Dan Banik speaks with Alanna O’Malley about the hidden history of the United Nations, showing how actors from the Global South helped shape global governance, decolonization, development, and the struggle for a more just international order. The conversation explores why the UN looks very different when viewed from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and why these debates matter so much in today’s crisis-ridden world.
In this episode of In Pursuit of Development, Dan Banik speaks with Alanna O’Malley, Professor and Chair of Global Governance & Wealth and Head of Department of History at Erasmus University, about the hidden history of the United Nations and the decisive role of the Global South in shaping global governance. Drawing on her forthcoming book, Decolonising Global Order, The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South, she explains how actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America helped transform debates on decolonisation, development, human rights, sovereignty, and economic justice — even as their contributions were often written out of mainstream histories.
Dan and Alanna explore why the UN looks very different when viewed from the Global South, why the institution cannot be understood only through the lens of Security Council politics, and why international law and multilateralism still matter deeply to many countries despite growing frustration with double standards and inequality. This is a wide-ranging conversation on the United Nations, global development, the crisis of multilateralism, and the long struggle to build a more representative and just international order.
Read a short article based on this episode at: https://globaldevpod.substack.com/ Â
[Dan Banik]
Wonderful to see you today, Alanna.
I'm so happy that we got connected recently and I got to hear about this amazing book that you're soon done with. No pressure, but welcome to the show.
[Alanna O’Malley]
Thanks very much.
Thank you so much for the invitation.
It's really, as I said, an honor to connect with you.
And I've drawn great inspiration from your work.
So I really am excited to tell you about the ongoing book project is how I would phrase it rather than the finished article.
But thank you for giving me this chance to talk about it.
[Dan Banik]
A lot of people are complaining about the UN.
And given what is happening today with the wars and the invasions and perhaps, you know, reduced focus on poverty reduction, the UN is not coordinated.
It is just not fit for purpose.
It doesn't, you know, address some of the big challenges that we face today.
But as I understand it, you've been arguing that a lot of the analysis and the perspectives that we often have on the UN, and whenever we say that the UN is failing, is often shaped by how we in the West view the institution.
And it may not necessarily be how countries in the Global South view it.
So could you help us get started with that perspective?
I mean, is the UN failing?
And if so, is it only the West that's
that thinks the UN is failing or is it more of a consensus on this issue?
[Alanna O’Malley]
So there's a couple of things there.
I mean, firstly, I would start with this kind of problem that I am still, you know, I'm trying to understand for a very long time, which is that everything that we know about the UN in terms of what we learn in school or in university or what we read in the media or in kind of public platforms somewhere is
is really informed largely by the Western viewpoint of the United Nations, right?
So this story that, you know, at the end of the Second World War, the post-war victors created an institution of collective security to guarantee peace and security around the world.
And then that kind of transformed into, you know, the UN being this vehicle for the delivery of the liberal international order, right?
which rose and fell in terms of its success or not success over time.
And that's kind of the traditional story that we've told of the UN.
And it's very teleological.
And it's kind of the known history, right?
But it always seems to me to be largely in contrast with the reality.
Because if you go to the UN archives in Geneva, or in New York, or in any national capsule, every national capsule has archives of the United Nations kept by that country.
And
that country's contribution to the UN, it's the voices of Global South actors that are most prominent and most dynamic and most active.
And so I think most of my career has been driven by the challenge to understand that fundamental gap.
And that's really where this book project is coming from.
And it's about thinking about how the actors of the Global South have changed the UN over time.
and what traces of their agency were left on the system and how that changed the structures of the UN, but also the political dynamics around the questions they were engaged with.
So that's the second thing that I would say about your first question, which is about, I don't really agree with this idea that we use the term success or failure if we're talking about the UN.
Because firstly, also, the UN's job is multifarious, right?
I mean, it has so many different projects ongoing at the same time.
And the broader global ambitions are lofty, such like, you know, if you think of the first sustainable development goal, no poverty seems an enormous hill to climb.
But it's the job of the UN to set out this lofty agenda for humanity.
