Kofi Annan

Dumile Feni (South Africa), Figure Studies, 1970. At its fifteenth summit in August 2023, the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) group adopted the Johannesburg II Declaration, which, amongst other issues, raised the question of reforming the United Nations, particularly its security council. To make the UN Security Council (UNSC) ‘more democratic, representative, effective, and efficient, and to […]

Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Sergio Vieira de Mello, November 1997. Sergio, as he was known, was a high-ranking troubleshooter for the UN when he died with 21 colleagues in the 2003 attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad. A biopic of him has just been released. MILTON GRANT/UN PHOTO

William vanden Heuvel, a former US envoy to the UN, helped set up the Franklin Roosevelt International Disability Rights Award, among the many roles he has played in his life related to the world body. Here, he awards the prize to Queen Sofía of Spain on behalf of her country, Sept. 9, 2013. PAULO FILGUERIAS/UN PHOTO

Amina Mohammed, right, the deputy secretary-general of the UN, signed a partnership agreement with the World Economic Forum, led by Borge Brende, left, to speed up progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general (behind Mohammed) and Klaus Schwab, the Forum’s chief executive, joined the ceremony in June.

Nations have been demoted; on the top level of the org chart we now find the Borg.

A trip by the members of the UN Security Council, above background, to the Congo in October 2018 included meeting with female political candidates (front rows) who are competing in the country’s Dec. 23 elections. Recent murders of UN peacekeepers in the Congo raise the question as to whether the Council is clear on the consequences of peacekeepers becoming parties to a conflict. MICHAEL ALI/Monusco

This month Consortium News launched Consortium News Radio. Today we begin a second radio show in collaboration with Pacifica Radio’s Flash Points, a biweekly interview program with Consortium News writers. In collaboration with Dennis Bernstein, host of Pacifica Radio’s syndicated…Read more →

The fire challenge, bicycle killers and 'The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things' + this day in history w/the Stockholm Syndrome and our song of the day by Echo & the Bunnymen on your Morning Monarchy for August 23, 2018.

Kofi Annan, who led the UN for 10 years, beginning in 1997, attending the Munich Security Conference in April 2018. He died suddenly on Aug. 18, 2018, at 80 years old, a day before the anniversary of the 2003 terrorist attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad. CREATIVE COMMONS

Being the head of a creature essentially without spine, and, even more to the point, with vague form, must be something of a challenge.  Part of the failing of the United Nations probably lies in its disparate existence, a scattered composition of bureaucratic entities that, when they come together, supply a perfect picture of inertia.  (Perhaps for the best: a more active UN could well lead to a deeper muddying of waters.)  Such an arrangement invariably leads to one conclusion: The organisation tends to mimic the power order of the day, compliant to the great states, malleable to their ca