Mark Leon Goldberg

The UN has a solid track record when it comes to environmental treaties.

El Fasher is the largest city in Sudan’s Darfur region. It is also one of the few major cities in Darfur that has not fallen to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) during the civil war that broke out last year. However, an attack on El Fasher seems imminent. The RSF has surrounded the city and is laying siege to it. The United States, the United Nations, and key players around the world are urging against this impending attack, but […]

On Friday, May 10, the General Assembly will hold a vote on Palestine’s bid to become a full member of the United Nations. The vote is largely symbolic. An entity can only become a full UN member with the approval of the Security Council, and Palestine’s bid failed in a vote last month due to a U.S. veto. However, this General Assembly vote provides the 193 existing UN member states an opportunity to formally express their support—or lack thereof—for Palestine’s […]

Each year, the United Nations Development Program produces the Human Development Report. This is a compilation of country-level data around education, health, and economic security that aspires to give a more holistic understanding of a country’s development beyond economic indicators alone.

Thousands of delegates gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, last week for the UN Civil Society Conference. The gathering was dedicated to the upcoming Summit of the Future, a major UN conference in September intended to reform and revitalize the UN and the multilateral system. The Nairobi civil society conference was an important opportunity for advocates, the NGO community, and other interested parties to help shape the outcome of the Summit of the Future.

I have been covering the International Criminal Court as a journalist for nearly as long as the Court’s been in existence. And as regular newsletter readers will know, I’ve been expecting this particular shoe to drop since November, when ICC prosecutor Karim Khan first visited the region and warned Hamas and Israeli officials that he’s monitoring the situation.

Some of the most heavily indebted countries in the world are also the ones most vulnerable to climate-induced natural disasters. When a hurricane, cyclone, or massive drought hits a country, officials can be faced with the choice of either servicing their debts or paying for disaster recovery. As the pace and scale of natural disasters increase due to climate change, some policy entrepreneurs have introduced the idea of including so-called “Pause Clauses” in loan agreements that would enable the country […]

By the end of the week, there will be five new members elected to the United Nations Security Council. On Thursday, the General Assembly vote on new members of the UN Security Council to replace countries whose terms are expiring at the end of the year. These elections are a significant event at the United Nations because they shape the composition of the single most important body in the UN system—the only one that can authorize military intervention, impose international […]

As we sat down to record the debut episode of our new podcast about the United Nations on Wednesday afternoon, Vladimir Putin was being feted in Pyongyang by Kim Jong Un and his cadres. The two had just signed a security pact revived from the Cold War era, signaling an ever-closer alliance and marking the death knell of nearly 20 years of North Korea nuclear diplomacy at the Security Council. (Russia, after all, is violating the very Security Council sanctions on North Korea that it once supported!) We discuss the implications of North Korea no longer being on the Security Council’s agenda, and what rising geopolitical tensions suggest about about the Council’s role in managing global crises.

The situation in Southern Lebanon is extremely precarious. Israel is positioning more and more military assets along its northern border, while Hezbollah continues its near-daily attacks on Israeli targets from Lebanon and has threatened an all-out war. Caught in the middle are about 10,000 United Nations peacekeepers.