But if we then attach success or failure to that agenda directly, then it makes the gap smaller.
of achieving those stated aims impossible to climb so i think we should still think rather about more in a more complicated way about the un what is the un being good at what has it changed what has it failed to change what initiatives have begun how can these initiatives be taken forward and so on so forth and i think if we look at what global south actors think about the un
The thing that stands out for me, this is probably the second thing that I try to understand, is that although the people across countries in Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, are most directly affected by the work of the UN, because of course the UN carries out many programmes in these places,
mostly on economic and social development.
Those people are the ones who have historically had the most faith in the organisation.
They believed that the UN could make their lives better, to put it in simple terms.
And that belief waxed and waned over time.
It was not always consistent.
And I think it takes us up to the point today where I think there's still stronger belief in general terms about the potential of
of the international system or the responsibility of the international system towards humanity that people try to invoke from the Global South rather than in the Global North.
There's a real passivity about the UN.
There's a real negativity.
I mean, you'd be hard pushed, I think, to find anybody who would say, oh, it's the UN's responsibility to do this or
we should bring this question to the UN.
Whereas if you look at the major issues of the day, you know, Gaza, what's going on in the Iran war, the Russian aggression against Ukraine, a lot of the global south are the actors who are driving the cases at the ICJ, for example, the UN General Assembly resolutions.
So that agency that historically has always been there is still very performative in the UN system.
[Dan Banik]
When I think about these narratives on global governance, on global development and the UN, and when I do interact with UN officials, Alanna, I get the sense that the UN is only as powerful or influential as its member states want it to be.
And there I think there's a dilemma because you have the financial power of certain states, you have
these five permanent members of the Security Council that play an outsized role.
And then, as you were alluding to, perhaps in the General Assembly, even a small country has one vote and feels it is represented and can be heard.
So the voices of the smaller actors all get a lot of attention as much as the bigger actors in the General Assembly.
So do you think some of this challenge or the perception of the failure is related to funding, which is largely controlled by the West, whereas in terms of activism, in terms of, you know, coming up with new ideas, it is the Global South that has taken the lead?
[Alanna O’Malley]
Yeah, so this is the kind of fundamental contradiction that we've seen emerge in Global South agency in the international system over time.
And it's most obvious in the UN, but it's also the case in the IMF or in the World Bank or in other institutions.
And that's this contradiction wherein since 1960, two thirds of the UN's members are of the Global South, they're Global South states.
But at the same time, they have not been able to leverage the majority position
into compromises from the global north on major development issues, but also on, you know, right now, the climate finance debate, for example.
And that has become a problem that has always been a problem over time, but has become increasingly acute as the financial crisis of the UN is more widespread.
And now, of course, it's in dire straits, to put it in even mild terms.
And still that majority pressure is
is unable to leverage compromise from Global North actors to put more money into the UN.
And that means that there's a frustration because it's a question of what then does the agency and dynamism produce?
And my argument is that it's not a question of the immediate results all the time.
It's a question of piecemeal approaches to institutional change because institutional change is always very slow.
It's a question of shaping public opinion around the imperative of the UN system and the work that it does.
But it's also about thinking about what are the kernels of the ideas or the institutional dynamics on this question.
which may not succeed right now, but will be very formative for, you know, future initiatives.
And if I could give one historical example of that during the 1960s, I think it was 64, 65.
And this is something I write a little bit about in the book.
I'm interested in this, what I've kind of termed, you know, lost causes in the UN system.
Right.
So what happens when an initiative comes and then it doesn't seem to go anywhere?
One of the interesting cases is the proposal to create a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which actually emerges in the 1960s.
It's actually pushed by Britain and the Netherlands and Kenya and other globalized countries who think this is really, really important to have a person who is responsible for human rights.
And this is around the time that they're negotiating the draft covenants.
that will emerge in 1966.
So there's a quite intense human rights debate.
And this proposal goes forward and is discussed, should it be the creation of a High Commissioner for Human Rights.
