Ideas - Can the UN's 80th General Assembly meeting change the world?

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

As the United Nations turns 80, calls for reform are louder than ever. Against the backdrop of multiple global crises, strongman diplomacy and rising threats from climate change to AI, a growing campaign is calling on the UN to revisit the outdated charter established in 1945 and work on reinventing the organization. "We need to start rethinking what kind of institution we would like to establish to make sure the 21st century does not become as violent as the 20th century," says Tim Murithi, head of the Peacebuilding Interventions Program at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.

Hugh is a rock climber, a white supremacist, a Jewish neo-Nazi, a spam king, a crypto-billionaire, and then someone killed him. It is truly a mystery. It is truly a case of who done it. Dirtbag Climber, the story of the murder and the many lives of Jesse James. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. We spend a lot of time at ideas thinking about how change comes about, how seismic shifts happen in a society's thinking or beliefs or the way it organizes itself. Of course, there are as many answers as there are instances of change, but sometimes in our collective history, there is no choice.

Change, compromising for the sake of change, becomes existential. There were many who doubted that agreement could ever be reached by these 50 countries differing so much in race and religion, in language and culture. But these differences were all forgotten in one unshakable unity of determination to find a way to end war. That was the motivation back in 1945 to find a way to end wars. Crisis is what led 50 countries to sign off as war was still raging on what they described back then as a global Magna Carta for Peace. And so that's how the United Nations was born 80 years ago. It was a conference to write a people's charter, opening with the words,

we, the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind. That's not to say it was easy. The motive was existential, but the process was Herculean.

A feat of diplomacy. A huge conference in the city of San Francisco that lasted 51 days, 850 delegates, Plus their staff and advisors, 3,500 people involved in debate, text revisions, and hard-won compromise. President Truman closed the conference in 1945, and he said no one claims that it is now a final or a perfect instrument. Changing world conditions will require adjustments, but they will be the adjustments of peace, not of work. Eight decades later, there is broad agreement that given our fast-changing world,

those adjustments are long overdue. Major nuclear powers are openly threatening nuclear war. We are facing climate catastrophe. We have wars in Europe and other parts of the world that are unmanageable. We have emerging technologies like artificial intelligence that are out of control. If now is not the right time to review how we govern these crises, then when would be? The big question is how. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed.

Great. So welcome, everyone. I see a number of new faces. So for those of you who are here for the first time, very nice to see you and have you join us. And for those who are coming a second time, that means we think you are committed warriors to the cause and you will be conscripted for even heavier duty. It's July 2024. It's a typical Zoom call connecting volunteers around the world, but it's ground zero for a new campaign, only two months old,

to push for reforming the United Nations. For those who are a little bit newer, we launched the coalition at the Nairobi Civil Society Conference of the UN in May, so it's still relatively new. Guiding the conversation from Geneva is Canadian Egyptian Hebali, a former journalist who left reporting on humanitarian crises to do this full time. I wanted to know, given your focus on humanitarian crises, what is preoccupying you these days about the crises of our world? I think I am most preoccupied by the fact that we don't really have a functioning playbook for how to respond to crises anymore.

there used to be a toolkit, you know, a crisis breaks out, the humanitarians go in, you can minimize the damage, you've got a peace process that leads to some kind of resolution. But today, you see in particular when it comes to conflicts that they just continue on and on and on and the tools we used to use aren't working anymore. So for me, that's what's top of mind. It's how do we get new playbook that works in the, age that we're in and in the world that we're in today. So can you take me to the moment when you decided to leave kind of this role as the storyteller

and more of a more hands-on kind of role in getting at exactly the problem you just outlined? I had been observing and reporting on humanitarian crises for so many years. And every single year, the UN would launch a call for funding to respond to crises. and every single year the amount it was asking for was bigger and every single year the gap between the people in need and the number of people the UN was going to be able to help got bigger. And so it just felt like we were on this sinking boat in which, you know, you find a hole, you try to plug it,

and then another hole pops up and you try to plug that hole. And then suddenly, you know, the boat is so full of holes that you just need to build a new boat. So I tried to think, what is it that? connects all of these different crises that I follow, whether it's inequitable access to vaccines during COVID, or the fact that the countries at least contributed to creating climate change or bearing the biggest brunt with villages going underwater, or the inability to stop the wars in Gaza and in Ukraine. And all of it came back to the way decisions are made at an international

