 24.

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49. Youssef Mahmoud and Anupah Makoond, Sustaining Peace: What Does It Mean in Practice? April 2017. https://www.ipinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ 1704_Sustaining-Peace-final.pdf. 50. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2018-03-28/secretary-generalsremarks-security-council-high-level-debate 51. Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, “The United Nations: Continuity and Change,” in The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, ed. Weiss and Daws, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–40; and Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, “Change and Continuity in Global Governance,” Ethics & International Affairs 29 (4) (2015): 391–5 and 397–406. 52. Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). Contrary interpretations are Rajan Menon, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Graham Harrison, “Onwards and Sidewards? The Curious Case of the Responsibility to Protect and Mass Violence in Africa,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10 (2) (2016): 143–61. 53. Frances M. Deng et al., Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996). For a history, see Thomas G. Weiss and David A. Korn, Internal Displacement: Conceptualization and its Consequences (London: Routledge, 2006). 54. “Displacement Studies and the Role of Universities,” lecture by Francis Deng to a Conference of the German Academic Exchange Service, University of Kassel, Germany, June 2002. 55. Peter J. Hoffman and Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarianism, War, and Politics: Solferino to Syria and Beyond (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). 56. Gareth Evans, “Commission Diplomacy,” in International Commissions and the Power of Ideas, ed. Thakur, Cooper, and English, 278–302; and Daisuke Madokoro, “International Commissions as Norm Entrepreneurs: Crating the Normative Idea of the Responsibility to Protect,” International Studies Review 45 (1) (2019): 100–19. 57. Kofi A. Annan, The Question of Intervention and “We the Peoples”: The United Nations in the 21st Century (New York: UN, 2000). 58. Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization, UN document A/ 54/1 (New York: UN, 1999), 48. 59. Thomas G. Weiss, “Moving Beyond North–South Theatre,” Third World Quarterly 30 (2) (2009): 271–84. 60. Round tables and consultative meetings were held, in chronological order, in Ottawa, Geneva, London, Maputo, Washington DC, Santiago, Cairo, Paris, New Delhi, Beijing, and St. Petersburg. See Weiss and Hubert, The Responsibility to Protect: Research, Bibliography, and Background, 349–98. 61. Annan, The Question of Intervention, 7. 62. UN, 2005 World Summit Outcome, General Assembly resolution A/Res/60/1, 24 October 2006, paras 138–9.

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168  63. Interpretations by commissioners are Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2008); and Ramesh Thakur, The United Nations, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See also Alex J. Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Anne Orford, International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Aidan Hehir, The Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric, Reality and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2012); and Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention. 64. Evans, The Responsibility to Protect, 28. 65. HLP, A More Secure World, para. 203. 66. Kofi A. Annan, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All (New York: United Nations, 2005). 67. For up-to-date tallies, see the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect: https://www.globalr2p.org/resources/un-security-council-resolutions-and-presidentialstatements-referencing-r2p/. 68. Thomas G. Weiss and Barbara Crossette, “The United Nations: Post-Summit Outlook,” in Great Decisions 2006 (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 2006), 9–20. 69. José E. Alvarez, International Organizations as Law-makers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 591. 70. Alexander J. Bellamy, “What Will Become of the Responsibility to Protect?” Ethics & International Affairs 20 (2) (2006): 143–69. 71. Summaries from the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, http:// globalr2p.org/advocacy/index.php. 72. Ban Ki-moon, Implementing the Responsibility to Protect, Report of the SecretaryGeneral, UN document A/63/677, January 12, 2009. 73. Rama Mani and Thomas G. Weiss, eds., The Responsibility to Protect: Cultural Perspectives in the Global South (London: Routledge, 2011). 74. Gareth Evans, “The Limits of Sovereignty: The Case of Mass Atrocity Crimes,” Prism 5 (3) (2015): 3. 75. Thomas G. Weiss, “RtoP Alive and Well After Libya,” Ethics & International Affairs 25 (3) (2011): 287–92. 76. “Letter Dated 9 November 2011 from the Permanent Representative of Brazil to the United Nations Addressed to the Secretary-General,” UN document A/66/ 551-S/2011/701, p. 1. 77. Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 78. Nico Schrijver, The UN and the Resource Management: Development without Destruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

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79. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 80. Julie Fisher, The Road from Rio: Sustainable Development and the Nongovernmental Movement in the Third World (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1993). 81. For instance, on marine resources, the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (1973–1982) defined the sovereign rights of coastal states and introduced the international deep-sea-bed regime, based on the nascent principle of the common heritage of humankind. 82. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/. 83. In addition, in 1969 Secretary-General U Thant alerted the General Assembly: “For the first time in the history of mankind, there is arising a crisis of worldwide proportion involving developed and developing countries—the crisis of the human environment.” United Nations, Problems of the Human Environment: Report of the Secretary-General (New York: UN, 1969), 4. 84. Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament on Mankind (London: Pan, 1972). 85. Alden Lowell Doud, “International Environmental Developments: Perceptions of Developing and Developed Countries,” Natural Resources Journal 12 (520) (1972): 520–9. 86. Development and Environment, Report of a Panel of Experts Convened by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Founex, Switzerland, 4–12 June 1971, paras 2 and 4, reproduced as Annex I of UN document A/CONF.48/10, December 22, 1971. 87. Quoted by Maurice Strong, “Policy Lessons Learned in a Thirty Years’ Perspective,” Ministry of the Environment, Stockholm Thirty Years On (Stockholm: Ministry of the Environment, 2003), 16. 88. Report of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 5–16 June 1972, UN document A/CONF.48/14/Rev.1 (New York: UN 1973) UN sales no. E.73.II.A.14. 89. Quoted by Weiss, et. al, UN Voices, 413. 90. Maria Ivanova, The Untold Story of the World’s Premier Environmental Institution: UNEP at Fifty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021). 91. World Commission on Environment and Growth, Our Common Future, 8. 92. UN, General Assembly 85th Plenary Meeting. UN document A/RES/44/228, December 22, 1989, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/44/ares44-228.htm. 93. Report of The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, June 3–14, 1992, UN document A/CONF.151/26 (Vol. I), August 12, 1992, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm. 94. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 219. 95. Four documents were published between September 2013 and November 2014 in preparation for COP21. The most recent was Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report (Geneva: IPCC, 2014), www.ipcc.ch.

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170  96. IPCC, “Press Release: IPCC Agrees Special Reports, AR6 Work Plan, April 14, 2016,” available at https://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/pdf/press/160414_pr_ p43.pdf. 97. Nigel Lawson, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming (London: Duckworth Overlook, 2008). 98. Stephen J. Macekura, Of Limits and Growth: The Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 99. https://www.ssrc.org/publications/view/the-field-of-climate-and-security-a-scanof-the-literature/ 100. Ken Conca, An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global Environmental Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 101. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 378. 102. UN, AGE, 7–8. 103. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 384. 104. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 384. 105. Edward C. Luck, “UN Reform Commissions: Is Anyone Listening?” speech on May 16, 2002 at the University of Waterloo conference on “The Ideas Institutional Nexus.” See also his “Blue Ribbon Power: Independent Commissions and UN Reform,” International Studies Perspectives 1(1) (2000): 89–104. 106. See the counter-factual analysis by Thomas G. Weiss, Would the World Be Better without the UN? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). 107. Von Einsedel and Fong, The Rise of High-Level Panels, 6.

Chapter 4 1. Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, and Thomas G. Weiss, UN Ideas That Changed the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), and Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly, UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). For the other titles, http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/index.php?cPath= 1037_3130_3369. 2. Nanette Svenson, The United Nations as a Knowledge System (London: Routledge, 2016). 3. James G. McGann and Richard Sabatini, Global Think Tanks (London: Routledge, 2011). 4. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 373. 5. Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, UN document A/55/305. S/2000/809, quotes from paras 65, 68, and 67. 6. Elizabeth Sellwood, “Informing the United Nations: The Practice of Analysis in the Department of Political Affairs,” Knowledge Project Working Paper, 16 December 2002.

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7. Ibid., 8–9. 8. Simon Chesterman, Secretary or General? The UN Secretary-General in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 9. Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjöld (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). 10. Marrack Goulding, Practical Measures to Enhance the United Nations’ Effectiveness in the Field of Peace and Security: A Report Submitted to the Secretary-General, New York, June 1997. 11. Report of the High-level Independent Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, UN document A/70/95-S/2015/446, June 17, 2015, para. 172. 12. Advisory Group of Experts for the 2015 Review of United Nations Peacebuilding Architecture, The challenge of sustaining peace, June 29, 2015, para. 104, http:// www.un.org/pga/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/07/300615_The-Challenge-ofSustaining-Peace.pdf. 13. United Nations, “Terms of Reference for the New/Revised EOSG Posts and Units, January 1, 2017,” https://www.un.int/sites/www.un.int/files/Permanent% 20Missions/delegate/eosg_terms_of_reference.pdf. 14. Duncan Green, How Change Happens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 15. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 388. 16. Charles Petrie, Report of the Secretary-General’s Internal Review Panel on United Nations Action in Sri Lanka, Geneva, November 2012, https://digitallibrary.un. org/record/737299?ln=en 17. Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Richard Jolly, and Frances Stewart, Adjustment with a Human Face: Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth—A Study by UNICEF (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 18. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 219. 19. Diane Stone, Global Knowledge Networks and International Development (London: Routledge, 2005); Janice Gross Stein, Richard Stren, Joy Fitzgibbon, and Melissa MacLean, Networks of Knowledge: Collaborative Innovation in International Learning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 20. Petru Dumitriu, Knowledge Management in the United Nations System, UN document JIU/REP/2016/10 (Geneva: JIU, 2016). 21. Emanuel Adler and Peter M. Haas, “Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program,” International Organization 46 (1) (1992): 367–90. 22. Leon Gordenker, Roger A. Coate, Christer Jonsson, and Peter Soderholm, International Cooperation in Response to AIDS (London: Pinter, 1995); and Peter M. Haas, Robert O. Keohane, and Marc A. Levy, eds., Institutions for the Earth: Sources of Effective International Environmental Protection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 23. Peter A. Hall, “Introduction,” in The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynsianism Across Nations, ed. Peter A. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 26.