And of course, the General Assembly passes it on and it falls off the agenda then after 67, 68.
But when this post is created in 1992, then it's exactly the same proposal that has come from the 1960s.
It's just that the moment and the dynamism is then behind that initiative again,
and then this institutional change is created.
I think it's a great example of the historical continuities that shape the UN system.
[Dan Banik]
When I read your work, I am fascinated by the stories of individuals.
It could be a Chilean lawyer.
It could be UN staff members, civil society organizations from the Global South, thinkers, academics.
There are so many voices, Alanna, out there that have shaped the evolution of the organization.
And yet you argue that many of these voices seem to be a bit invisible or we don't know enough.
So I'm wondering, why is it?
What happened?
I mean, was there a conscious attempt to silence these voices, whether influence was marginal or great?
There was this idea that somebody would sort of shape the narrative.
I mean, why?
Was this a conscious effort or was it just something that has evolved that those without maybe too much sort of a financial muscle didn't really get to scream loudly?
And it was only those with muscle, financial muscle that got to decide.
So what explains this invisibility of the voices of the Global South in the evolution of the organization?
[Alanna O’Malley]
That's a great question.
So I think there's probably two or three different reasons.
I don't think it's a global conspiracy to individualise the agency of the Global South.
I think a couple of different things happened.
Firstly, I think there was quite a conscious effort to build...
the credibility and legitimacy of the UN from the very beginning as something that was going to be better and long lasting than the League of Nations.
So remember that when the San Francisco conference takes place and the UN Charter is signed, the final League of Nations officials have to go in the back door of the building because they don't want this association with the failed League of Nations that didn't prevent the Second World War.
So there's quite a kind of conscious effort then that the UN is presented as, you know, a bright and shiny chance for humanity.
And it's embraced very much.
In fact, it's embraced far more by Global South actors than the Global North anticipate in the beginning.
And then, of course, that sets off
a whole trajectory around decolonization.
I think the second thing is that then a lot of the analysis of the UN has been kind of linked to the Cold War and has been really viewed only through what does the Security Council do or not do for most of the 20th century?
Like we have this overwhelming emphasis on the Security Council.
Where, in fact, most of the UN's work and actually what the UN does best, far better than peace and security, is about economic and social development.
But we haven't told those histories and we're doing it now.
It's a huge emerging literature.
in history and law and political science that's doing excellent work in this.
But those are not traditionally part of our framing.
The second thing I think which is problematic is that there's been this very teleological push, right?
So like the UN didn't do anything during the Cold War, which is a fable.
And then in the 1990s, there's this moment of hope and resurgence
But then the genocides that took place in Rwanda and in Bosnia, you know, and Haiti, of course, that really became a moment when humanitarianism, even militarized humanitarianism, as some people refer to it, or humanitarian intervention didn't work.
And then, of course, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 without a second Security Council mandate.
And of course, that was then seen to be, look, the great powers will still do what they want.
And the problem with all of that perspective is that it's hinged to
the UN as a vehicle for liberal internationalism or as a tool of the United States abroad.
And so that has, you know, squashed down the kind of what the UN has been historically into this very linear process, which makes no allowance or space for other views of what the UN was.
I find this kind of very confusing because, yes, you had like Chilean lawyers like Hernan Santa Cruz, who was a fundamentally important figure at the UN for human rights.
You had, of course, the Liberian activist who became a UN member, Angie Brooks, who did so much important work for the UN.
You had huge figures who came out of Nigeria, out of India, of course, and not least Nehru, but also Indira Gandhi and others who were so fundamental.
And, you know, right across the world, you had all these voices who were really structuring the debates around economic development, around human rights and around peace and security that really were fundamental to how the UN approached and was able or not able to exercise its authority or its role in those areas.
And that has been cried it out by this focus on democracy.
this security imperative of the UN and what the United States does or doesn't do vis-a-vis the UN, which is a very, very, very narrow view, which has led us to this problem.
Whereas now, every time we kind of hear any analysis of the UN anywhere, it's only about the Security Council and it's only about mostly the veto powers.