level and what I considered to be inequitable global governance. So that's what kind of pushed me in this direction. What is the idea behind the role that you've been asked to inhabit and that you now inhabit that really spoke to you? At the broad level, I think the task is to remind people that we can dream again, you know, to be able to put ourselves in a place when things are so dark, it's really hard to imagine that they can be better. And I think we need people who are able to say, actually we can dream of a different world and the status quo is not inevitable. It doesn't have to be like this. And to give people that permission to hope for something better. That I think honestly is one of the biggest things that's missing right now is the ability to reimagine. So that's part of

what I hope I can bring. And on a more practical level, often people just need to start. Big changes require a few people at the very beginning who are willing to be called night. are willing to be seen as unrealistic and who can believe in it when it's not yet mainstream. And then they create an environment in which it becomes more permissible to believe in it. And that's the role I think we try to play. So is dreamers kind of the, you're saying permission to dream? I like to think of us as like pragmatic, realistic, politically savvy dreamers, yes. Often on the show, we talk about how does change come about?

And the answer is different, depending on the realm, of course, that we're talking about. But in this particular world, like trying to reform an international organization that's been around since the Second World War feels like such a morass, such a difficult thing to do, even for a group of politically savvy, pragmatic, you know, dreamers. What's the number one skill do you think that's required to push this forward? Courage. Courage and persistence, I think, because it really is about having the courage to think that this is possible, having the courage to go out there with a position that people might think is crazy initially and sticking with it until you get over that hump, which in all change processes you eventually do. It's just that early bit of pushing the rock up the hill where you're getting the most resistance, the most friction. And if you just stick with it long enough, then eventually that rock slides over and the snowballing effect starts to take hold. It's hard to reconcile that optimism with the fractious state of the world.

The polycrisis we're living in right now and how the UN has responded. Here's the newly elected president of the General Assembly. The 80th session of the General Assembly is nervous. ordinary session. Normally this would be a moment to celebrate, but are we really in a mood for a celebration? Can we celebrate while parents in Gaza are watching their children starve? While Afghan girls are banned from school, prevented from having a normal childhood, while grandfathers in Kharkiv are are sheltering and bath-tops fearful of drones and missiles.

While women in Darfur are hiding their daughters from being raped, while Pacific Islanders are watching, seas rise and waves laps against their home. And while 808 million people are still trapped in extreme poverty, worried about how to simply feed their family. Instead of celebrating, one might rather ask, where is the United Nations, which was created to save us from hell? I think most people you would talk to

understand that there's something dysfunctional and ineffective about the United Nations, but maybe can't get to the exact specific malaise, what it is about the structure of the organization. And the way it works, that makes it impotent, I guess, for lack of a better word. What is in your mind at the heart of what's wrong with the UN as it is right now? I think the core of the problem is that the rules of the game are not fair. The 9,941st meeting of the Security Council is called to order.

The provisional agenda for this meeting is threats to international peace and security. So the main body to govern war, conflict, peace and security issues is the UN's security council. And that security council has five permanent members, and those five permanent members have the right to veto any decision that that body takes. So Russia invades Ukraine, and yet Russia has the power to veto a resolution about stopping the war in Ukraine, which it has done twice since 2022. Dear colleagues, we deeply regret the decision of the Russian Federation to veto the resolution. The Council lost a precious opportunity to show to the world its unity, its power, its usefulness.

There are supposed to be mechanisms to prevent that kind of an obvious conflict of interest, and yet they are not used. So it's really that veto power that I think has many people extremely, not only upset, but just completely flabbergasted by how this can be possible. And vetoes have been used to prevent action in all kinds of contexts, Syria, Mali, Sudan, and of course probably the most flagrant example is Gaza. But the veto was never meant to be a tool to further genocide. It was, you know, actually, Ukrainian president Zelensky said it himself.

