UN21 Project

Research Group on International Organizations

A Five Year Research Plan

Michael W. Doyle

Professor of Politics and International Affairs

Princeton University

As part of the United Nations University's (UNU) research project on The United Nations System in the 21st Century, this research group will focus on international organizations (IOs). Over the course of the next five years this group will examine how well, or poorly, international organizations -- the UN most central among them -- are coping with challenges arising in the five issue areas: peace and security, economic development, environmental balance, human dignity and political governance. The wider UN21 research project also includes research groups which concentrate on other actors -- states, markets, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and regional organizations. Our group will focus on the specific roles played by the United Nations and other international bodies organized on a global, governmental international scale.

The project seeks to make a contribution towards defining the role that the UN should play in meeting those challenges. The project plans to identify the appropriate division of labor between the UN, on the one hand, and states, markets NGOs and regional organizations, on the other. We will examine the changing roles each "actor" is experiencing and ask which of these levels of global organization best meets human needs for peace and security, development, ecological balance, human dignity and effective governance. Should we, to exaggerate, anticipate a world of absolutely sovereign states, a world of magically clearing markets, independent autarkic regions, responsive and effective NGOs? What role, in particular, should the UN be playing in this complex organizational setting? Should we expect a shift in the direction of UN governance (global sovereignty) or, instead, a slide toward a less and less salient role for the UN in which the UN perhaps even loses its monopoly as the only universal, multipurpose, intergovernmental organization?

The specific task of the international organizations research group is, first, to assess the current record, present capacities and future potential of international organizations in each of the five issue areas. We begin with the role of international organizations in peace and security in 1996 and then, in the following years, take up economic development, environmental management, human dignity and conclude in the fifth year with governance. Second, we will consider how the role of international organizations, and the UN in particular, can be enhanced, in light of the relative advantages of the other actors.

The aim of the five year project is to produce an edited volume in the fifth year on the role of the UN in the world emerging in the early 21st century. Two to four overview papers will be commissioned every year, for presentation at the annual conference. These papers may be assembled (together with an introduction and conclusion) into an annual UNU Occasional Paper covering the international organization role in each of the five issues.

Thematic Guidelines

Each paper and each volume will have special features, but all should give consideration to the following guidelines.

- International organizations (IOs) clearly differ from the other actors the project is examining. Each IO is a composite made up of more powerful, coherent actors who define, to a greater or lesser degree, the identity and capacities of the international organization. In the framework employed by UNU's project concept paper, IOs are arenas, tools and actors. IOs are arenas in which states, NGOs and corporations play out their ambitions. Even though the particular regime underlying each IO -- the UN Charter for the UN -- shapes the terms of the contest, the contest is the result of outside actors seeking to enhance their power, profit, principles and prestige. IOs thus are also tools with specific capacities that are more or less useful for those outside actors. But IOs also are actors; institutions empowered by their constituents, endowed with a semi-independent identity by their charters, staffed by a semi-autonomous civil service. The extent of the UN's autonomous role thus has ranged from global "counsel" -- the role the UN has played in the development and environmental areas and may soon (if the post-Somalia "coalitions of the willing" model spreads)⁽¹⁾ be limited to in peace and security -- to a more activist role of "manager" -- the role that the World Bank and IMF have played in development and finance and that the UN has sometimes held in peacekeeping.⁽²⁾

- The United Nations is one among many international, global organizations. Even in peace and security -- the focal point of the UN's global mandate -- the International Atomic Energy Agency enjoys an independent mandate. In the area of economic development, despite several normative prescriptions for coordination, the UN has so far held a junior and peripheral role. The question of appropriate division of labor and the need for coordination arise not merely between, for example, regional organizations and the UN, but also between the UN and other international organizations, some with over-lapping mandates.

- The research group also have a normative and policy agenda. We seek to identify ways in which needed capacity can be enhanced such that the UN can operate more effectively in those issue areas in which it should enjoy relative advantages. How, we will ask, should the UN be structured to meet its responsibilities? What changes in major organs -- the Security Council, General Assembly and Secretariat -- can best further the UN's purposes in peace and security, economic development, environmental balance, human dignity and effective governance? What resources will the UN require to meet those goals?