And these debates about UN reform are important about veto powers, but the UN is so much more than that.
And we really have to
You know, I think it's very important to shape public opinion a little bit more broadly on the UN and think about its role in other areas.
It's not an unproblematic role.
It's not hugely positive.
It's not always effective, but it's the strongest instrument we have for these humanitarian ambitions.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, I was thinking that a lot of this negative portrayal of the UN is shaped by our demand or hunger for hard power.
We tend to judge success or failure according to these hard power narratives.
Whereas I would say that, you know, the global South, Alanna, has been interested in economic development.
I mean, it's not like they're not interested in human rights.
And so we have to maybe firstly clarify that, and you mentioned this earlier, the 1966 covenants, right?
So you have...
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and then you have the one on economic, social, and cultural rights.
And it turns out there were major Western powers who weren't comfortable with the economic, social, and cultural rights covenant and did not support it for fear of supporting trade unions or whatever.
So one got the impression during the Cold War that the North and the West was more concerned with this first-generation civil and political rights and were paying lip service to the second-generation stuff that many countries in the Global South were interested in, right?
So it was poverty reduction, economic growth, development, perhaps even aid.
So you could say perhaps, and I've been making this argument and I'd like to test it, and if you have heard this before on my show, that I think some of the current tension, Alanna, and we can talk about whether this is also a historical case, is over the concept of development, that people have very different understandings of what development means.
And so for the global nod, it was, you know, democracy, human rights, institutions.
And the Global South was saying, it's not like we disagree, but we are suffering.
You know, we can't we don't have that luxury of thinking long term.
We want it now.
And so while during the Cold War, I mean, you know, you write about it in one of your articles, the rise of the non-aligned movement.
I mean, that was a very important project from the Global South, as was the formation of the G77, the Group of 77 in the UN.
So you had these reactions, I suppose, from the Global South to this one-sided focus on certain things from the Global North.
But I wanted to ask you more about that other aspect of development.
Do you see historically very divergent understandings of development, which in a way culminated with the 2030 agenda in 2015,
Which, by the way, is not a UN thing.
It is member countries, 193 countries signed on the dotted line, even though the SDGs and the 2030 agenda is often sold as a UN thing, which was meant to fail, invariably fail.
Do you see a historical trend about sort of disagreements or maybe also agreements on the understanding of development?
[Alanna O’Malley]
I mean, this huge disagreement.
I mean, you know, the UN should be understood as the contestation of the centre of the contestation of the liberal international system, whatever that means.
Remembering that most of the world don't experience liberal internationalism or as liberal or liberating in any kind of fundamental way.
And a lot of that disagreement is centred around development and how development should take place.
I mean, remember that the big
historical debates historically that have framed this discussion you know permanent sovereignty over natural resources through the 40s and 50s and 60s this is a huge discussion about whether or not countries
can lay claim to sovereignty over their natural resources.
And this is a huge point of disagreement between North and South because the Global North really frames it as a, you know, you'll scare away the investors if we hand over sovereignty over these resources.
But then there's a kind of consensus among Global South countries
no, no, no, no, no, we need to control resources as fundamental.
This is the economic sovereignty part of decolonization that goes hand in hand with the political part.
But even within Global South, the Global South group or the G77, there's huge problems, right?
There's an attempt to create a common market in Central Africa in the 1960s that falls apart because they can't agree on reducing export duties between the countries.
There is a huge disagreement between Latin American countries
who never really managed to get a common market or regional cooperation off the ground.
India is constantly talking at the UN about how they do not want needs-based development.
They want different types of development.
And of course, those ideas get picked up very much at the World Bank later on with some of the thinkers and the Indian economists who go there.
And I think you've heard that story already.
So there is a huge amount of contestation between Global South actors about what does development look like?
And you see a lot of these debates that play out, especially in UNCTAD and the G77.
And the fundamental principles about, you know, agreeing new regimes for reducing tariffs or trying to reduce the powers of cartels over control of mineral resources and selling prices.