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172  24. Louis Emmerij, Richard Jolly, and Thomas G. Weiss, Ahead of the Curve? UN Ideas and Global Challenges (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 26–42. 25. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 373. 26. Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and Ten Reports from Thematic Task Forces, available at www.un millenniumproject.org. 27. James G. McGann, ed., Think Tanks and Policy Advice in the US: Academics, Advisors and Advocates (London: Routledge, 2007). 28. 2018 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=think_tanks, 35–6. 29. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, “Political Approaches,” in The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, ed. Thomas G. Weiss and Sam Daws, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 54. 30. Morgan Meyer, “The Rise of the Knowledge Broker,” Science Communication 32 (1) (2010): 118–27. 31. Roman Kislov, et al., “The ‘Dark Side’ of Knowledge Brokering,” Journal of Health Services Research and Policy 22 (2) (2017): 108. 32. https://www.crisisgroup.org/who-we-are/history 33. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 373. 34. https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/27557/how-to-win-readers-andinfluence-officials-as-a-multilateral-pundit. 35. Baz Lecocq, Gregory Mann, Bruce Whitehouse, Dida Badi, Lotte Pelckmans, Nadia Belalimat, Bruce Hall, and Wolfram Lacher, “One Hippopotamus and Eight Blind Analysts: A Multivocal Analysis of the 2012 Political Crisis in the Divided Republic of Mali,” Review of African Political Economy 137 (2013): 343–57. 36. Meyer, “The Rise of the Knowledge Broker,” 123. 37. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 408. 38. Interview, February 10, 2020, New York. 39. Karen Bogenschneider and Thomas J. Corbett, Evidence-Based Policymaking (New York: Routledge, 2010), 24. 40. https://www.ipinst.org/about/mission-history. 41. https://www.ipinst.org/about/mission-history. 42. https://www.ipinst.org/about/center-for-peace-operations. 43. https://www.ssrc.org/programs/view/cppf/. The concept of the “think bridge” was suggested to Gillian Sheehan during an interview she conducted with former CPPF associate director Stephen Jackson in 2018, while working on a review of CPPF. 44. UNU’s James Cockayne dubbed this expert briefing the “Carayannis formula” after its CPPF convener, as it approximated the Security Council’s Arria formula sessions, the Council’s informal meetings with civil society begun in March 1992. 45. https://i.unu.edu/media/cpr.unu.edu/attachment/3593/UNUCPRStrategyWeb.pdf.

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46. Colum Lynch, “Bolton Builds Anti-China Campaign at the UN,” Foreign Policy, April 3, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/03/bolton-builds-anti-chinacampaign-at-the-u-n/ 47. W. Andy Knight, S. Neil MacFarlane, and Thomas G. Weiss, “Swan Song,” Global Governance 11 (4) (2005): 527–35; and Leon Gordenker and Christer Jonsson, “Evolution in Knowledge and Norms,” in The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations, ed. Weiss and Daws, 104–15. 48. Kathryn C. Lavelle, The Challenges of Multilateralism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 49. UN Office in Geneva, “The End of the League of Nations,” https://www.unog.ch/ 80256EDD006AC19C/(httpPages)/BA9387B56BFAAFB4C1256F3100418C75? OpenDocument. 50. Hans N. Weiler, “Whose Knowledge Matters? Development and the Politics of Knowledge,” in Entwicklung als Beruf, Festschrift für Peter Molt, ed. Theodor Hanf, Hans N. Weiler, and Helga Dickow, 485–96, at 487. 51. Quoted by Weiss et al., UN Voices, 391. 52. Mahmoud Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). 53. Howard W. French, “The Darfur the West Isn’t Recognizing as It Moralizes About the Region,” New York Times, March 29, 2009. 54. Meyer, “The Rise of the Knowledge Broker,” 122. 55. Thomas G. Weiss, Would the World Be Better without the UN? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). 56. Green, How Change Happens, 62. 57. Weiler, “Whose Knowledge,” 488.

Chapter 5 1. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70 (1) (1990/91): 23–33. 2. George Magnus, Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy? (London: Wiley & Sons, 2010). 3. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 6–11. 4. Andrew F. Cooper, “Labels Matter: Interpreting Rising Powers through Acronyms,” in Rising States, Rising Institutions, ed. Alan S. Alexandroff and Andrew F. Cooper (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2010), 76. 5. Andrew F. Cooper and Ramesh Thakur, The Group of Twenty (G20) (London: Routledge, 2013). 6. Andrew F. Cooper and Bessma Momani, “Re-balancing the G-20 from Efficiency to Legitimacy: The 3G Coalition and the Practice of Global Governance,” Global Governance 20 (2) (2014): 213–32.

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174  7. David Held and Charles Rogers, “Introduction: Global Governance at Risk,” in Global Governance at Risk, ed. David Held and Charles Roger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 6. 8. Robert Wade, “Western States in Global Organizations,” in ibid., 81. 9. Quoted by Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly, UN Voices: The Quest for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 394. 10. See “Principles from the Periphery: The Neglected Southern Sources of Global Norms,” a special section with contributions by Eric Helleiner, Martha Finnemore, Michelle Jurkovich, Kathryn Sikkink, and Amitav Acharya, Global Governance 20 (3) (2014): 359–481. 11. Thomas G. Weiss and Pallavi Roy, eds., The UN and the Global South, 1945 and 2015: Past as Prelude? (London: Routledge, 2017). 12. Thomas G. Weiss and Ariana Erthal Abdenur, eds., Emerging Powers and the UN: What Kind of Development Partnership? (London; Routledge, 2016). 13. Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order (Cambridge: Polity 2014). 14. Charles T. Call and Cedric de Coning, eds., Rising Powers and Peacebuilding: Breaking the Mold? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 15. See Eduarda Passarelli Hamann and Carlos A.R. Teixeira, “Brazil’s Participation in MINUSTAH (2004-2017): Perceptions, Lessons and Practices for Future Missions” Special Issue, Rio de Janeiro: Igarapé Institute, 2017. 16. Adriana Erthal Abdenur and Danilo Marcondes, “Democratization by Association? Brazil’s Social Policy Cooperation in Africa,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 29 (4) (2016): 1–19. 17. Arturo C. Sotomayor Velázquez, “Why Some States Participate in UN Peace Missions While Others Do Not: An Analysis of Civil–Military Relations and Its Effects on Latin America’s Contributions to Peacekeeping Operations,” Security Studies 19 (1) (2010): 160–95. 18. Eduarda P. Hamann, A Força de uma Trajetória: o Brasil e as operações de paz da ONU (1948–2015), Instituto Igarapé, Nota Estratégica 19 (October 2015). 19. Adriana Abdenur and Charles T. Call, “A Brazilian Way? Brazil’s Approach to Peacebuilding,” in Rising Powers and Peacebuilding, ed. Call and de Coning, 15–38. 20. http://dados.gov.br/dataset/atividades-em-missao-de-paz-no-haiti. 21. Carlos C. V. Braga, “MINUSTAH and the Security Environment in Haiti: Brazil and South American Cooperation in the Field,” International Peacekeeping 17 (5) (2010): 711–22. 22. Kai M. Kenkel, “ ‘South America’s Emerging Power: Brazil as Peacekeeper,” International Peacekeeping 17 (5) (2010), 644–61. 23. Ibid. 24. Marcos Tourinho, Oliver Stuenkel, and Sarah Brockmeier,“ ‘Responsibility while Protecting’: Reforming R2P Implementation,” Global Society 30 (1) (2016): 134–50.

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25. Abdenur and Call, “A Brazilian Way?” 26. Jennifer Welsh, Patrick Quinton-Brown, and Victor MacDiarmid, “Resposta do Brasil da Responsabilidade ao Proteger: a perspectiva canadense,” Política Externa 21 (4) (2013): 27–34. 27. Xenia Azvenov, “ ‘Responsibility while Protecting’: Are We Asking the Wrong Questions?” January 30, 2013, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, https://www.sipri.org/node/409. 28. Abdenur and Marcondes, “Democratization by Association?” 29. https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/troop-and-police-contributors. 30. Kabilan Krishnasamy, “A Case for India’s ‘Leadership’ in United Nations Peacekeeping,” International Studies 47 (2–4) (2010): 225–46. 31. Alan Bullion, “India in Sierra Leone: A Case of Muscular Peacekeeping?” International Peacekeeping 8 (4) (2001): 77–91; and Frank Van Rooyen, Blue Helmets for Africa: India’s Peacekeeping in Africa, SAIIA Occasional Paper n. 60, 2010, Emerging Powers and Global Challenges Programme. http://www. operationspaix.net/DATA/DOCUMENT/4760~v~Blue_Helmets_for_Africa__India_ s_Peacekeeping_in_Africa.pdf. 32. Bullion, “India in Sierra Leone,” and Krishnasamy, “A Case for India’s ‘Leadership.’” 33. Richard Gowan, “How Africa Outflanked India at the UN” Pragati, June 2, 2013, http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/2013/06/how-africa-outflanked-india-at-the-un. 34. Rosemary Foot, China, the UN, and Human Protection: Beliefs, Power, Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 35. Zhang, “China and UN peacekeeping: From Condemnation to Participation,” International Peacekeeping 3 (3) (1996): 1–15, at 2. 36. International Crisis Group, “China’s Growing Role in UN Peacekeeping,” Asia Report No. 166, 2009, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/north-east-asia/china/chinas-growing-role-un-peacekeeping. 37. Zhang, “China and UN Peacekeeping.” 38. Monthly summary of contributors as of March 9, 2020, UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/troop-and-policecontributors. 39. UN, “Annan Tours China’s New Peacekeeping Training Centre” UN News, October 12, 2004, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=12197&Cr= china&Cr1=. 40. “China Opens Up 1st peacekeeping Training Center,” Xinhua, June 25, 2009, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-06/25/content_8324367.htm. 41. Huang Chin-Hao, “Principles and Praxis of China’s Peacekeeping,” International Peacekeeping 18 (3) (2011): 257–70. 42. Courtney J. Richardson, “A Responsible Power? China and the UN Peacekeeping Regime,” International Peacekeeping 18 (3) (2011): 286–97. 43. Saferworld “China’s Growing Role in African Peace and Security” 62, 2011, file:/// C:/Users/carayannis/Downloads/Chinas%20Growing%20Role%20in%20African %20Peace%20and%20Security.pdf.