The UN system needs to be reformed so that the right of the veto is not a right to kill. So I have been on this journey for more than 30 years of trying to understand how the system can better address the issue of conflict. Across the world in Cape Town, South Africa, Timothy Murithi heads the Peace Building Interventions Program at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. He is also author of a book titled Ethics of Peace Building. He's originally from Kenya, built a career that began at an undergraduate at Queen's University in Canada. From his vantage point, the UN's dysfunction was codified in that celebrated charter by the major powers who designed it. Essentially, these powerful countries created a system within which they maintained. quite a degree of control, deliberately so. It was essentially designed to almost prevent them

from fighting each other again at its core, but it's gradually morphed into a universal organization in terms of planetary representation in 193 countries, so not all territories of the world, but quite a substantial enough number to say that this is one of the few universal organizations we have in the world. But in the retention of that control, which is a lot of the retention of that control, starts not only at the United Nations Security Council, but you will find that all senior positions within the United Nations system, perhaps with the exception of the United Nations Secretary General, senior positions within Secretariat are dominated, or have been dominated by these major powers. These are the essentially authorities, I would say, illegitimate

authorities that abrogated for themselves the power to determine the trajectory of the United Nations system as a whole. It's collective security system. It's replicated in the global financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and subsequently World Trade Organization. It's also manifest in a number of other institutions that have been designed to deal with planetary and global challenges. So these are the, if you will, those who've abrogated themselves the power and therefore the right to determine the trajectory of this institution going forward.

And it's been a struggle to democratize the United Nations to make it a system that is in fact equitable and responsive to the will of the 193 countries that essentially fall underneath with the rubric and effectively recipients of its governance, so to speak. But we're not there, as we've said. It's, in fact, heading in the opposite direction where the tyranny of this small group of powerful countries

has brought the United Nations into a major state of disrepair, into a major crisis point for the planet. The United Nations, you're absolutely right, it never really lived up, was never really given the opportunity. to live up to its billing. And we're in a situation now where talk of simply hoping that it will is, in fact, as I said, quite naive

and could lead us to an even worse situation in the future. So we are at a stage where we need to start rethinking what exactly, what kind of institution we would like to establish to make sure the 21st century does not become as violent under the 20th century. To be clear, the UN itself has considered that question, repeatedly. Successive secretaries general have tried to update the place from the inside out. The United Nations has never been more needed.

Our values have never been more relevant. And the needs have never been greater. That is why I have informed yesterday UN member states that I am officially launching what we call the U.S. And it's considering a raft of changes. But critics say there's only so far such efforts can go. It's very difficult to reform a system when you don't actually control the finances of the system, not even, you don't even generate the finances of the system.

The United Nations system is beholden to its member states in terms of financial resourcing. And in particular, the dominant, the major countries, do contribute to an oversized amount of resources to the United Nations, and from that perspective, can even control the nature of the reform agenda. At the moment, if we fast forward to the present, we have something called the UN-80, that the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is now advocating, which essentially is a slash-and-burn operation, which is, these are not my words, these are the words of United Nations staff members who have issued a formal letter to actually criticize the UN-80 initiative and,

say it's going nowhere, and it will do very little. In fact, it will make the situation much worse. It's going to potentially leave 23 million people without access to basic humanitarian assistance. Countless of people will be killed because of ongoing conflicts and the failure of the system to operate more efficiently on the ground. A provision of basic services in terms of healthcare, education, and so on will also be severely affected. through this merging slash and burn, you know, approach to the reform of the multilateral system. Tim has long believed that the key to real change is actually an obscure mechanism embedded in that outdated UN Charter itself. It's called Article 109.

We have drafted, thanks to the help of many of you, actually, a policy brief that outlines our vision and allows us to have something to share with those that we're reaching out to. It's September 10, 2024. Hibba and her fellow politically savvy dreamers are back on another Zoom call. They've been preparing for the UN's upcoming summit of the future. Tim Marithi is one of the coalition's advisors. This is actually about 8 billion people,

and how can we get this issue to move forward in a very complicated intergovernmental environment, which, you know, to a large extent, has excluded the voices of ordinary people. So I think for me, the more the merrier. Their growing coalition is aimed at one thing, persuading UN members to invoke Article 109. If I have your pleasure, may I invite the leaders of Gellors, who are in favor of the approval of the Charter and the Statute and the Agreement on Interim