You see efforts to change the rules of trade, but also trying
between global side actors themselves to also implement the UNCTAD resolutions, UNCTAD 1, UNCTAD 2, it doesn't really go anywhere.
And Raoul Prébys, the, you know, the first Secretary General of UNCTAD, who himself is a kind of an inspired economic thinker and has, you know, has a vision of
for how a new international system might look, becomes very frustrated with this.
And he leaves that job as Secretary-General of UNCTAD because he sides the disagreement between actors of the Global South themselves.
And he says the G77 is very dysfunctional.
They agree in Geneva, but they don't implement it at home.
I think we should understand not just that development is contested north to south, it's also contested very much within Global South countries.
And the basic problem that they keep hitting the wall on, even when they make agreements,
around sharing resources or sharing technology or creating regional institutions.
You know, the UN Economic Commissions become very, very important, especially in the 1960s when they finally create the UN Economic Commission for Africa, a process that doesn't go anywhere for 15 years because the Global North doesn't want an Economic Commission for Africa because that might interfere with imperial networks of power and access to resources there.
But even when they have these commissions,
They still also always face the problem of financing.
And this is what I find so interesting about the debate around economic sovereignty, which is that there's so much effort put into these different systems.
They tried to create SunFed in the 1950s, especially the UN Fund for Economic Development.
Then they try to create a special fund.
And as soon as the Americans indicate in the mid 60s that they're not going to put money into the special fund, the Indians write back to their to the capital.
And they say, well, if the Americans are not going to put money in, we're not putting money into the special fund.
And that kind of kills that initiative.
So it is about this kind of disaggregation that emerges around what does development mean?
And the essential problem of leveraging financial access, leveraging access to capital.
It's not so only about the loans that are available from the IMF or from the World Bank to a lesser extent.
It's really about access to finance to create these mechanisms.
to foster development on a regional or national level.
And when that access becomes very difficult and is anyway contested, it kind of exposes this wider schism that exists between Global South actors about what kind of development do they really want to do.
[Dan Banik]
I'm so glad that you mentioned that when we talk about the Global South, we're not talking about one block.
Not everybody agrees.
This is also a point I've been making in my work that there is a lot of disagreement between the big actors in the Global South among themselves and
like the Indias and the Chinas, but there's also disagreement among the smaller actors and the bigger actors in the Global South.
So there's this disenchantment that maybe the Global South is getting what it wants, but it only benefits the bigger actors in the Global South and the crumbs are available to the smaller actors.
So yeah, you're absolutely right.
The contestation of development, but also disagreement within.
But I wonder, and you and I were talking about this before the recording started, that David Engerman was on my show recently, and he's written this fantastic book on Apostles of Development.
I wonder whether some of this disagreement, Alanna, among the Global South countries, whether it is support for UNCTAD or whether it is for any resolution,
is because some of these countries had very influential scholars or practitioners with very strong views on certain things, whether it is growth, distribution, focus on inequality, the role of markets, the role of international institutions.
And India is a great case.
Within the country, a lot of economists disagreeing among themselves.
So it was often very difficult, even within a country, to come up with one unified view.
So I wonder whether some of the challenges you're describing related to funding, related to political support, is based on those disagreements.
What development should look like?
[Alanna O’Malley]
I think you're absolutely right.
I think it's not that, you know, this was contested even on the national level, especially in the larger states that had a lot of diverse views of the ways to manage the economy.
Like, I already find that very interesting because I'm from a very small state, Ireland, and, you know, the kind of diversification of thinking about the economy was far less dynamic, even in Ireland, than it would have been
you know, in these large global size states where there was much more room and space to think about, you know, to imagine possible economic futures.
And this is what's so fascinating about global size dynamism in the 70s and the 80s.
If we move the debate chronologically forward a bit, you have all this conversation that's going on.
You have all these economic thinkers and engermen
has written this wonderful book, indeed, about these economists from a particular school in the Keynesian school who view, you know, Keynesian economics in a certain way and then disagree with Keynesian economics as their thinking evolves.