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176  44. Lei Zhao, “Two Pillars of China’s Global Peace Engagement Strategy: UN Peacekeeping and International Peacebuilding,” International Peacekeeping 18 (3) (2011): 344–62. 45. Christoph Zürcher, “30 Years of Chinese Peacekeeping,”Centre for International Policy Studies, University of Ottawa, 2019, https://www.cips-cepi.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2019/01/30YearsofChinesePeacekeeping-FINAL-Jan23-1.pdf. 46. International Crisis Group, China’s Foreign Policy Experiment in South Sudan, Asia Report N.º 288 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2017). 47. International Crisis Group, China’s Growing Role in UN Peacekeeping; and Zürcher, “30 Years of Chinese Peacekeeping.” 48. Miwa Hirono and Marc Lanteigne, “Introduction: China and UN Peacekeeping,” International Peacekeeping 18 (3) (2011): 243–56, at 243. 49. Courtney J. Fung, “China’s Troop Contributions to UN Peacekeeping,” United States Institute of Peace, 212, July 2016. 50. Li Dongyan, “China’s Participation in UN Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding: Prospects and Ways Forward,” Foreign Affairs Review, 2012, https://gaodawei. wordpress.com/2015/11/06/cass-scholar-on-chinas-participation-in-un-peacekeepingand-peacebuilding-prospects-and-ways-forward/. 51. Zhao, “Two Pillars of China’s Global Peace Engagement Strategy.” 52. Thanks to Lina Benabdallah for this insight. See also Julia O. Rosa, “A Different Peacebuilding? China’s Contribution to the Debate and Practices,” Master’s thesis, Renmin University of China, 2018. 53. Tatiana Carayannis and Nathaniel Olin, “A Preliminary Mapping Study of ChinaAfrica Knowledge Networks,” SSRC 2012, https://www.ssrc.org/publications/ view/a-preliminary-mapping-of-china-africa-knowledge-networks/. 54. There is a significant body of literature, most visibly by Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is Another Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). 55. Li Dongyan, 2018. “China’s International Peacekeeping Operations—Concepts and Models” (in Chinese) https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/BwJ5t8dhMm1PBNlMfSKQZQ. 56. Colum Lynch, “China’s Soft-Power Grab,” Foreign Policy, 14 August 2020, https:// foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/14/china-soft-power-united-nations-hong-kongcrackdown/. 57. https://www.cigionline.org/publications/deeper-look-chinas-going-out-policy. 58. Mathieu Duchatel, Richard Gowan, and Manuel Rapnouil, Into Africa: China’s Global Security Shift, Policy Brief (Brussels: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2016). 59. Colum Lynch and Robbie Grammer, “Outfoxed and Outgunned: How China Routed the U.S. in a UN Agency,” October 23, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/ 2019/10/23/china-united-states-fao-kevin-moley/. 60. Lynch and Grammer, “Outfoxed and Outgunned.” 61. Shi Jingtao, “China at 70 Aims to Strive for Lead Role in Post-Cold War International Order,” South China Morning Post, September 23, 2019.

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62. Quoted by Jingtao, ibid. 63. Xue Lei, 2017. “China’s Development-Oriented Peacekeeping Strategy in Africa,” in China and Africa: Building Peace and Security Cooperation on the Continent, ed. Chris Alden, et al. (Basingstroke, UK: PalgraveMacmillan, 2018), 93. 64. Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi, “The Coronavirus Could Reshape Global Order: China Is Maneuvering for International Leadership as the United States Falters,” Foreign Affairs, March 18, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ 2020-03-18/coronavirus-could-reshape-global-order. 65. Ishan Tharoor, “No One Will Win the U.S. and China Coronavirus Contest,” Washington Post, March 30, 2020. 66. “ ‘Enhance Solidarity’ to Fight COVID-19, Chinese President Urges, also Pledges Carbon Neutrality by 2060,” UN News, 22 September 2020, https://news.un.org/ en/story/2020/09/1073052. 67. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacyinvasion 68. See Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 69. Paul Evans, “Canada Caught in the Vortex of US–China Techo-Nationalism, East Asia Forum, 28 February 2019, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/02/26/can ada-caught-in-the-vortex-of-us-china-techno-nationalism/. 70. Tagi Segafi-Nejad with John Dunning, The UN and Transnational Corporations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 71. Georg Kell, “Relations with the Private Sector,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Organizations, ed. Jacob Katz Cogan, Ian Hurd, and Ian Johnstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 730–73. 72. John Gerard Ruggie, “global_governance.net: The Global Compact as Learning Network,” Global Governance 7 (4) (2001): 371–8. See also Jean-Philippe Thérien and Vincent Pouliot, “The Global Compact: Shifting the Politics of International Development?” Global Governance 12 (1) (2006): 55–75; and Klaus Schwab, “Global Corporate Citizenship: Working with Governments and Civil Society,” Foreign Affairs 87 (1) (2008): 107–18. 73. Oliver F. Williams, Corporate Social Responsibility: The Role of Business in Sustainable Development (London: Routledge, 2014). 74. John Gerard Ruggie, “Business and Human Rights: The Evolving International Agenda,” American Journal of International Law 101 (4) (2007): 819–40, at 819; and Promotion and Protection of all Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development, UN document A/ HRC/8/5, April 7, 2008. 75. https://www.unglobalcompact.org/. 76. UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2018, http://unctad.org/en/Pages/DIAE/ World%20Investment%20Report/WIR-Series.aspx. 77. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 390.

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178  78. C. Wardle and H. Derakhshan, Information Disorder: Towards an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Paking (Brussels: Council of Europe, 2017), https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-towardan-interdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html. 79. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1057883024887607297 80. Danah Boyd, et al., The Networked Nature of Algorithmic Discrimination, Open Technology Institute, https://www.danah.org/papers/2014/DataDiscrimination. pdf. 81. António Guterres, “Remarks to the Human Rights Council,” February 25, 2019, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2019-02-25/remarks-the-humanrights-council. 82. Tatiana Carayannis, “Rethinking the Politics of Violent Conflict,” Items, January 23, 2018, https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-programs/rethinking-the-politics-ofviolent-conflict/. 83. http://www.un.org/en/digital-cooperation-panel/. 84. United Nations, “Interdependence in a Digital Age,” 2019, https://www.un.org/en/ pdfs/DigitalCooperation-report-for%20web.pdf. 85. “The Digital Side of the Belt and Road Initiative is Growing, The Economist, Special Report, 6 February 2020, https://www.economist.com/special-report/ 2020/02/06/the-digital-side-of-the-belt-and-road-initiative-is-growing. 86. Richard Gowan and Anthony Dworkin, “Three Crises and an Opportunity: Europe’s Stake in Multilateralism,” European Council on Foreign Relations, 2019. https://www.ecfr.eu/page/-/three_crises_and_an_opportunity_europes_ stake_in_multilateralism.pdf. 87. Social Science Research Council “To Secure Knowledge: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good,” Report of the SSRC To Secure Knowledge Task Force, 2018. https://www.ssrc.org/to-secure-knowledge/ 88. UN Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office and Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Financing the UN Development System: Time for Hard Choices (Uppsala, Sweden: DH, 2019), 13. 89. UNDP, A Study of the Capacity of the United Nations Development System (Geneva: UN, 1969), document DP/5.

Chapter 6 1. António Guterres, Annual Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization 2020, https://www.un.org/annualreport/ [un.org], 32–51. 2. Alfin Tofler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks Translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 276. 4. “President Trump Directs his Administration to Halt Payments to the World Health Organization,” April 14, 2020, https://to.pbs.org/2VrBbjq.

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5. UNDESA, “Covid-19 to Slash Global Economic Output by $8.5 trillion over Next Two Years,” 13 May 2020, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/poli cy/wesp-mid-2020-report.html. 6. Francis Fukuyama, “The Pandemic and Political Order: It Takes a State,” Foreign Affairs 99 (4) (2020): 31. 7. “How Covid-19 Will Change Us: Insights from around the World,” Noema, June 8, 2020, https://www.noemamag.com/yuval-harari-elif-shafak-dambisa-moyoeric-schmidt-how-covid-will-change-us/ 8. Matt Apuzzo and David D. Kirkpatrick, “Racing for Cure, Scientists Unite in Global Effort,” New York Times, April 2, 2020. 9. Quoted by Thomas G. Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis, Louis Emmerij, and Richard Jolly, UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 342. 10. Edgar Morin, On Complexity (NJ: Hampton Press, 2008), 5. 11. Janice Gross Stein, Richard Stren, Joy Fitzgibbon, and Melissa Maclean, Networks of Knowledge: Collaborative Innovation in International Learning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 17. 12. Quoted in ibid., 20. 13. See “The UN at 75,” a special issue of Global Governance 20 (2) (2020). 14. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Liam Collins, Kristen G. Decaires, and Jacob S. Shapiro, “The Pitfalls and Possibilities of the Measurement Revolution: Commentary,” The National Security Review, January 16, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/ 01/the-pitfalls-and-possibilities-of-the-measurement-revolution-for-nationalsecurity/. 15. Quoted by Weiss, et al., UN Voices, 384–5. 16. The Social Science Research Council Task Force Report To Secure Knowledge https://www.ssrc.org/to-secure-knowledge/#executive-summary. 17. Alondra Nelson and David A. Banks, “Concept Note Detailing Anticipatory Social Research,” Social Science Research Council, October 9, 2018. 18. International Commission on Multilateralism, Pulling Together: The Multilateral System and Its Future (New York: International Peace Institute, 2016). 19. Kenneth W. Abbott, Jessica F. Green, and Robert O. Keohane, “Organizational Ecology and Institutional Change in Global Governance,” International Organization 70 (2) (2016), 247–77. 20. Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850 (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).

