Relevance of UNO in 21centurury
Keywords:
working groups, General Assembly, UN systemAbstract
This research paper related to relevance UNO in 21St Century. The United Nations is currently engaged in a reform process that is more urgent than any previous one. The urgency stems from a pervasive lack of political and financial support from its members. Last year’s fiftieth anniversary celebration prompted several private studies on the future of the United Nations. The General Assembly also created a series of working groups charged with developing proposals for reform of the General Assembly, the Security Council, and UN finances, and for implementation of the secretary-general’s agendas for peace and development. A separate working group on the UN system as a whole is to report to the General Assembly with a summary of the other working groups.
References
Donald C. F. Daniel and Bradd C. Hayes, eds., Beyond Traditional Peacekeeping (New York: St. Martin's, 1995); Lori Fisler Damrosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993).
Major ones include Erskine Childers with Brian Urquhart, Renewing the United Nations System (Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 1994); Reforming the United Nations: A View from the South (Geneva: South Centre, 1995); Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Independent Working Group on the Future of the United Nations, The United Nations in Its Second Half-Century (New York: Ford Foundation, 1995).
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); John Oneal, Frances Oneal, Zeev Maoz and Bruce Russett, "The Liberal Peace: Interdependence, Democracy, and International Conflict, 1950-1985", Journal of Peace Research 33, no. 1 (February 1996).
This term is used explicitly by the Commission on Global Governance and the Independent Working Group, see n. 1; also United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
I served, with Paul Kennedy, as co-director of the secretariat of the Working Group. For that reason I avoid commenting at all on the particulars of other reports. A Kantian vision certainly underlay my contributions, and whereas I believe Professor Kennedy and most - perhaps all - of the members of the Working Group implicitly shared that vision in some degree, neither they nor the Ford Foundation, which funded the effort, are responsible for any of the remarks in this article. Nor would I pretend that all of the balances proposed here were ever considered overtly or consciously; they are, however, relevant both to post hoc evaluation and to any effort to synthesize recommendations from the various studies and reports.
See Adam Watson, ed., The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1994); Mark Zacher, "The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian System", in Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James Rosenau, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty: Territorial and Political Economy in the Twenty-first
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.