And they move, you know, between the Keynesian and the Smith model of development in terms of
ways to manage the national economy.
And yet, despite this diversification, even on a national level, and of course, more broadly, you know, the Latin Americans who are really kind of ahead on this because they're talking about regionalization.
you know, in the late 19th century.
So they have a very evolved view of the value of regional cooperation, even if they themselves don't manage to do it very productively for a large amount of time.
They still managed to reach these really broad agreements and they reached consensus in the UNCTAD debates, but also then in the UN General Assembly on the new international economic order debates.
And that kind of dissipates in the 1980s because nationalisation fails, nationalisation of industries fails.
And then that creates a huge amount of economic crisis and the Washington consensus comes in and so forth.
But the fact that they reach these consensus positions, to me, is incredible, because it means that they're able to overcome these internal debates about what should development look like.
[Dan Banik]
Or even disillusionment, right?
[Alanna O’Malley]
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
That's another part of it, right?
I mean, at the same time, all these countries, or many, many, many of these countries have huge amounts of poverty.
There's a very interesting statement that comes from, I think it's a Nigerian chief, and he's at the opening ceremony of the UN Commission.
for Economic Commission for Africa.
It's 1960s, early 1960s.
And he says, yes, you know, regional cooperation is very important and we value our neighbours.
So please help us with that.
But above all, give us money.
You know, there is this kind of like, you know, he emphasizes this very kind of humorously like,
They need investment.
They need finances.
And so this is like the other part of the debate that I don't really talk about in the book, but I'm so fascinated by is the role of corporate power in this, right?
Because corporations are very much embedded in post-colonial economies.
And they're not only just nefarious agents of the preservation of colonial power.
They're actually very important for economic development and growth.
And, you know, they, of course, are assessing their access to resources, but also the risk sometimes of unstable regimes, especially the 70s and 80s.
And they're very much like an under-scrutinized actor in this realm.
And I'm really kind of curious about the relationship between post-colonial governments and corporate actors as drivers of development, but also as drivers of instability.
because they play such a political role, not just as an economic power.
So there's all these kind of different actors in this space.
And I think that somehow we need to kind of capture some of that diversity to inform current debates about economic development.
Because it's not just that we have different, we have growing levels of inequality now.
We've always had that.
Now it's more stark.
But this has always been a problem.
And we have yet to come to
Any kind of consensus, like the consensus that was reached in the 70s and 80s and even in UNCTAD, like that consensus doesn't exist to the same extent anymore about economic development because the economic system is a lot more diversified in terms of its institutions and its capital resources and the way they're distributed.
But I do think we need to kind of recover some of those initiatives because, of course, there are historical continuities to these debates.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, I was thinking about the corporate actors increasingly, at least in the current time that we're in.
You have a lot of major corporate actors from the global south with a huge presence in the global north.
It could be Indian pharmaceutical companies, Chinese companies exporting, you know, tech companies.
And these actors would sometimes benefit from certain regulations that the Global North is interested in promoting because of business ties.
But I still want to probe this one particular point, Alanna, which is the motivation for some of these Global South countries to retain faith.
in the UN.
You know, you mentioned your country, Ireland.
Norway is, again, a very small country.
It turns out the smaller states are often very dependent or love the UN because we get a seat at the table.
And both Ireland and Norway, by being generous with foreign aid or whatever, we are hanging out with the big actors.
Now, the same thing can't be said about the Indias and Chinas, where I also see a warm embrace of the UN.
And it surprises me.
It's almost like, you know, during COVID and also in the last few years, the Chinese discourse and my colleague Benedict and I wrote a piece.
It is always about balance.
multilateralism versus what they term as unilateralism that some of the big powers pursue.
The same thing in India, but perhaps to a lesser extent because India really wants a seat at the Security Council.
So what explains this motivation to still have faith, Alanna, in the system when development is not progressing, they feel a bit marginalized,
They may be excluded.
Sometimes the big powers want them to support their resolutions and other times they're being marginalized.