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Index Note: Tables, figures, and boxes are indicated by an italic ‘t’, ‘f ’, and ‘b’, respectively, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. A4P (Action for Peacekeeping) 75 Abbott, Kenneth W. 33–4 Abramowitz, Morton 106–7 Academic Council on the United Nations System 115 academics see scholars Acharya, Amitav 12 Activism 43, 116 activism/knowledge relation 116 indigenous activists, persecution of 43 Adedeji, Adebayo 27–8, 66 Adelphi (Germany) 99 advocacy advocacy and education INGOs 47 advocacy NGOs 116, 141–2 advocacy/research relation 115–16 Afghanistan 38–9, 97 Africa China and 127–8 ICC 54–6, 162n.50 Aga Khan, Sadruddin 65 AGE (Advisory Group of Experts on Peacebuilding) 63, 74, 91–2, 124 UN Secretariat: independent analytical capability 97–8 AI (Amnesty International) 47 AI (artificial intelligence) 135, 143 Alibaba Group 63 Allende, Salvatore 132–3 alternative voices 12, 120 in battleground of ideas and Third UN 122–32 Brazil 120, 124–6 China 120, 126–31 criticism of 114–15

developing countries 123 emerging powers 12, 114–15, 120, 131 India 126 for-profit businesses 12, 120 new media 120 technology 120, 132–7 see also Brazil; China; digital technology; India; information; postwar order; technology Alvarez, José 80 Andonova, Liliana B. 9 Annan, Kofi 21, 29, 44, 61, 69, 77, 145 In Larger Freedom 79 High-level Panels 63 “problems without passports” 61 R2P/humanitarian intervention 78–9, 90, 101 as SG 95 Anstee, Margaret Joan 95, 138 Arizpe, Lourdes 144 armed conflict 135 artificial intelligence in 135 drones 135 see also wars Arria, Diego 47–8 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 119 Atwood, Brian 69 AU (African Union) 35, 73–4, 119 AU/UN partnership 111–12 ICC and 55 authoritarian regimes 37–8, 43 Avant, Deborah 34 Axworthy, Lloyd 49–50, 77

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182  Ban Ki-moon 63, 72, 80–1 2012 Petrie Report 100 human rights abuses and looming crises 100 three pillars 80–1 Barnett, Michael 8, 18, 104–5 Barrata, Joseph 8 Bensouda, Fatou 52 Better World Fund 115 Biden, Joseph 89 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 63 Blaustein, Jacob 16 Bogenschneider, Karen 111 Bolsanaro 12–13, 89, 144 Bolton, John 53–4 Bosnia 76 Boulding, Elise 122–3 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 27–8, 69 Addendum to “An Agenda for Peace” 68–9 An Agenda for Peace 68–9 Brahimi, Lahkdar 66, 69, 96–7 Brahimi report 11, 67–71, 89–90 2000 Panel on United Nations Peace Operations 69 HIPPO and 72–5 importance of 71–2 knowledge brokers 105 need to improve analytical capacity and strengthen knowledge management 95–6 prerequisites for successful peacekeeping operations 70 recommendations 70–1, 73, 96–7 see also peace operations Brandt, Willy 65–6 Brazil alternative voices 120, 124–6 “Brazilian way” of peacebuilding 125–6 contribution to UN normative debates 125–6 RwP 125–6 UN peace operations 124–5 BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa Group) 121, 124–5 Brookings Institution 29, 76 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 65, 83 Brundtland Commission 86–7, 89–91 members of 85–6

Brundtland report (Our Common Future) 11, 67–8, 83, 86 timing 63–4 World Commission on Environment and Development 83, 85–6 see also sustainable development Bullion, Alan 126 Bush, George W. 55 Calder, Alexander xii Call, Charles 124 Campbell, Kurt M. 131 Canada 49, 77 see also landmine ban CAR (Central African Republic) 76, 113 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 45, 100 CARE 47 Carlsson, Ingmar 7–8, 65 Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict 65, 91–2 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 115 Carson, Rachel 84 case studies 11 alternative voices 124–37 commissions and panels 67–90 INGOs/NGOs 10–11, 45–6, 48–62, 106 knowledge brokers: case studies and examples 106–8, 111–14 Castells, Manuel 14 CCA (Common Country Assessment) 99 CDP (Committee on Development Policy— previously Planning) 103 Cecil, Robert, Lord 115 CGPCS (Contact Group for Piracy off the Coast of Somalia) 35 Charnovitz, Steve 43–4 Chesterman, Simon 37, 50, 97, 160n.15 China 75, 126–7 Africa and 127–8 BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) 129 a challenger to post-war normative order 130–1 Chinese trade and aid vs Western ODA 129 Civilian Peacekeeping Police Training Center 127 contribution to normative debates 127, 129–31

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 COVID-19 131 “developmental peace” 128–30 “digital Belt and Road” 136 FAO and 130–1 INGOs 42–3 multilateralism 127–8 NGOs/INGOS and 42–3 One China policy 128 as P-5 member of the Security Council 127 R2P 128 Social Credit System 132 sustainable development 131 UN peacekeeping 127–31 UN Security Council 128–9 US/China digital trade 136 US/China rivalry 130–2, 136, 139 veto on Syria UN intervention 80, 128 CIC (Center for International Cooperation) 72–3, 106 CICC (Coalition for the International Criminal Court) 10, 51–3 see also ICC civil society global civil society 39, 50, 133–4 governments and 47–8 Panel on United Nations–Civil Society Relations 45 Third UN 1, 26 UN Charter and 16, 44 Clark, Grenville 8 Claude, Inis 1–2, 6, 17–18 climate change 13, 86–9, 140 2015 Paris Agreement 83–4, 87–9, 101, 141–2 2015 UN Climate Change Conference, Paris 89 2018 Katowice Climate Change Conference, Poland 88 2019 Climate Action Summit, New York City 83–4 Climate Security Mechanism, UN Secretariat 89, 99 COP21 89 greenhouse gases 88 P-5 and 89 Third UN 87 US 89 see also environmental issues; IPCC Clinton, Bill 51

183

Club of Rome, report to 65, 84 CMC (Cluster Munition Coalition) 51 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions 51 ICBL-CMC 51 Coalition on Women and International Peace and Security 45–6 coalitions of the willing 9, 35, 101 Cohen, Roberta 29, 76 Cold War 48–9, 97 growth of non-state actors and 34, 37–8, 43 international justice, pursuit of 52–3 markets/states balance and 10 UN peacekeeping 68–9 Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance 63 commissions 63, 91–3, 149 contributions by 66–7, 90–1, 93 costs of 63–4, 91–2 current template for 91 growth of 63–4 history and dynamics overview of 64–7 ideas and 65–7 independent experts 66–7 names of 65 recommendations for 93 reports by 65–7 Third UN 5, 11, 67 UN Secretariat and 65, 91–2 ways of proceeding 91 conflict prevention 70, 94–5 Conservation International 83 constructivism 18, 25 consultants 1945 San Francisco Conference 16 knowledge and 94–5 research consultants 94–5 Third UN 2–3, 11–12, 15 see also knowledge Cooper, Andrew 121 Corbett, Thomas 111 Côte d’Ivoire 76, 95–6 R2P 81 COVID-19 xii, 12–13, 61–2, 120, 122, 150 AC (after-corona) 140 China 131 citizen politics, need for new kind of 142

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184  COVID-19 (cont.) inter-disciplinary perspectives, need of 98–9 international cooperation, need of 139–40 international scientific/public health officials cooperation 140–1 postwar order limits 13 Trump, Donald and 139–40 UN and 2, 118 UN Security Council 149–50 US/China rivalry 136 vaccine 141–2 WHO 139–40 as world-war equivalent 140 Cox, Robert 25, 101–2 CPPF (Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, SSRC) 11–12, 96–7, 106, 110–11, 129 Chatham House rule 112–13 expert brainstorming session on Guinea Bissau 113 First UN and 113 “Knowledge Project” 97 as “think bridge” 112–14 CRASH (Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires) 47 CSR (corporate social responsibility) 36, 133 Czempiel, Ernst 7–8 DAC (Development Assistance Committee, OECD) 23–4 Darfur 79, 81, 116, 127–8 data 12, 36, 145, 148–9 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation, EU) 136–7 Day, Adam xi, 106–7 Dayal, Virendra 99–100 Dayal, Viru 44 DCAF (Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance) 106 decolonization 4, 15–16, 123–4 de Coning, Cedric 124 Demailly, Damien 59–60 Deng, Francis M. 29, 76–8 Deng Xiaoping 126–7 developing countries 52–3, 56–7, 78, 101–2, 123–4

development “China model” of 129 “developmental peace” 128–9 development INGOs 47 human development 29–30, 82 see also sustainable development digital age 139, 142 digital technology 3, 137 changing nature of armed conflict and violence and 135 digital economy 132 High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation 5, 63, 136 Third UN 3 US/China digital trade 136 US/China rivalry 132 see also technology Doshi, Rush 131 Doyle, Michael 6 DPA (Department of Political Affairs) 70, 74–5, 97 “Knowledge Project” 97 DPET (Department of Policy, Education, and Training, DPO) 108 DPKO (Department of Peacekeeping Operations) 70–1, 74–5, 97 DPO (Department of Peace Operations) 74–5, 108 DPPA (Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs) 74–5, 99, 108 Draper, William 29–30 DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) 76, 81 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt 15–16 Duchâtel, Mathieu 130 Duterte, Rodrigo Roa 12–13, 144 Duvall, Raymond 8, 18 Dworkin, Anthony 136–7 East Timor 76, 127 ECLA (Economic Commission for Latin America) 100 see also ECLAC ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) 28, 91–2 see also ECLA The Economist 18, 57, 59 ECOSOC (Economic and Social Council) 38, 42, 145