Year I (1996): Peace and Security

The first annual conference will focus on peace and security and meet in Tokyo on 6-7 November 1996. Each of the research groups will present two to four papers, for a total of about fifteen to twenty papers, on the issues of peace and security. The IO research group will focus on how effectively international organizations have coped with the new security challenges of the post-Cold War international system. Stymied by Cold War deadlock for much of the past fifty years, the UN became what it was designed by its founders to be when a working consensus emerged on the Security Council in the late 1980s. For the first time in its history, the Security Council adopted the central role in international peace and security that the UN's founders had written into the UN Charter in 1945. But together with remarkable semi-successes in collective security in the Gulf and complex, multidimensional peacekeeping in Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia and Mozambique, crises that revealed the limits of UN action overtook the organization in Somalia and Bosnia. The International Atomic Energy Agency and UNSCOM (set up to disarm Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological capability following the Gulf War) also displayed a revival that led states and NGOs to begin to outline an ambitious program of comprehensive nuclear arms control. I would like paper-writers this year to focus on whether and, if so, how much the UN role in peace and security changed? How did it make its decisions? What enhanced capabilities would be needed if the UN were going to continue to develop as a manager of global peace and security, ranging from a "UN army" to improvement in Secretariat management? Alternatively, what problems are likely to arise if the UN role is limited to global counsel, farming out security operations to great powers that may or may not be willing to undertake them?

I am approaching on an informal basis the following scholars for papers on the following topics:

1. "Lessons from Peacekeeping in the 1990s: A Comparison Across Cases." Dr. Thomas Weiss (USA) at Brown University. Commentators: Dr. Winrich Kuhne (Ger.) at SWP Ebenhausen; Brigitte Stern (Paris); W. Ofuatey-Kodjoe (CUNY).

2. "Arms Control: The Role of International Organizations -- IAEA and UNSCOM, etc." Dr. Brahma Chellaney (India) at ANU. Commentator: Dr. Shai Feldman (Tel Aviv).

3. "The Role of the Security Council in Peace and Security." HE David Malone (Canada) at Oxford. Commentators: HE Diego Arria (Venezuela); Dr. Edward Luck (USA) at UNA-USA.

I am asking Professor Adam Roberts (UK) at Oxford to serve as advisor to the International Organization Section for the peace and security year.

Year II (1997): Economic Development

In this year, I would like to commission papers on the World Bank -- its strategies and governance. I would also like an author to explore the UN's own role as a setter of doctrine (An Agenda for Development), the UNDP's particular functions and whether the UN system as a whole is capable -- or should be made capable -- of planning a global political economic of development. In this connection, should the UN and its affiliated institutions have greater capacities to raise revenue (tax) for public purposes and, if so, how should this revenue be raised (Tobin Taxes, airline taxes, global commons, etc.)?

Year III (1998): Environmental Balance

This year would raise questions concerning the UN's role in the development of environmental doctrine, through the global conferences (such as Rio) and what directions this agenda-setting role should take in the years ahead. I would like to ask an author to consider whether environmental management should be focused on the global or the regional (or national) level. For what environmental stresses is each level the more appropriate? I would also like to commission a paper on UNEP.

Year IV (1999): Human Dignity

In this year, I would like to commission authors to explore the debate over the meaning of human dignity. Is it universal or particular, embodied in loose norms or defined by human rights? The role that the UN Human Rights Commission can play in furthering human dignity is also worth exploration as is a discussion of how human dignity could be best furthered, whether by IOs or regional or nongovernmental organizations or states.

Year V (2000): Governance

The ultimate issues are who rules, how and for what purposes. I would like the authors of this year to explore the thorny issues of UN institutional reform, including the reform of the membership and rules of procedure of both the Security Council and the General Assembly. Should Germany and Japan be new permanent members and what should permanent membership entail? (I assume that the Security Council will not have been resolved by 2000.) Should regional organizations, NGOs or even democratically elected representatives be seated in the General Assembly? Lastly, I would like an author to undertake the large issue of how much sovereignty should be transferred to global international organizations such as the UN, taking into account the discussion of relative advantages of the previous four years' of the UN21 project.

1. See Boutros-Boutros Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace (1995) and US Department of State, PDD 25: The Clinton Administration Policy on Reforming Multilateral Peace Operations (May 1994).

2. These roles are outlined in UNU, "The United Nations System in the 21st Century," January 1996.