What's going on?
[Alanna O’Malley]
I mean, that's the million dollar question, right?
I mean, and I remember coming across a lot of files in Africa, in Ghana, in Accra, in the Padmore Library, you know, just kind of pages and pages and pages of newspaper columns written in the 1950s and 60s, people like the UN in Kwame Nkrumah's phrase, the only hope for mankind.
And somehow some of that faith has lasted.
And I find it absolutely fascinating.
And what I think it's down to is there's still a legitimacy, right?
at the UN, right?
I mean, if you look at what Bahrain has been trying to do on the Security Council now to respond to this crisis over the Strait of Hormuz, it's the Security Council that they want to take it to.
There's a sense that their resolution didn't succeed in its form last night.
But I mean, there's still a legitimacy.
If you bring your problem or your question or your issue to the UN, that's your best chance to put it on the international agenda, have it discussed publicly, build a consensus around it,
and then also to hopefully push for some action.
And I mean, some of these resolutions very recently on Security Council, the Bahrainian one is a good example, and also others to do with this current crisis.
They have broken or set precedents
for having the highest numbers of co-sponsors.
One resolution last week on this crisis, 135 co-sponsors out of 193 member states.
And that suggests that, you know, despite the rhetoric of the kind of the UN being unfit for purpose, and I think that a lot of that rhetoric is true, states still attach an importance
to bringing an issue to the UN, being part of a consensus, building relationships and then using those relationships at the UN, in the UN environment.
Why do they have this faith?
Why is that legitimacy still there?
I'm not entirely sure.
I mean, I think one of the issues is that if we think of the international community, whatever that is, nobody really knows what this means.
I think the General Assembly is the best barometer, at least, or reflector or mirror
of the international community.
And so this is about that international space.
But it's also about public opinion.
You know, the UN will, and these debates, they make the headlines in the global media.
I mean, Al Jazeera has the UN featured every single night, even at times when it's, I was going to say at a time when there's less crisis, but I can't remember that for the last five years.
So even in a more quiet time, right?
So it means that there's a legitimacy.
And this also goes for
If you think, for example, of the South African case against Israel at the ICJ here in The Hague.
And what was really interesting about that case in court, I was lucky to be in the courtroom on the first day.
And of course, you have absolutely phenomenal rhetoric coming from the lawyers.
But outside the palace, the peace palace itself,
you hear the chants of support for the Palestinian people.
And there were hundreds, if not thousands of people outside chanting.
And they're chanting for the Palestinian cause at the UN's highest court in the land, you know, in support of this case.
So this means that there's also, I think, a kind of a hope, at least amongst ordinary people, that the UN can do something.
Or at the very least, even if they believe that the UN can't do anything, it's a venue, it's a place to direct people
this energy and this frustration because national governments everywhere just seem to be unable to respond in a coherent way to the current crises of international relations.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, you know, that South African case was iconic in many ways because you had one of the BRICS members going against the Global North.
And that showcased both support within the Global South, but also resistance.
A couple of weeks ago, Alanna, I was attending a roundtable in Addis Ababa, and this was about amplifying African voices on global development.
And before we even started, what most participants were really upset about was that UN resolution regarding reparations that was spearheaded by Ghana recently, 123 votes in favor, three countries against, voted against, 52 abstained.
And it was about just getting this kind of support that slavery was bad.
And the attendees of this roundtable couldn't understand why 52 countries had abstained in these three countries.
And so...
Again, that for me was that conundrum that there was a lot of support for the 2030 agenda.
They were saying the U.N.
is in financial crisis.
And we really all, even though we have very little money in many of these African states, we need to step up.
We need to pay more.
But we can't understand how these things happen in the U.N.,
And the final thing I wanted to mention to you is the financial crisis that the UN is facing, which Alanna, I was told at least by some UN employees, local employees in Addis Ababa, is leading to a bit of a crisis of legitimacy in the sense that on the one hand, the UN officials feel that they can't
not dictate, but the kind of interactions they're having with local officials is different.