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 ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) 35 ECPS (Executive Committee on Peace and Security) 96–7 Eichelberger, Clark 16 EISAS (Electronic Information and Strategic Analysis unit in the Secretariat) 71, 96–7 emerging powers 124 alternative voices 12, 114–15, 120, 131 global governance and 12, 121–2 Global South 120, 122–3 normative advances and debates 122–3 see also Brazil; China; India eminent persons 5, 149 comparative advantages of group of 82 High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons 36–7 ideas and 64–5 peace operations 68 Third UN 7, 11, 63 see also commissions; panels Enough Project 116 environmental issues 86–7, 102 1962 UN Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources 83–4 1971 Founex group 84–6, 89–90 1972 Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm 83–5 1992 Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro 37, 83–8 1997 UN Kyoto Conference 86 2002 World Summit, Johannesburg 86 2012 Rio+20 37, 57, 86 China 131 Kyoto Protocol 86–7 UN Conference on Environment and Development 86 UN General Assembly 86 World Commission on Environment and Development 83, 85–6 see also climate change; sustainable development epistemic communities 1, 24, 88–9, 102, 141 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 12–13, 144 espionage 15–16

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EU (European Union) 136–7 GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) 136–7 Evans, Gareth 65, 77–81 expertise 17, 64, 89–90, 135 external expertise 90, 97–9, 102–4, 108, 112 as relative and value-laden notion 95 scientific expertise 87–8, 145 see also knowledge experts 5, 17, 95 independent experts 66–7 knowledge and norms 67–8 policymaking and 24–5 see also knowledge; scholars Faaland, Just 6 Facebook 5 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) 130–1 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation, US) 15–16 feminism 9 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) 5, 141–2 Finnemore, Martha 34, 104–5 Finkelstein, Lawrence 9–10 First UN 1–2, 20–1, 149 disparities in power and influence in 62 First/Second UNs relationship 13, 97, 144 human rights and 54 ideas and norms 7, 20–1, 28 as legitimizer of ideas 20–1 polarization of politics in 13 SDGs 56–60 see also governments; member states; three UNs Florini, Ann 39 Fong, Alexandra Pichler 63–4 France 60, 130 Francis, Pope 58 Friends of the Earth 83 Fukuyama, Francis 140–1 3G Coalition 121 G-7/G-8 (Group of Seven/Group of Eight) 101 G-20 (Group of 20) 121

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186  G-77 (Group of 77) 123, 126 Gandhi, Indira 85 Gates, Melinda 63, 136 Gates Foundation 141–2 GCRP (Geneva Centre for Security Policy) 106 GEF (Global Environment Facility) 86–7 Geneva Conventions 55–6 Genocide Convention 17, 55–6 Ghai, Dharam 60–1 Gildersleeve, Virginia 16 global governance 3–4, 147, 150 changes in 33–4, 38, 61 concept of 7–9, 19, 39 emerging powers and 12, 121–2 formal and informal values, rules, norms, practices 9 globalization and 7–8 INGOs and 33–4, 39 new architecture of 12, 39–40, 133 NGOs and 34 non-state actors 9, 33–4 non-territorial players 5 participation in rule-setting processes of global governance 122 Third UN and 7–10, 140–1 TNCs and 5, 33–4 transnationalism 34 Western dominance in global governance 122, 147 Global Governance (journal) xi, 2, 7–8, 17–18 globalization 7–8, 14, 43 Global North 11–12 knowledge brokers and 94 North–South divide 77–8, 82, 84–5, 123 global problems 13, 39, 61–2, 113, 137, 145 Annan, Kofi: “problems without passports” 61 COVID-19 and climate change as 140 global problem-solving 7–8, 35, 62–4, 145, 150 UN and 140 Global South 3, 129 emerging powers in 120, 122–3 intellectual agency of 25–6 North–South divide 77–8, 82, 84–5, 123 R2P and 80–1 SDGs 58

TNCs in 12 UN and 27, 36 Goetz, Anne Marie 9 Goldstein, Judith 24 GONGO (government-organized NGO) 37–8 Gore, Albert Arnold 88–9 Goulding, Marrack 97 governments 21 civil society and 47–8 duties of governments facilitated by international partnerships 35 First UN 21 government representatives/ international civil servants relations 21 governments/INGOs partnerships 50 NGOs and 43–4 non-core financing by 30 non-state actors and 17 Third UN/governments collaboration 143–4 see also First UN; member states Gowan, Richard xi, 108–9, 126, 130, 136–7 Graham, Bill 77 Graham, Paul 134 Gramsci, Antonio 139 Granderson, Colin 69 Green, Duncan 99–100 Green, Jessica F. 33–4 Greenpeace 83 Guterres, António 5, 36–7, 63, 70, 136, 145 climate change 83–4 commissions 63–4 external expertise 98–9 misinformation and hate speech as global threats 135 UN peacebuilding 74–5 UN peacekeeping 74–5 Guttmacher Institute 106 Haas, Ernst B. 24 Haas, Peter 24, 102 Haiti 76, 124–5 Hall, Peter 24, 102 Hamburg, David 92 Hammarskjöld, Dag 68, 97 Haq, Ameerah 72 ul-Haq, Mahbub 29–30, 82

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 hate speech 135 HD (Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue) 11–12, 106 Hege, Elisabeth 59–60 Held, David 122 Helleiner, Gerry 147–8 Hercus, Ann 69 Hessel, Stéphane 109–10 He Yin 128–9 Heyzer, Noeleen 22–3, 46, 115–16 HI (Handicap International) 49 High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation 5, 63, 136 High-level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence 63 HIPPO (High-level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations) 11, 63, 67–9, 72, 74–5, 89–91 Brahimi report and 72–5 consultations, interviews, workshops and peace operations visits 72–3 gap between what is asked of UN peace operations and what they can deliver 72 innovations 74 members of 72 objectives 73 recommendations 73–5 sustaining peace 74, 124 UN Secretariat, independent analytical capability 97–8 see also peace operations HIV/AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome) 24–5, 102 HLP (High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change) 63, 66 A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility 79 Holt, Victoria 107 HRuF (Human Rights up Front) 100 HRW (Human Rights Watch) 47, 49, 116 human development 29–30, 82 Human Development Report 29–30 humanitarian intervention 101 ICISS 77–80, 89–91 R2P 77–81, 90 see also R2P human rights 29, 99–100

187

First UN and 54 UNGC 36 Human Rights Council 79 human security 38–9, 65, 82, 92, 149 IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa Group) 121, 124–5 ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) 5 ICBL (International Campaign to Ban Landmines) 10, 48–51 ICBL-CMC 51 see also landmine ban ICC (International Criminal Court) 51–6, 60 1998 Rome Conference 53 Africa 54–6, 162n.50 CICC 51–3 criticism 54–5 establishment of 29, 51–3 INGOs/NGOs’ success 48, 60 international justice, pursuit of 52–3, 55–6 Nuremberg and Tokyo trials 52–4 Rome Statute 52, 54–5 Rome Treaty 29, 51, 53 Russia 53, 55 seat of 51–2 States Parties 53–5 US 53–5 ICG (International Crisis Group) 11–12, 106–7, 116 ICISS (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty) 11, 75–7, 81, 89–90, 149 Canada 77 civilians, fate of 76–7 commissioners 77–8 humanitarian intervention 77–80, 89–91 legitimate use of international force 79–80 The Responsibility to Protect report 29, 76–7, 79 state sovereignty reframed 75, 77 see also R2P ICM (International Commission on Multilateralism) 149–50 ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) 5, 49–50, 77, 108–9

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188  ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) 52–3 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) 52–3 ideas and norms 94–5 alternative ideas 121–32 carriers/influence of ideas relation 27 commissions 65–7 creation of knowledge and norms 26–7, 34 definition 21–2 dynamics of change and 6–7 eminent persons and 64–5 First UN 7, 20–1, 28 four impacts of 22–3 historical and social contexts of 26 ideas as one of most important UN legacies 1–2, 19, 25–6, 146 impact of ideas and research 99–102 importance of 13, 21–30, 146 INGOs 61–2 inputs from all three UNs 29–30 institutionalization of ideas in the UN system 101–2, 147–8 international civil servants and 29–30 panels 65–7 policymaking and 24 positive, normative, causal ideas or beliefs 23–4 role of ideas 24–5 Second UN 7, 20–1, 28 sources of 26 sources of knowledge and norms produced by the UN 7 Third UN 15, 17, 19, 26–9, 34, 90–1, 142, 147–8 UN ideas 15, 18, 23, 25, 28, 82–3, 94–5 vehicles for 149 see also knowledge IDPs (internally displaced persons) 29 IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development) 101–2 IGOs (intergovernmental organizations) 1, 10 growth of 33, 39–40, 42–4, 42t INGOs:IGOs ratio 42t, 43–4 need of robust intergovernmental institutions 139 number of 43–4

states and IGOs/non-state actors partnerships 35–6 states as IGOs: substantial pillars of world order 2, 9–10 IL (International Law) 3–4, 18 ILO (International Labour Organization) 17, 36–7, 44 World Employment Programme 82 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 7 Independent Commission on Multilateralism 63 India 124–6 inequality 44–5, 121, 133–4, 142, 145 information 134, 138 2003 World Summit on the Information Society, Geneva 37 disinformation campaigns 134–5 information disorder 12–13, 134 information overload 104, 147 information revolution 118, 120, 147 misinformation as global threat 135 see also knowledge; media INGOs (international non-governmental organizations) 10, 19–20 2006 Accountability Charter 37–8 advocacy and education INGOs 47 case studies 10–11, 45–6, 48–62 China and 42–3 contributions to UN knowledge and norms 45–60 development and humanitarian INGOs 47 disparities in power and influence in 62 ECOSOC and 38 funding 37–8 global governance 33–4, 39 governments/INGOs partnerships 50 growth of 30–1, 31f, 33–4, 39–40, 42–4 ideas and norms 61–2 INGOs:IGOs ratio 42t, 43–4 “nasty” social movements 38–9 number of 30–40, 42–3, 42t participation in UN global meetings 37 SDGs 57, 59 UN accreditation 38 see also NGOs institutionalism 24 liberal institutionalism 18 intellectuals 2–3, 15, 24, 123, 141, 145

