Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:18:07.894Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Where the UN Has Failed to Live Up to Its Mission: Looking Back to Look Forward

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

Devaki Jain
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In its seventy-fifth year, the UN needs to reflect more seriously on its value in the current global scenario, the current flow of ideas, and the current flow of power that is prevalent in the world. It is important to recall that the UN was founded after World War II as a way of addressing conflict at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield. Negotiating peace, attempting to provide some form of justice, and affirmation of human rights seemed to be the aspiration. It is within this context that women engaged in affirming their own special location in society and economy. However, over the years the UN has revealed its inability to fulfill these goals. Perhaps in the midst of all these failures, the only category of people that has drawn strength from the UN, but now has to leave it behind, are women. Scattered as they were across a world of distances, women of different cultures and classes found strength in numbers and, through the UN system and the conferences they convened, became a power of their own. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that today, however, women do not need and cannot have their aspirations be facilitated by the UN, because in their engagement with one another they have also recognized their differences. Being of similar gender does not necessarily overcome other oppressive differences.

Keywords

United Nationswomennegotiating peacejusticehuman rightsDevelopment Alternatives with Women for a New EraDAWNGlobal South
Type
The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 34 , Special Issue 3: The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward , Fall 2020 , pp. 351 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Assisted by Shivangi Gupta, who received her master of science degree in economics from the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) School of Advanced Studies in New Delhi.

References

NOTES

1 India's appeal was for the UN to address the treatment of Indians in South Africa. It was 1950 before the General Assembly declared that apartheid was based on racial discrimination.

2 UN sanctions against South Africa began with arms and petroleum embargoes in 1963.

3 “Address by President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, at the 62nd Session of the United Nations’ General Assembly, New York” (speech, United Nations, New York, September 25, 2007), South African History Online, www.sahistory.org.za/archive/address-president-south-africa-thabo-mbeki-62nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly-new.

4 The other three were the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the UN-International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW), and the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues (OSAGI). Along with DAWN, these were all merged into UN Women in 2010.

5 “CSW 64 / Beijing+25 (2020),” Commission on the Status of Women, UN Women, www.unwomen.org/en/csw/csw64-2020.

6 Devaki Jain, “Minds, Not Bodies: Expanding the Notion of Gender in Development” (conference presentation, Bradford Morse Memorial Lecture, UNDP, Beijing, September 5, 1995).

7 Amartya Sen, “Transition to Sustainability” (keynote address, Inter-Academy Panel on International Issues, Tokyo, May 15, 2000).