It's no longer saying, do this, this is the right thing.
Local officials are pushing back and saying, hey, guys, no, no, no, no.
You guys don't have the power.
You don't have the money.
You could see this both in terms of increased agency from the global south, but also a bit of a worry from the UN that best practices that they have established are being contested.
[Alanna O’Malley]
So I'm just going to start with the last thing you mentioned first.
So this is there's a problem here in the sense that, you know, maybe the value of UN expertise is being diminished and being ignored by some national governments because the power of the UN overall is lower.
Now, the positive side of that is that a lot of UN programs, you know, have been criticized for not being attentive enough to local conditions anyway.
So we definitely need a new balance in the relationship of how the UN executes its programs.
And that should be more in concert with national governments.
Even though that's very difficult, especially if you think about programmes that work with authoritarian regimes, right, who are very resistant to any kind of, you know, respect for global norms on human rights or these kind of questions.
So that means that it's still very important for the UN to be in these places doing this work, to represent or try to advocate for these rights.
But at the same time, yeah, maybe there is a problem also with how the UN has implemented this stuff.
Well, there is a problem historically because, you know, it's been accused then of being, you know, imperialistic, which is a term I hate in this context, or it's been accused of being unresponsive or unattentive to local needs.
So there's a shift in that local dynamic.
And that will really go to what happens to the UN next, right?
Will we get through a process of charter review and reform again?
or in some substantial way, or will we see the UN kind of hollowed out from the inside further?
You know, I mean, I'm clearly on one side of that debate, but I really don't know what will happen there.
But yeah, I think the debate about slavery as the greatest crime against humanity was very disappointing, because it just reflected this kind of old traditional biases around, you know, the racial divide of North-South,
around these controversial issues.
I can't explain the 52 votes against.
I imagine that this was driven by the not wanting to be responsible for the payment of reparations.
[Dan Banik]
The fear of reparations, apparently.
[Alanna O’Malley]
Yeah.
I mean, which is, you know, I mean, that's an unsustainable position anyway.
And I think, you know, I think this also reflects a very kind of negative and narrow view
approach of global north countries to their global south counterparts because you know if we're going to shift the terms of the relationship with the global side to one of progressive partnership which is what they've been calling for for decades rather than one of a paternalistic and kind of question of you know inferior superior dynamic that is so damaging to relations
then we have to be able to face these issues and say, look, you know, this was the past.
This was a horrendous system.
And that really it wrote destruction across most of the world for the gain of the global north.
But unless we're able to stand up and take responsibility for that history, then.
it's very difficult to forge a new partnership of connection and progress.
I think it was a fundamental mistake to vote against that resolution because UN General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, but they're very symbolic and they carry a political weight.
And I think...
If we'd managed to see a greater majority on that, including more global north countries, it doesn't mean necessarily that global south countries can leverage reparations out of them, because that's a long process that might take time.
But I think for the symbolic gesture of the recognition of responsibility and the feeling of culpability for this that exists, I think, in a lot of places, that should have been expressed more clearly.
I also think the final thing I'll say about that is that
If we really want to move to new ways of thinking about development or picking up on some of the old ideas of development that didn't work the first time around, that we should be rehearsing again, according to history, then I think we need to also move past these paradigms of racial division.
You know, in the international community, it's always going to be a part of the discourse.
But if we really are serious about trying to strengthen international institutions, then we need to do that by getting out of this box of the racial divide, because unfortunately, we are in a new key in international relations today.
which is a lot about great power politics.
And it's going to be a contestation of the great powers in the next years, in which I think middle and smaller powers need to be much more aligned across the various factions rather than between them, because that's the way to preserve their influence in the international system.
[Dan Banik]
Well, Alanna, I wish we could go on, but we'd have to leave it at that.
This was great fun for me to chat with you.
I can't wait to read the book.
[Alanna O’Malley]
Me too.
[Dan Banik]
Thank you very much for coming on my show today.
[Alanna O’Malley]
Thank you so much for the invitation.
It's been a pleasure.
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