After the unprecedented horrors of World War II, the international community certainly needed a unifying institution where they could meet in good conscience to discuss and address key global issues of all kinds. After seventy-eight years of existence, the legitimacy and pseudo-authority of the UN has come into question by individuals identified as anti-globalists or populists. Personally, I believe that the growing concern around the UN’s effectiveness and legitimacy are justified considering the subpar track record and reputation they have accumulated over the course of almost a century of “peacekeeping”. This is not to downplay the many successes of the UN or the good intentions the have behind their decisions, but recently it seems that the UN has done a lot of criticizing and complaining rather than problem solving.
Severine Autesserre notes in their article the different studies done to criticize UN peace keeping efforts. One of those studies that stood out to me was Jeremey Weinstein’s discovery that 75% of civil wars that the UN intervened in saw a continuation of the conflict within ten years. For the sake of this blog post, I will not go over all the data presented, but I want to emphasize that the UN’s peace keeping missions tend to lead to nothing- thus facilitating a waste of time and resources. Additionally, the UN has been flooded with states that actively fight against western values. This is extremely prevalent in the UN Human Rights Council where some of the world’s most egregious violators of human rights hold a seat and spend their time demonizing western states like Israel while ignoring the evils done by China, Iran, or Myanmar. Hopefully, the UN and their globalist allies can find ways to combat this internal issues or we might see the end of the organization and a beginning of a new world order or another massive war (similar to how the League of Nations met their demize before the start of WWII).
One reply on “Week 7”
Benjamin,
I am limiting my comments on the blog posts while I am reading the research papers. But I thought you well-described the debate between the globalists and the anti-globalists. There can be little question that the UN has fallen well short of the goals that were set out at its founding in 1945. But that said, it has done a lot of good and, in my view, the world would be a much more dangerous and chaotic place if it did not exist. –Professor Wallerstein