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 international civil servants xii, 21, autonomy of 71–2 government representatives/ international civil servants relations 21 ideas and 29–30 India 126 need to improve analytical capacity and strengthen knowledge management 95–6 see also Second UN international cooperation xii, 2, 143 breakdown of 12–13 consensual cooperation 140 COVID-19 139–41 international scientific/public health officials cooperation 140–1 need of 61–2, 139–40, 150 research cooperation 140–1 successful international cooperation and three UNs 143 UN Charter 16 International Court of Justice 55 international humanitarian law 54 international justice 48, 54–6 Third UN and 56 UN Security Council, international criminal tribunals established by 52–3, 55–6 see also ICC International Organization (journal) 7–8, 17–18 international relations complexity and interdependence of 14–17, 30, 39, 139 ideas in 25–6 international system 123, 150 changes in 122, 139–40 internet 5, 24–5, 137 IOs (international organizations) 3–4, 17–18 growth of 31f, 31, 39–40 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 5, 11, 24, 87–90, 145 impact of 88–9 see also climate change; environmental issues; sustainable development IPE (International Political Economy) 3–4, 18

189

IPI (International Peace Institute) 11–12, 75, 106, 110–11, 113–14 Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations 111–12 IPA (International Peace Academy) 111–12 as think tank 112 visibility of 112–14 IR (International Relations) 3–4, 8, 18, 75 NGOs 44 peace operations 68–9 Iraq 38–9, 76, 95, 97 Israel 53 IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) 83 Jackson, Robert 138 Jolly, Richard xi, 2 Jonah, James O. C. 2–3 Kambale, Pascal 55 Kell, Georg 132–3 Keohane, Robert 18, 24, 33–4 Keynes, John Maynard 150 Klein, Lawrence 103 knowledge 11–12, 119 activism/knowledge relation 116 changes in knowledge institutions 118 DPA: “Knowledge Project” 97 hierarchies of knowledge 116–17 as inadequate 62 INGOs, contributions to UN knowledge and norms 45–60 inter-disciplinary perspectives 98–9 knowledge ecology 131, 133–4 knowledge economy 94–5, 103–4, 106, 114–15 knowledge networks 102–3, 119, 145–6 knowledge/power link 115 knowledge production and dissemination 15, 34, 102 NGOs 36, 47–8, 141–2, 160n.15 politics of knowledge and norms 1, 19, 28 Second UN 28, 114, 145 social knowledge production 145–6 Third UN 7, 28, 34, 94–5, 102 UN analytical capability 94–9 UN Secretariat 95–7

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190  knowledge (cont.) UN Secretariat, independent analytical capability 71, 96–9 see also consultants; epistemic communities; expertise; experts; ideas and norms; information; knowledge brokers; research; scholars; think tanks; universities knowledge brokers 1, 10–12, 94, 104–5, 147–8 case studies and examples 106–8, 111–14 definition of 105 “double peripherality” 117 effective knowledge brokering 110 ethics 116–17 functions of 105–6, 107b, 108–9, 119 future and dark side of knowledge brokering 114–19 Global North and 94 importance of 104–5, 118 multidimensional nature of knowledge brokering 105–6 real-time analytical support to secretariat staff 106–7 self-reflection 117–18 think tanks 108 Third UN 106 translating knowledge and convening policy makers 108–10 Krasner, Stephen 4 Kuhn, Thomas 24–5 Kumar, Rajendra 88–9 landmine ban 29, 48–51 1993 International NGO Conference on Landmines, London 49 Canada 49 cluster munitions 51 ICBL 10, 48–51 Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor 51 landmines and civilians 48–9 landmines as weapons of war 48–9 MI 49 Mine Ban Treaty 48–51 NGOs’ success 48, 50–1 Ottawa Convention on Landmines 48–51, 60

Ottawa Process 29, 49–50 states not parties to the treaty 51 Third UN and 49, 51, 60 US 51 VVAF 49 leadership (Second UN) 18 intellectual leadership 149 League of Nations 38, 115, 150 Leimbach, Dulcie xi Lewis, W. Arthur 102–3 LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) 38–9, 58–9 liberalism 122–4, 127 crisis of 120–1 liberal institutionalism 18 Libya 76, 80–1, 125–6 Li Dongyan 128–30 Lie, Trygve 74 Liu Tiewa 128–9 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel 12–13 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 26–7 Luck, Edward 67–8, 93 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inacio 124–5 Lupel, Adam 110 Lynch, Colum 130–1 Ma, Jack 63, 136 Maduro, Nicolás 12–13, 144 MAG (Mines Advisory Group) 49 Magnus, George 121 Mali 127–8 Malloch-Brown, Mark 106–7 Malone, David 71–2 Mamdani, Mahmoud 116 Manley, John 77 Martin, Ian 74–5 Martin, Paul 77 Marxism 25 Matthews, Jessica 62 McGann, James xi McNamara, Robert 65 McNeill, John Robert 15 McNeill, William H. 15 MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) 23–4, 56–7 2000 Millennium Summit 56–7 MDGs/SDGs comparison 57–8, 60 Second UN and 56–7 shortcomings 56–8

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 Measures for the Economic Development of Under-Developed Countries 102–3 Measures for International Economic Stability 102–3 media 3, 120 Third UN 2–3, 15 see also information; social media member states (UN) xii, 4, 91–2, 143 First UN 1–2, 20–1, 28 power grip on Second UN by 13 territorial states 5 see also First UN; governments MI (Medico International) 49 Millennium Summit (2000) 36, 56–7, 69 MINUSTAH (UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti) 70–1, 124–6 Mitchell, George 106–7 Modi, Narendra Damodardas 144 Monk, Richard 69 MONUSCO (UN Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo) 70–1 Moreno Ocampo, Luis 52, 55 Morin, Edward 145 MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors without Borders) 47 multilateralism 6, 13, 115, 118, 147 China 127–8 crisis of 120, 144 Independent Commission on Multilateralism 63 multilateral anxieties and the postwar international order 120–2 multiple multilateralisms 15 research cooperation on 141 UN in the broader multilateral system 149–50 Myanmar 38–9, 55, 76, 81, 149–50 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples) 15–16 Naím, Moisés 37–8 NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) 71, 101, 123, 126 R2P, rejection by 80–1 UN Secretariat and 71, 96–7 National and International Measures for Full Employment 102–3

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nationalism xii, 13, 118, 120, 141 new nationalisms 3–4, 13, 18, 144 polarization of politics 13 techno-nationalism 132, 136–7 nation-state 3 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 35, 53, 81, 125–6 Naumann, Klaus 69 Nelson, Alondra 148–9 Netanyahu, Benjamin 12–13, 144 NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 10, 19–20 1945 San Francisco Conference, NGOs in 15–16 accreditation of 42 advocacy NGOs 116, 141–2 China and Russia on 42–3 definition 42 funding 37–8, 43 global governance and 34 governments and 43–4 importance of 44, 50, 62 knowledge production and dissemination 36, 47–8, 141–2, 160n.15 NGOs/corporations clashes 30 number of 41, 43 research NGOs 142, 146 SDGs 59–60 as “sovereignty-free actors” 41, 61 suppression of 43 sustainable development and 48, 84–5 tasks of 1, 10, 41–2, 47, 160n.15 as theoretical and practical concern 62 Third UN 2–3, 7, 15 UN Charter and 16–17, 19–20, 36, 41–5 as UN integral components 17 UN Security Council and 46 US NGOs 44 see also INGOs NIEO (New International Economic Order) 101 non-state actors xii, 1 1945 UN San Francisco Conference 15–16 contemporary world politics and 5–6 empirical and theoretical reality of 18 global governance and 9, 33–4 governments and 17

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192  non-state actors (cont.) growth of 14, 30, 34–5, 37–9, 43, 61, 141–2 independence 6 limitations of 61–2, 143–4 non-state led governance 9, 33–4 “power shift” toward 62 roles of 141–2 states and IGOs/non-state actors partnerships 35–6 Third UN 1–6, 10, 15–16 UN decision-making and 18 UN Security Council and 47–8 UN thinking and 7, 10, 19–20 see also Third UN non-traditional actors 5 normative future (UN) 12–13 First UN 149 future as defined by speed and interdependence 142 recommendations 140–1, 143–50 Second UN 145, 147, 149 Third UN, importance of 143–4, 147 three UNs interactions 143–7 UN: fitter for purpose xii, 12–13, 140–2 norms/normative 130 Brazil’s contribution to normative debates 125–6 China as challenger to post-war normative order 130–1 China’s contribution to normative debates 127, 129–31 emerging powers 122–3 INGOs, contributions to UN knowledge and norms 45–60 knowledge and 114–15 normative changes 99–100, 119, 122–4 normative ideas 23–4 “norm entrepreneurs” 142 peace operations normative shift 75 statistical norms and guidelines 23 western normative predominance 25–6 see also ideas and norms Norway 77 NRA (National Rifle Association, US) 6, 38–9 Nye, Joseph 18 Nyerere, Julius 65

OAS (Organization of American States) 119 Obama, Barack 53–4, 107, 139–40 Obi, Cyril xi OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) 70 ODA (Official Development Assistance) 23–4, 56–9, 92, 129 Ogata, Sadako 65 Orban, Viktor Mihály 144 Oxfam (Oxford Committee for Famine Relief ) 47 P-5 (permanent five members, UN Security Council) 96–7, 130, 144 China 127 climate change 89 Syria 80 veto-wielding 5 see also UN Security Council Palme, Olav 65 panels 63, 91–3, 102–3, 145, 149 contributions by 66–7, 90–1, 93 current template for 91 growth of 63–4 history and dynamics overview of 64–7 ideas and 65–7 recommendations for 93 reports by 66 Third UN 5, 11, 67 UN Secretariat and 91–2 participation 121 barriers to 27 civil society 47–8 INGOs, participation in UN global meetings 37 participation in rule-setting processes of global governance 122 SDGs 58 Third UN 5–6, 44–5, 62 partnerships 39–40, 137–8 global partnership 36–7, 50, 56–7 governments/INGOs partnerships 50 governments and international partnerships 35 public-private partnerships 3–4, 9, 61 Second UN’s intellectual partnerships 99, 145 states and IGOs/non-state actors partnerships 35–6