Arrangements to rise in their places and be good enough to remain standing while they're counted. To understand what it is, we have to return again to 1945 and the decision of the world's major powers to give themselves the veto. So as a concession to the many countries of those 50 that ultimately signed the charter in 1945 in the very beginning, many of them were opposed to the idea that the five permanent members of the Security Council, so the U.S., China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom would have a veto power. And so they were given a promise. You know, they said it's a particular moment in time after World War II, just sign on,

and within 10 years we will review this distribution of power. So it's actually written into the founding document of the UN in Article 109 that there shall be a review conference held within the 10th year of the UN's establishment. Or at least that if a review conference hasn't been held by then, that it should be placed on the agenda for discussion. 1955 came around. A majority of countries were in favor of a review, but they felt the timing wasn't right.

And so they punted it to some undetermined time in the field. future and 80 years later, this year in 2025, we're celebrating the UN's 80th anniversary, this built-in review mechanism has never been used. And that same excuse is being used that this isn't the right time. And so I guess we're asking if in a situation in which major nuclear powers are openly threatening nuclear war, we are facing climate catastrophe. We have wars in Europe and other parts of the world that are unmanageable. We have, we have have emerging technologies like artificial intelligence that are out of control. If now is not the right time to review how we govern these crises, then when would be?

So can a conference change the world? This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. You know what's funny? Tony Collette hates watching horror movies, but she loves acting in them. As one of the most dynamic and versatile actors of her generation, Tony has starred in everything. I mean, from her Oscar-nominated role in The Sixth Sense to her iconic haunting performance in Hereditary. In our career-spanning conversation on Q, you'll hear why she keeps returning to the genre she's afraid of. That's on Q with me, Tom Power.

Follow wherever you get your podcasts, including on YouTube. Welcome to the Summit of the Future. It's September 22nd, 2024. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is officially opening what's been billed as Summit of the Future in New York. We are here to bring multilateralism back from the brink. It's the culmination of countless hours of conversation,

research and horse trading inside the UN and out, all aimed at bringing the UN into the 21st century. And you see it in the final pacts, promises to engage youth, to pay more attention to climate, to governing outer space, to nuclear proliferation, and to finally fix the Security Council. On peace and security, they promise a breakthrough on reforms to make the Security Council more reflective of today's world, addressing the historic and the representation, of Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. They lay the foundations for a more agile peace-building commission

and for a fundamental review of... Just a few days earlier, another report on upgrading the UN, 100 pages long, is launched into the world. It's titled A Second United Nations Charter. I wanted to thank you all for coming to this event. Actually, this series of three events where we are trying to sort of give an overview of the scope of the project and the contents of a second charter.

This one is by authors who aren't with the UN. They're international experts and thinkers, even Nobel laureates, volunteers, who spent nearly three years imagining what an updated UN could look like. Well, it would have a Security Council that would be more, representative and a veto override to vetoes in the Security Council. Hello, my name is Augusta Lopez-Claros. I am the executive director of the Global Governance Forum, an organization that over the last

two to three years has been working on a fairly large project involving a rethinking of the UN Charter. You know, what would this document look like if we were to write it today with, a view to empowering the UN to be a more effective organization in the 21st century. We also think that longer term, the UN should turn into an organization of states, which is what it is today, into an organization of states and peoples, and therefore we propose the creation of a parliamentary assembly, which would bring representatives from the parliaments of the member nations, either the parliaments themselves or directly elected, you know, from their

populations. And this would sort of address the democratic legitimacy deficit that the UN system has, as it was convinced in 1945. The new UN would have an Earth System Council. Yeah, an organization that would harmonize international environmental law that would coordinate global environmental policy that would see implementation of global environmental or treaties and so on, because this is an area in which there is chaos, there is disorder, and because of that, there is lack of action.

We absolutely have to have that conversation. We don't want to prejudge the outcome of that conversation. But, of course, ultimately, it will be the member states themselves who will decide what kind of reforms they want to introduce and how they want to modernize the human charter. But wouldn't this process be vulnerable to the same forces like vetoes that get in the way of action now? You see, the beauty of Article 109 is that the convening of the conference to reconsider the charter cannot be vetoed. Remember, Article 109 was introduced to placate those 17 countries that objected violently to the presence of the veto. So Article 109 has this wonderful feature, which basically says that the conference can be convened simply with the approval of

two-thirds of the General Assembly and nine out of the 15 members of the Security Council. So the bar to convene the conference is not especially onerous. And so for me, it's the logical way to go forward. It's still not easy getting buy-in from 193 countries on anything, never mind such a monumental step. Just writing that report required countless volunteer hours from seasoned experts, funding from philanthropists, and someone to coordinate it all. But big change has to be imagined before it can be sold. I guess I would like to ask you a more philosophical question.

