Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball | Inside this week’s UN General Assembly

This week on Keeping an Eye on the Geopolitical Ball, Jamie Shea, Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, reflects on the 78th Annual Session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Jamie describes the mood at this week’s summit as particularly gloomy, pointing to the 4/5 missing Security Council members, the very slow international humanitarian response to the flooding disaster in Libya, as well as the great challenge of meeting the SDGs. Against the backdrop of the UN’s lack of involvement in solving some of the big crises taking place around the world, the relevance of it as a global actor is being questioned. Jamie, however, contends that the UN remains irreplaceable in four main areas, namely in global climate change, international arms control, transnational justice, but most importantly, in providing the world with a platform for annual exchange. While the UN needs to reform, it is the only organisation we currently have to stop the world, as Secretary General Guterres said, from “ripping apart”.