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 PBC (Peacebuilding Commission) 70–1, 74–5, 101–2, 113, 125 see also peacebuilding PBF (Peacebuilding Fund) 113 see also peacebuilding PBSO (Peacebuilding Support Office) 70–1, 74–5, 98 see also peacebuilding peace “developmental peace” 128–30 liberal peace 122–4, 127–9 sustaining peace 72–4, 92, 124, 130, 135 peacebuilding 74–5, 124 “Brazilian way” of 125–6 emerging powers and 124 UN as most visible peacebuilder 124 women’s contributions in conflict mediation and peacebuilding 45–6 see also AGE; DPPA; PBC; PBF; PBSO peace operations 11, 68–75 2000 Panel on United Nations Peace Operations 69 2009 New Horizon process 70 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on UN Peace Operations 69, 72 2017 report Improving Security of United Nations Peacekeepers 70–1 Brazil 124–5 China 127–31 Cold War and UN peacekeeping 68–9 deployment capability 70–1, 73–4 eminent persons and 68 first UN peacekeeping force 68 gap between Third UN’s recommendations and First/Second UNs’ implementation 71 gender gap in peacekeeping 45–6 GIS (geographic information system) 71 India 126 normative shift: from use of force to “primacy of politics” 75 personnel deployed in 35 pre-deployment training 70–1, 127 prerequisites for successful peacekeeping operations 70 principles: consent, impartiality, non-use of force 69, 73–4, 128

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states and IGOs/non-state actors partnerships 35 see also AGE; Brahimi report; DPKO; DPO; HIPPO Pearson, Lester B. 28, 65, 68 Pearson Commission 65, 91 Pendergast, John 116 Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier 83, 85–6 philanthropy 30, 117–19, 141, 148 PHR (Physicians for Human Rights) 49 piracy/counter-piracy 35 states and IGOs/non-state actors partnerships 35 PMD (Policy and Mediation Division) 108 PoC (protection of civilians) 107, 128 polarization 5–6, 13, 33, 134–5, 144 policy alignment 110, 113 policymaking 94 evidence-based policymaking 10, 109, 114–15, 119, 145–6 experts and 24–5 ideas and 24 think tanks and 10, 94–5 UN 10 political will 81, 140, 143–4 Pompeo, Mike 53–4 populism xii, 118, 120, 141 new populisms 3–4, 13, 144 polarization of politics 13 Post-2015 Development Agenda 36–7 postwar order 13 challengers of the normative postwar order 120 China as challenger to post-war normative order 130–1 multilateral anxieties and the postwar international order 120–2 peacebuilding 124 see also alternative voices Prebisch, Raúl 28, 101 private sector (for-profit) 36, 63 alternative voices 12, 120 FDI 12, 133 growth of Third UN for-profit members 61 ILO and 36–7 non-core financing by 30 Third UN 1–3, 7, 12, 15, 143

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194  private sector (for-profit) (cont.) UN and 132–3 see also digital technology; TNCs; UNGC Pronk, Jan 47–8, 63–4 PTROs (private transnational regulatory organizations) 149–50 Putin, Vladimir 12–13, 144 R2P (responsibility to protect) 55–6, 75–82, 92, 125–6, 149 Annan, Kofi 78–9, 90, 101 basic idea of 78 Canada 77 China 128 Côte d’Ivoire 81 criticisms 81 endorsement by member states 80 Global South 80–1 humanitarian intervention 77–81, 90 ICISS: The Responsibility to Protect report 29, 76–7, 79 legitimate use of force 79–81 Libya 81, 125–6 NAM members, rejection by 80–1 normative logic of 78–9 North–South divide 77–8 “R2P lite” 80 sovereignty as responsibility 29, 76–80 Syria 80, 128 Third UN reframing 80 UN General Assembly 79 UN Security Council 79–81 see also ICISS Ramos-Horta, José 72 Ramphal, Shridath 65 Ramphal, Sonny 7–8 Rapnouil, Manuel 130 RCs (resident coordinators) 99 Realism 18 REF (Research in Excellence Framework, UK) 117–18 Reimann, Kim D. 43 remittances 12, 133 research advocacy/research relation 115–16 anticipatory social research 148–9 “consultification” of research 117–18 demand for 147 donor-driven research 117–18

ethics 116–17 formation of new coalitions 101 funding 117–18, 148 good written and jargon free 108–9 impact on disputed issues 101 impact of ideas and research 99–102, 111 longer-term/real-time impact of research 99–100 need for real-time intellectual inputs 103–4 “research compact” 148–9 research cooperation 140–1 research institutions 97, 99, 103–4, 112, 118, 141 research NGOs 142, 146 Second UN 99, 148–9 self-reflection 117 setting future agendas and agencies 101–2 social research 117, 148–9 see also knowledge Rieff, David 54 right-wing politics 144 white supremacists 33 Rikhye, Indar Jit, Major-General 111 Ritchie, Cyril 38–9 RMR (Regional Monthly Review) 99 Robins, Dorothy 16 Roger, Charles 122 Rosenau, James 7–8, 41, 61 Rosenthal, Gert 91–2, 147–8 Rostow, Walt 82 Ruggie, John G. 25, 27–8, 132–3, 143 Russia ICC and 53, 55 NGOs and 42 political and normative influence 130 veto on Syria UN intervention 80 Rutherford, Kenneth 50 Rwanda 38–9, 54–5, 76, 95–6 RwP (Responsibility while Protecting) 81, 125–6 Sachs, Ignacy 85 Sachs, Jeffrey 103 Sadik, Nafis 21 Sahnoun, Mohamed 65, 77–8

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 Salamon, Lester 38 Santos Cruz, Carlos Alberto dos, General 70–1 Save the Children 47 Schlesinger, Stephen 15–16, xi scholars 11–12, 103, 108–9 importance of 6 suppression of 43 Third UN 1–3, 6–7, 15, 142 see also experts; knowledge; universities Scholte, Jan Aart 154n.17 Schrijver, Nico 82–3 Schroeder, Mike 44 Schultz, Theodore W. 102–3 SCR (Security Council Report) 11–12, 75, 106–7 What’s in Blue 107 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) 10, 23–4, 29–30, 56–60, 98–9 First UN and 56–60 Global South and 58 implementation of 59–60 INGOs 57, 59 MDGs/SDGs comparison 57–8, 60 mixed success 59–60 NGOs 59–60 ODA 58–9 origins of 57 OWG 57 Second UN and 59–60 shortcomings 58–60 Third UN and 56–60 see also sustainable development SEA (sexual exploitation and abuse) 74 Second UN disparities in power and influence in 62 external expertise and 103 First/Second UNs relationship 13, 97, 144 ideas and 7, 20–1, 28 intellectual leadership 149 intellectual partnerships 99, 145 internal think tanks 108 knowledge and 28, 114, 145 as legitimizer of ideas 20–1 MDGs and 56–7 member states’ power grip on 13 recommendations 145

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role: to translate scholarship into policy options and strategies 103 SDGs 59–60 secretariats 1–2, 20–1 staff members of 18 Third UN/Second UN interaction 21, 145, 147, 149 see also international civil servants; leadership; secretariats; three UNs; UN Secretariat secretariats 63, 143 commissions and 65 Second UN 1–2, 20–1 see also Second UN Security Council resolution 1325 Expert Study 72–3 Sell, Susan 34 Sen, Amartya 28–30, 65, 82 Shimura, Hisako 69 Shotwell, James 16 Shustov, Vladimir 69 Sibanda, Philip 69 Sierra Club 83–4 Sikkink, Kathryn 24 Sinclair, Timothy 7–8, 34 Singer, Hans 28, 101 SIPRI (Swedish International Peace Research Institute) 99 al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah 144 Skjelsback, Kjell 43–4 Small Arms Survey 11–12, 106 Smith, Gayle 116 SNA (System of National Accounts) 23 social media 3, 62, 134–5 see also media social sciences 6, 18, 28 Society for International Development 115 Sohn, Louis 8 Somalia 76, 95–6 Somavia, Juan 20–1, 26 Sommaruga, Cornelio 69, 108–9 Soon-Shion, Patrick 140–1 South Sudan 127–8 sovereignty 3–4 1962 UN Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources 83–4 resource sovereignty 82–4, 169n.81

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196  sovereignty (cont.) sovereignty as responsibility 29, 76–80 see also ICISS; R2P Soviet Union 15–16, 36, 132–3 Sri Lanka 100 SSRC (Social Science Research Council) xi, 11–12, 96–7, 111, 129 Academic Network 112 see also CPPF Stanovnik, Janez 86–7 states as essential players in global arena 34 state-centric perspectives 3–4, 18, 35, 39, 61 states and IGOs/non-state actors partnerships 35–6 states as IGOs: substantial pillars of world order 2, 9–10 territorial states 4–5 Stimson Center 11–12, 75, 106–7 Strong, Maurice F. 84–5, 146 Sudan 38–9 sustainability 42, 82–3, 86–7, 91 North–South divide 82, 84–5 sustainable development 11, 82–90, 92, 101 2030 Development Agenda 60, 82, 131 China 131 deforestation and resource sovereignty 82–4, 169n.81 development/environment management complementarity 85 eco-development 84 NGOs and 48, 84–5 North–South divide 84–5 resource management 82–4 Third UN 83–7 UN 82–3 UNGC 36 see also Brundtland report; climate change; environmental issues; IPCC SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) 5 Switzerland 77 Syria 76 R2P 80, 128 UN Security Council’s paralysis over 80–1, 128, 149–50