I mean, you mentioned funding, you mentioned pro bono work, you certainly have motivation. Just a statement on what it takes today do you think, to me? make change on the global stage of the order that you are hoping for? I think that one important factor is I sense an increasing sense of alarm at the way, at the direction that the world is going, right? You know, there is kind of universal recognition that, you know, climate change is a serious problem that needs addressing and that in the absence of action, we're going to bring a great deal of suffering to humanity. And so you see a growing number of people in official circles and the capitals with the members of the UN in the upper reaches of, you know, policymaking circles.

You see this sense of frustration and this sense of alarm that we need to change the institutional framework that allows better kinds of international cooperation. You see it on the security side. More and more experts are talking about, you know, the likelihood. of a nuclear nuclear war in coming years, no longer as a distant prospect, but as something that needs to be avoided for obvious reasons. And this sense of, this quiet, the sense of alarm is actually growing. You see it when you talk to officials and the international financial institutions with what is happening on the inequality side, right? Income inequality has ceased to be simply an economic problem and has mutated into a deep social problem that is undermining

the basis of democracy, that is giving rise to populism, that is empowering demagogues in many parts of the world, you know, who come up with claims that they can solve people's problems, but in fact, we're only motivated by the desire for power. So inequality has become a serious problem that is destabilizing societies. And so it's really, The aggregation of these things, I think, which is leading many UN member states and their representative, their ambassadors at the UN, their prime ministers, and so on, to see this project with a certain kind of, what's the word, I'm looking, not only interest, but I think that they are glad that there is a civil society organization, like the Global Governance Forum, that is actually coming forward with creative proposals. I think ultimately civil society will play the leading role in persuading member states to convene this conference and to rethink the charter.

But can a conference really change the world? Think of a conference as being, as entailing the coming together of UN member states to have a meaningful consultation about how do we want to strengthen the mechanisms of international cooperation? How do we want to modernize our global governance architecture, which is kind of a legacy of 1945 and World War II, right? So it isn't really the conference. The conference is what we call this coming together of nations to have this conversation.

And I think that calling it a conference, to simplify the idea, I think what we're talking about is basically a coming together of nations to have that very important conversation. However that takes, and in whichever form that takes. Yeah, it's the opening. Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So that conference, which again, as we agree, is an opening, will still convene the same countries with all the baggage that they carry currently in an ineffectual or at least not perfectly effective United Nations.

It does not worry you in some way that in fact those same countries that have been kind of dominating this only multilateral organization the world has that they may not just impose their will at a conference as well. I think we were able to model through

through the 1950s, 70s, 70s, 80s and so on. and somehow escaped, you know, a global calamity such as a nuclear war, although things got pretty hairy at the height of the Cold War in the early 1980s and so on, right? But, you know, we emerge out of that process relatively unscated. But when you talk to the scientists, when you see what they are saying about climate change, when you talk to the security experts who see their trends on military spending and the current tensions that exist between the major powers, no one has made the case to us that this is kind of what we call a stable equilibrium,

that we can just afford to remain on this path and not end up in some kind of major calamity. And so if the powerful member states, the Russia, the China, the Americans, you know, were to try to dominate the conflict, or to try to block some of the most important initiatives coming out of that conference, you know? The burden then will be on them to persuade the other countries that there is a better path, such as muddling through. But I don't think they will succeed.

Hibba is criss-crossing the globe on a mission of persuasion, and with her team trying to convince UN members that the opening is worth seizing now. Sometimes she's in conversation on a stage. So how would you describe this moment? What is at stake for the UN, for geopolitics, for the world order? And sometimes in quiet sessions with UN members behind closed doors. A lot of it is talking to people, mostly governments, but also civil society, academics, the UN, you know, a whole range of stakeholders.

