UN General Assembly - failure for the 79th year running?

Amid escalation of global conflict, the annual gathering of world leaders in New York highlighted the shockingly low number of women in highest office, raising more questions about a system in crisis.

At the start of the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), world leaders gather in New York to take part in the High Level debate. At this ‘state of the union address’ for the entire world, 133 heads of state or government took to the stage. 

Just nine of these speakers were women. 

It is hard to tell what is most shocking about this statistic. For decades, women’s rights activists have made increasing women’s political participation and representation a top priority. We have been calling attention to disparities every bit as depressing as this year’s UNGA for as long as I can remember. It has been a call that many politicians have loudly claimed to have heard, and to have themselves taken as a priority - from the current UN Secretary-General, who has long trumpeted his feminist credentials, to UN Women, which has made serious efforts on the issue.

The net result of these years of talk? Women leaders are outnumbered 20-1 on the global stage.

Pathetic.

Simple metrics like the number of women prime ministers and presidents have always been useful as a campaigning tool because the systems of national and global power have consistently been so slow to change. The ultimate result of such a small proportion of decision makers being women - and the thing that we want to change - is how women and girls are treated by political and diplomatic systems at the macro level. But using the micro level - the number of women who reach the very top of politics - has always been a figure that everyone can easily understand as a gross inequality, and something that shames politicians and decision makers. But we should also note that the vagaries of political systems in which an elected few represent the interests of the many have distorting effects that go beyond numbers. 

Just as some women have sought to dismantle patriarchal norms and break glass ceilings with the intention of challenging the systems that create and perpetuate inequality, there have been women in politics who have chosen to pull up the ladder behind them, who wish only to succeed in an unjust system and shore it up further. Similarly the appointment of women to historically conservative institutions has not necessarily heralded a step change to how they work, so much as it has shown that women are as ideologically heterodox as any other group.

Put another way, no rights activist celebrated the appointment of the CIA’s first woman director, a figure deeply implicated in the agency’s torture program, while for every Sonia Sotomayor, there is an Amy Coney Barrett. 

The world has seen women leaders who are every bit as incompetent and bellicose as their male counterparts. Our argument as activists has not been that women should be elevated to leading positions simply for the benefit of particular individuals, that we should help those women trying to ‘lean in’ to the status quo. Rather, increasing women’s representation is an essential part of the transformation of those institutions, in order for them to work better for everyone’s interest. 

The UNGA speaker list is then just another data point for a system that is catastrophically failing the world, to be placed alongside the decline in global peacefulness, the increase in people displaced by conflict and disaster, while nations continue to spend trillions of dollars on arms that are demonstrable failing to keep people safe.

The failures we see around us all lead to a fundamental question: what is the point of meeting at UNGA during a genocide?

What is the point of this model of multilateralism when the Israeli government rejects the world’s demands for an end to escalation, and instead continues to mount a ground invasion of Lebanon?

And what of the ongoing conflicts in Sudan, DR Congo, Myanmar, Ukraine, and in the dozens of countries affected by strife? What of our ability to deal with the climate crisis? How is the multilateral system to meet any and all of these challenges?

The United Nations is an institution that needs fundamental reform if it is ever to fulfil its purpose of maintaining international peace and security.

To this end, the UN did agree a pact at the Summit of the Future earlier last week in an attempt to meet these challenges. If it is to be successful, it will need to address the problems we identified in our publication exploring the crisis of confidence in the multilateral system. Will the pact be able to overcome the contradictions and asymmetries inherent in a system designed by and for colonial powers, countries engaged in the exploitation of others, countries that set the rules for others while picking and choosing which rules it will abide by, and which allies to whom they will give a free pass for violations?

If you want to understand the failure of the UN and the multilateral system, nothing exemplifies it more clearly, more simply than the lives of the Palestinian people.

From the UN’s inception to the present day, Palestinians have been denied their basic rights, their right to self-determination, the right to live in the lands of their forebears. They have been denied justice for the countless crimes and violations to which they have been subjected. Everyday. For generations.

Will the pact for the future come to grips with the decades of failure, injury, and injustice? It will be fair to judge the success of attempts at reform of the multilateral system with this measure.

We might also be able to judge the success or failure of this reform by whether future editions of UNGA look like last week’s edition. If we find ourselves with the same men, in the same suits, with the same excuses for the same failures, the price the world pays will be incalculable.