Taiwan 127 Taft, Julia 27–8 Talal, Hassan b. 65 TCCs (troop-contributing countries) 70–1, 124–8 technology 33–4, 134, 138, 142 alternative voices 120, 132–7 China, Social Credit System 132 geopolitics of technology 120, 132–7, 142 techno-nationalism 132, 136–7 Third UN and 133–4, 137 US system of private credit bureaus 132 see also digital technology terrorism 18, 45, 58–9 9/11 attacks 79, 97 counter-terrorism operations 73–4 GWOT (Global War on Terror) 97 Thakur, Ramesh 55–6, 71–2 think tanks 1, 11–12, 97, 119 Brazilian think tanks 19–20 Chinese think tanks 19–20 definition 103–4 growth of 103–4 importance of 118 knowledge and 94–5 number of 103–4, 104t policymaking and 10, 94–5 Third UN 2–3, 7, 10, 15, 142 UN internal think tanks 108 see also knowledge Third UN 1–7, 121 advantages of the notion of 17–18 Annan, Kofi on 44 credibility 117 definition 2–3, 15, 141–2 emphases and dynamics of 17–21 funding 147–8 global governance and 7–10, 140–1 Global Governance (journal) xi, 2 heterogeneity 18–19, 141–2 ideas 15, 17, 19, 26–9, 34, 90–1, 142, 147–8 importance of 13, 16, 20–1, 45, 51, 118, 133–4, 143–4, 147 inequality and lack of diversity in 5, 44, 62, 147 knowledge and 7, 28, 34, 94–5, 102 no barriers to entry or exit/no permanent membership 5–6

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 non-state actors 1–6, 10, 15–16 outsourcing and subcontracting to members of 38 participation by 5–6, 44–5, 62 poorly understood, ignored, discounted 3–4 predominance of participation from western industrialized countries 122–3 roles 5–6, 17, 141–2 shortcomings of 53–4, 122–3 Third UN/Second UN interaction 21, 145, 147, 149 UN activities 7, 19 UN Charter and 41 UN ideas 15, 17, 19, 26–9 UN thinking 2–3, 5–7, 10, 17, 19–20, 142 see also civil society; commissions; digital technology; eminent persons; experts; INGOs; intellectuals; media; NGOs; non-state actors; panels; private sector; scholars; think tanks; three UNs; TNCs three UNs clashes between 30, 97 demand for research 147 as evolving and symbiotic knowledge economy 94–5 inequality and lack of diversity in 44 inputs from all three UNs 29–30 interactions among the three UNs 20–1, 20f, 27, 37, 143–7 leading individuals with experience in all three UNs 20–1, 27–8, 66 recommendations for 118 successful international cooperation and three UNs 143 the “whole”/three-faceted UN 10, 12–13, 15, 26–7, 39–40, 137, 150 see also First UN; normative future; Second UN; Third UN Tinbergen, Jan 103 TNCs (transnational corporations) 5 challenges to UN’s human rights or environmental norms 6, 38–9 definition (by UNCTAD) 32–3 foreign affiliates 32f, 33, 133, 157n.64 global governance 5, 33–4 in Global South 12 growth of 30, 33–4, 39–40

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hostility towards 132–3 marginalization within debates of UN organizations 31 number of 30–40 parent enterprises 32f, 33, 133, 157n.63 Third UN 10, 12 UN and 132–3 Toffler, Alvin 139 trade Chinese trade and aid vs Western ODA 129 declining terms of 28, 101 transnationalism 33–4 Trump, Donald 12–13, 89, 127 2017 UN General Assembly 13 2020 UN General Assembly 131 devices to deflect criticism used by 139–40 ICC 53–4 WHO, US withdrawal from 139–40 Turner, Ted 115 UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) 17 UK (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) Brexit 12–13 political and normative influence 130 UN (United Nations) xii, 1, 95, 144 1945 San Francisco Conference 15–16, 41 challenges and shortcomings 121–2, 135, 138, 144, 149–50 counter-hegemonic role 123 COVID-19 pandemic 2, 118 geo-political power 5 global problem-solving 140 goal-setting 56, 59 ideas 15, 18, 23, 25, 28, 82–3, 94–5 ideas as one of most important legacies of 1–2, 19, 25–6, 146 importance of 13 intergovernmental/autonomous actor distinction 1–2 an intergovernmental organization 4, 18 legitimacy 95 liberalism 122–3 need for a more robust UN 139–40 operations/activities as UN main contribution 7, 19

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198  UN (United Nations) (cont.) policymaking 10 reawakening of 13 three pillars of UN activity 12, 80–1, 94–5 see also normative future; three UNs UN budget 19 funding 115 leverage of largest contributors to 5 UN Charter 2–3, 19, 142 Article 2: 75 Article 2(7): 29 Article 13 16 Article 39: 52–3 Article 71: 10, 16, 36, 41–2 civil society 16, 44 draft 16, 44 international cooperation 16 NGOs and 16–17, 19–20, 36, 41–5 peace 68 Preamble 44, 68 Third UN and 41 “WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS” 44 UNCTAD (UN Conference on Trade and Development) 28, 33, 101, 123 TNC, definition of 32–3 World Investment Report 33 UNCTC (UN Centre on Transnational Corporations) 132–3 UNDP (UN Development Programme) 27–30, 95, 99 UNEF (UN Emergency Force) 124–5 UNEP (UN Environment Programme) 85, 87–8, 101–2 UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 17, 122–3 UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Fund) 30, 88 UN Foundation 115 UNFPA (UN Population Fund) 21, 106 UNGC (UN Global Compact) 5, 12, 133, 137, 143 core principles 133 Second UN and 36 sustainable development 36 Third UN and 36–7, 143

UN General Assembly 52, 83–4, 86, 145 2017 UN General Assembly 13 2020 UN General Assembly 131 R2P 79 UN Global Study on Women, Peace and Security 63 UNICEF (UN Children’s Fund) 17, 37, 101 UNIFEM (UN Development Fund for Women) 17, 22–3, 46, 115–16 UNIHP (UN Intellectual History Project) 1–2 UN Intellectual History Project 23 Union of International Associations 31 UNITAR (UN Institute for Training and Research) 111 universities 7, 21, 94–5 see also knowledge UNMOGIP (UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan) 126 UN New York headquarters 19–20, 110 UNOG (UN Office in Geneva) 11–12, 19–20, 106 UNRISD (UN Research Institute for Social Development) 108 UNSC (UN Statistical Commission) 23 UN Secretariat 61, 92, 145 Climate Security Mechanism 89, 99 commissions and 65, 91–2 conflict prevention 70, 94 culture of evidence and innovation 145, 149 independent analytical capability 71, 96–9 NAM and 71, 96–7 need to improve analytical capacity and strengthen knowledge management 95–7 panels and 91–2 UNGC and 36 UN Secretary-General 144 see also Annan, Kofi; Boutros-Ghali, Boutros; commissions; Guterres, António; Hammarskjöld, Dag; panels; Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier; Second UN; U Thant; Waldheim, Kurt

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 UN Security Council 42, 145 1325 resolution 45–6, 72–3 1973 resolution 81 Arria Formula 47–8, 147–8 China 128–9 deadlocked 80–1, 149–50 international criminal tribunals established by 52–3, 55–6 NGOs and 46 non-state actors and 47–8 polarization in 144 R2P 79–81 responsible exercise of sovereignty 76 Syria 80–1, 128, 149–50 see also P-5 UNSO (UN Statistical Office) 23 UN staff 48, 112–13 career movements of 104–5 UNU (UN University) 11–12, 108 UNU-CPR (UNU Centre for Policy Research) 108, 111, 113–14 UN Women 17, 101–2 Urquhart, Brian 62, 68, 92 US (United States of America) 2002 American Service-Members’ Protection Act 53–4 2020 presidential election 89 Army Signal Security Agency (National Security Agency) 15–16 climate change 89 ICC and 53–5 Mine Ban Treaty 51 NGOs 44 political and normative influence 130 private credit bureaus system 132 US/China digital trade 136 US/China rivalry 130–2, 136, 139 U Thant 169n.83 Van Rooyen, Frank 126 Victor Hugo 22 Viotti, Maria 113 Virilio, Paul 137 Viva-Rio (Brazilian NGO) 125 von Einsiedel, Sebastian 63–4

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VVAF (Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation) 49 Wade, Robert 122 Waldheim, Kurt 66 Wang Xuexian 72, 75 Wang Yi 130–1 Wapner, Paul 44 Ward, Barbara 22 Ward, Jonathan D.T. 130–1 Ward, Michael 23 wars 140 net wars and cyber wars 135 war zones, protection of civilians 107 war zones, protection of human beings in 11, 67–8 World War I 68 World War II 48–9, 108–9, 115, 120 see also armed conflict Weiler, Hans N. 115, 119 Weiss, Thomas G. 75 Wells, H.G. 68 Wendt, Alexander 25 Westphalia Peace Treaty 4 WFM-IGP (World Federalist Movement’s Institute for Global Policy) 51–2 WFP (World Food Programme) 130 Whitfield, Teresa xi WHO (World Health Organization) COVID-19 139–40 politicization of 140 US/China rivalry 139 US withdrawal from 139–40 Willetts, Peter 34 Williams, Jody 49–50 Wilson, Woodrow 68 WMD (weapons of mass destruction) 61–2 WMO (World Meteorological Organization) 87–8 women 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing 37 contributions in conflict mediation and peacebuilding 45–6

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200  women (cont.) reproductive rights and gender 101 UN Security Council 1325 resolution 45–6 Woods, Ngaire 25–7 World Bank 65, 101–2, 108–9 World Commission on Environment and Development 83, 85–6 world order 8 states as IGOs: substantial pillars of world order 2, 9–10 world politics 3 inequality and lack of diversity in 44 NGOs in 44

non-state actors and 5–6 sovereignty 3–4 World Vision 47 WTO (World Trade Organization): 1999 Seattle Ministerial Conference 37, 133–4 WWF (World Wildlife Fund) 83 Xi Jinping 12–13, 131, 144 Xue Lei 128–31 Yearbook of International Organizations 31 Yemen 76, 81 Zürn, Michael 8