But it is really about raising awareness. A lot of people don't even know that this mechanism to review and update the UN Charter exists. So first of all, it's, hey, did you know? And then it's about addressing the immediate fears and concerns that come up, which are extremely understandable and justifiable, but for which there are answers. We are now actively trying to engage governments across the world, Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia to build a coalition of willing governments within the United Nations General Assembly. Tim Murrithi from Cape Town, one of the coalition's advisors. Many governments are still very cautious about doing this because,

essentially all human beings, the majority of human beings have not known anything else other than the United Nations. So they're very cautious about opening up, if you will, the DNA of the United Nations to a deeper introspection and review because they're worried of what might be thrown out from the United Nations charter. And they think that we don't, they're worried about throwing out the United Nations baby with a bathwater. But I think we always try to remind them the United Nations is, in fact, not a baby.

But now the United Nations is an 80-year-old granny and is struggling to deal with the crises that we have around the world, Nandler. There's actually pushback across a whole range of fronts. So it's not only the powerful that don't want to give up power, which is what most people would assume will be the biggest challenge. And that certainly is going to be one of the challenges. But it's also those who are worried about throwing the so-called UN baby out with the bathwater, right? That the UN has done a lot of wonderful things and that there are a lot of really important norms enshrined in the UN, including human rights. And that if you reopen that, it becomes a Pandora's box and everything is up for negotiation at a time in which countries are really polarized, at a time in which we're seeing rollbacks on a lot of those rights that we,

used to take for granted. To be sure that those with the power are not for this, so they're quietly behind the scenes also preventing this from coming to the surface. You've never seen a debate on this at the United Nations Security Council. Well, you've seen certain countries call for it, like India. India's ambassador call for it at the United Nations Security Council, but you've never seen any of the permanent five members call for each other if you conference at the United Nations Security Council for obvious reasons.

They're sitting on a powerful position, Turkey's, do not vote for Christmas and for these powerful countries it's been Christmas since the beginning and the rest of us are obviously the outside looking in and I think we have we have the responsibility it will be on us to actually make this happen because the beneficiaries of the current system are really not for for changing almost every democratic state where we can imagine has always began with some form of a conversation and a discussion amongst its people right so it's not an possible thing to envisage, and it's not, and I think to, as to wage the fear, let me say the review conference is only the beginning of the conversation. It's not essentially going

to immediately replace the United Nations. This will take maybe three to five years, even longer maybe, because in order for us to get to the point where a new system is created and adopted, all 1923 countries have to have the opportunity to vote and agree to its establishment. So one should not think that, you know, this process essentially is throwing the United Nations, as I said, granny out of the bath at this stage. Yeah, I think it is real. I think there is a lot of fear in not all European capsules, but in some, yeah, we don't want to open up the charter because that would be very dangerous for us.

And you have to also think about the position of small and medium powers in the UN who already lack agency and lack clout and don't want to give away whatever positions they might have. My name is Alana O'Malley and I'm Professor of Global Governance and Wealth at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. There's also the fear, of course, that this relationship with the United States that looms over European security right now is very much in question. So opening up the charter might open up all kinds of tricky questions to do with that transatlantic partnership. We're having conversations a lot in Europe, especially right now, about global order. What is global order?

How does it change? And a lot of this is coming from the recognition in foreign affairs departments around the continent that the relationship with the United States is very different from basically since before the Second World War. But also that the global South is thinking about this not as a crisis of multilateralism, but as an opportunity to change. positions in the global order. And that has produced a lot of interest in thinking about the global side and what they want and who they are and how we relate to them as European

countries, but as Western powers. And that is all part of the conversation about UN reform. So in my, I think my interpretation of it is that there's a lot of fear about opening the charter, but this fear is misplaced because the problem is that if we leave the charter as it is, then we make the UN even weaker and more defunct than it already is. As a historian of the UN, I believe that it has many problems. But the main one is that people don't believe in it anymore. We've lost faith in internationalism, and we've lost faith in the United Nations. Elena O'Malley delivered her TEDx talk about the UN back in 2018.

We need the UN more than ever. we need to reimagine what it is and what it could be we need to rediscover its potential and we need to find again that belief in the united nations and its relevance for our everyday lives so i always like to know how people um caught on to ideas and make them their life's work and i wonder what it was that brought you to the study of multilateral institutions and the u.n what where did the road begin for you. So I'm Irish in case you didn't guess by the name or the accent. And so Ireland is a very proud member of the United Nations. And very much it was a feature of my understanding of Ireland as I was growing up, particularly because in 1960, Irish peacekeepers were during one of their first missions for the UN, some of them were killed in the Congo, in an ambush in the 1960s during

the Congo crisis, which took place from 1960 to 1964. And this was the first loss of Irish life as part of a peacekeeping mission. And so it had a huge cultural and historical resonance with the public in Ireland. And so I became interested then in the UN and what it does. And when I went to university, I really wanted to understand more about history, but also about international relations and how those two things come together and that they come together very clearly through the UN. As a historian, Elena went on to study the impact of Western dominance at the UN on how the organization is understood and what we think it's capable of. The EU is funding her multi-year research project in which she aims to uncover non-Western histories of the UN. And that's

is what I've termed the invisible histories of the UN. And the argument in that project is that because Western orientated visions of both what the UN was, but also what it could be, have dominated not just our historiography, but also our thinking and our common perception of the UN, that on the one hand, it invisibleizes all those other histories that very much exist, but are not part of our understanding of how the UN operates. And this is hugely problematic, because firstly, we then misunderstand, you know, the number one global institution of international politics, international relations. But secondly, we cannot possibly build forward constructive visions of what the UN could be.

If you think about reform or you think about the future, if you don't understand, it's fully global path. How much of what you think is kind of the core malaise at the United Nations is directly related to this erasure or this absence that you're talking about? I think, yeah, I think this is a really good question. So I think this common perception of the UN being dysfunctional, people say, oh, it's dysfunctional, it doesn't work very well. And therefore, you know, we don't really need it.

But on the other hand, as long as people hold this conception, they will not be interested in empowering the UN. And so it's stuck in this kind of circle of destruction, basically. So I think that if we start to think of it, not as only the organisation that protects Western interests, but is actually a global organisation that has achieved massive things in terms of economic and social development, much more than peace and security. But of course, economic and social development is fundamental to peace and security.

Then we can change the story of what the UN has been in terms of thinking about what it might be. And a lot of that is taking into account the actors from the global side who used it to achieve. independence and achieve freedom, but also, you know, more currently, you know, used it to kind of, for a positive economic and social development, used it to secure human rights, used it to resist authoritarian regimes, and used UN ideas and for UN principles to build stronger, safer, more resilient and more peaceful societies. So if we started telling those stories

what the UN has done and is doing, then we change the story of what the UN has done. capacity is. And I think that is where you get people thinking, oh, so the UN has done these things. Even if we in the West are not directly affected by the law of this, the UN can do these things. Let's help it to do more. Do you believe the UN is still fit for purpose? No, of course it's not fit for purpose. I mean, it's absolutely. It's nowhere near for purpose. You know, what it is able to do instrumentally through the Security Council and the meaning that it has for different people are two different things. And if we want to think, think, is the UN still relevant? Is its meaning still relevant? Then look at the case that the South

Africans are born against Israel and they did that at the ICA. And so they believe in the power of international law through the highest court of the UN to actually stop the genocide. Like this is a view of its purpose that's coming from a country that has a deep engagement with the UN and is supported right by 62, 64 other states at this point across the world. So we don't have to think about whether or not we, as individuals, think it's for purpose. We look at the people to whom it is most relevant, and they're the ones who decide, you know, or who can reflect, I think, best, what's the UN's relevance.

And we need to get a sense of those understandings and reflections and visions of the UN that are separate from that conversation about what the Security Council enables or disables to organisation to do. Because, of course, given the situation between the global powers at this moment, the Security Council is deeply dysfunctional. But we can't possibly open the reform agenda until we understand how other countries view the UN's utility. Still, as reform proposals go, and there are several,

Elena believes a conference triggered by Article 109 would make ample room for such discussions. It would be an opportunity for states to think more abstractly about what the UN could be. So, like, a lot of the politics and dynamics that General Assembly is, like, it's lobbying, it's horse trading, one, this, that and the other, that they, you know, there's a lot of things that are happening in that space all the time. But if you make it only about, well, UN reform, right?

So, firstly, you would have the opportunity to hear, like, what do various states want from the UN, what they don't want? And if we leave aside the veto problem for one minute, I think a lot of states can agree on, like, a new instrument for climate finance. or reform of the kind of economic and social development architecture of the UN, which is what the US has proposed, a reform of some of the major structures of the UN. I think we need to create a space to think only about those issues, because if we do it only at the UN, there's always a vote, there's always an agenda, there's always, you know, major issues of global affairs we dealt with. But we need to create that kind of space to allow them to think a bit more conceptually and abstractly. But the second reason, of course, is that if we don't bring these ideas together there,

they take place in other forums, right? So they're taking place in these kind of regional spaces and regional organizations. They're taking place in bilateral relationships. So I think it's essential to create that space. Like the question that I'll be asking for this next month is, where are the member states? You know, who's going to lead on this? Like what kind of speeches are we going to hear from Brazil and from South Africa, but also from Ireland, from the Netherlands, from European powers, where are they on this? Why are they,

why are they not leading the reform of the UN? To me, this just reflects that attitude of like status quo, we'll just keep the status quo. As long as we continue to do that, we'll also make the UN less relevant and disenfranchise people further from thinking that it's important. Less than a week before world leaders convened in New York for the 80th annual meeting of heads of state, the Article 109 coalition had managed to brief representatives from nearly 60 of 193 countries. Changing the world order is an incremental battle. It's a very painful process. It's actually ardures, it's painstaking when we speak to diplomats from different countries around. the world. Most are quite, you know, they're taking aback. They're not sure how to respond because

you're asking them to rethink the system. And some are quite cautious about raising their hand. In fact, some have been quite explicit in saying, we like this idea, but please get somebody else to go first and then we will support them from behind the scenes. And that behavior, I don't understand, because you, you claim to be a leader. You're a diplomatic leader at the United nation's system. And ideas do not simply just jump out of paper and run by themselves. They have to be held by certain human beings. And so we find that quite perplexing. But the nature of what we do, the nature of what civil society does is always, as you will, if you will, to hold the hand of our governments and to guide them in the right direction. I mean, nothing that has been achieved

globally, has been achieved by governments necessarily taking the initial lead. Let's go back to the abolition of slavery. We can go to the decolonization of countries that were colonized by most of these permanent five members. All those decolonial movements were led by individuals, associations, groups. We can fast forward to the environmental crisis, the climate crisis, the climate. change crisis. This is largely being led by civil society actors that are pushing governments to make certain decisions. We can focus on the international campaign to ban landmines. In fact, that was led by groups that were based in Canada. And to the present, where we are now

faced with another major campaign to get countries to agree to review the United Nations Charter going forward. So it is the nature of what we do. are prisoners of hope, I think Desmond Tutu used to say. Desmond Tutu Archbishop in South Africa who led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and trying to reconfigure, if you will, the nature of society in South Africa. And another South African leader who was the first president of the country, Nelson Mandela, had a very important quote where he said, it always seems impossible until it's done, you know? What makes you think that you can succeed?

Well, you certainly won't succeed if you don't try. So that's, I think, number one. And I'm really motivated by the words of a NASA scientist that have stuck with me for years now and that I always come back to when I get asked this question. And she gets asked to give hope on the climate crisis. and she says, I can't. You know, the world we once knew is not coming back and the future will inevitably be different for our children.

What we need is not hope, but courage. And courage is the resolve to do the right thing without a guarantee of a happy ending. And so that's how I think about this work. We have to try because we know that the situation we have today is literally killing people, whether that's on conflict or on the inability to govern climate change or through pandemics or all the other challenges that we're facing.

But why do I think we can succeed? And I do believe that we can succeed. Because things have gotten so bad that it is harder and harder for people to accept that the status quo is viable and easier to accept that while this process is going to be difficult and risky, we have to try something. If all goes well, according to the Coalition's plan, a general review conference, as it's described in Article 109 of the UN Charter, would begin in 2030. On ideas you've been listening to, Can a Conference Change the World, produced by me, Nala Ayad. Thank you to Hibali, Tim Murithi, Elana O'Malley, and Augusto Lopez Claros. Special thanks to the CBC's New York correspondent, Chris Reyes. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Emily Kiervezio. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich.

The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.com.