We are pleased to be launching this legacy site, thanks to the efforts of Ciprian Samoilă, in the hope of making clear that a quarter century + of our collective advocacy and monitoring was an investment worth making. 

We began this journey in 1999 with a trifecta of founders, a very generous core donor, and a vision of what the architecture of the United Nations might look like, indeed should look like if it is to fulfill its responsibilities for international peace and security.  The Global Action Program Statement, available elsewhere on this site, was more compelling in the NGO world than in the diplomatic one, but it did interrogate the world of weapons and security systems and posited a key role for the UN and related multilateral institutions in promoting peace and human security which remain painfully elusive into this present moment. 

One of the most important suggestions in the Program Statement also turned out to be among the most relevant and time-consuming of all Global Action project investments, especially in our early years.  The project for a UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) sought to fill a gap in the existing architecture of peacekeeping and atrocity crime prevention, aspiring  to create a UN standing capacity which could be deployed much earlier than was often the case with peacekeeping at that time in order to better address atrocity crime violence in its earliest stages.  This archive is rich with UNEPS contributions in multiple formats including conference notes and contributions  from scholars and advocates such as Hussein Solomon (South Africa), Annie Herro and Stuart Rees (Australia), Peter Langille (Canada), Lois Barber, Robert Johansen and Bill Pace (US), Manuela Mesa (Spain), Alcides Costa Vaz (Brazil) and Christian Tanyi (Cameroon).  Our internal colleagues also contributed much to our understanding of what a UNEPS could and could not accomplish, especially co-founder Saul Mendlovitz and Kavitha Suthanthiraraj who was capably serving as our International Coordinator during the peak of UNEPS activity.  UNEPS also profited greatly from the interest of two UN heavyweights, Juan Mendez and Sir Brian Urquhart. 

The three founders of Global Action — Saul Mendlovitz, Randall Forsberg and Jonathan Dean — have since left this earth, but they also left us with the responsibility to fashion a contribution which remained faithful to the original intent of the founders and generous earlier funders (such as Ira Wallach, the Hixon Family and Michael and Nan Frydland) while finding fresh ways to contribute to an evolving if deeply troubled international order. Many who have crossed paths over the years with our engagements know well the fragility of our system of international law, the painful reality of resolutions unimplemented, promises unkept, endless words unattached to the actions which might give them life.  The work of Global Action has always been tethered to the UN in one fashion or another, and we have sought to deepen that work over the years, a commitment to which this archive gives ample testimony.  But we have no illusions, indeed have never had any, about the relentless political nature of life at UN Headquarters and especially in the Security Council. 

Despite occasional misgivings, we have intentionally sought to deepen our relationship with the UN over many years with full acknowledgement of our small size and limitations structural, financial and intellectual.  Despite what we had once imagined, the UN is not always the most accommodating partner for smaller NGOs. This is especially true now, but even a generation ago when it was easier to establish relationships with diplomats and even with high-level Secretariat officials.  But even then it was clear that, for instance, there would be no UNEPS unless a group of influential states repackaged our idea to make it their own.  However, it was also clear that some of the core tenets of UNEPS, especially on the need for greater attention to civilian protection and rapid response, had echoes within Peacekeeping Operations itself.  We never achieved a UNEPS capacity per se, but much of what we advocated found fertile soil and policy convergence in the Secretariat which did much to make peacekeeping operations more credible and timely for states and victims alike. 

UNEPS in the end became a starting point for a series of programmatic interventions which were less about telling the UN what to do and more about helping to fix flaws and gaps in the system and, more specifically, to remind the UN over and over (including through our twitter feed and policy blog) that issues and policies within diverse conference rooms are linked.  This is especially the case with regard to the Security Council which became a major focus on our UN monitoring and which long resisted what had become obvious in other quarters – that failures in international peace and security impact every aspect of the UN and its policies including its budgets.  Armed conflicts jeopardize respect for international law but also impede development, cause human displacement and food insecurity, and undermine respect for human rights.  Though the UN has been slow on this uptake, it now recognizes the systemic implications of our peace and security failures and the need to reform the highly charged and visibly unequal political environment which too-often impedes Security Council effectiveness.  

As a good bit of this archive demonstrates, issues and policies are linked as are the people who are affected by them.  The impacts and consequences of our successes and failures in the peace and security realm are bound together and so must be our policy prescriptions.  Over the years, we were honored to help place language on gender and atrocity crimes in the Arms Trade Treaty, to promote the Programme of Action on Small Arms (UNPoA) and to highlight the gender implications of the Responsibility to Protect, a norm which made it out of the policy starting gate but never achieved the traction needed to convince suspicious states that RtoP  was more than an excuse for western countries to critique the behavior of their non-Western counterparts.  We worked with the UN on victims’ assistance, on Sustainable Development Goals implementation, on conventional weapons control, even on nuclear disarmament though we were blessed with learned colleagues to lead us in this endeavor, most especially Dr. John Burroughs of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP).  But here again, our influence as reflected in this archive is partly directed at weapons and their access but also partly directed at the implications of that access including the fear and intimidation which characterizes many communities across the globe governed against their will at the tip of a gun. 

As this archival material also makes clear, our investment in the UN goes beyond UN policy itself.  Through internships and other means, we have used our considerable and still- growing knowledge of the UN and its various structures and entities to help others find their voices in often and otherwise inscrutable UN spaces. Our interns over the years have mostly been female and have mostly come from parts of the world where direct UN access is limited.  We have taken seriously our responsibility to inspire gender-balanced global policy but have also sought to balance in our own work and outreach the relationship of global affairs and  local initiatives.  We have increasingly understood our own primary work as offering support to the good work of others, understanding the need to offer access to and mentoring inside the UN “bubble” where we could, but in a way which does not diminish the primacy of local activity and local initiative.  This is not the place for a thorough assessment/critique of the UN, but you will find elements of such in many parts of our archive.  This is, however, the point at which we remind the reader of the importance of “demystifying” the UN, which we have tried to do with interns and associates as one means of mitigating the disappointment which many have experienced both within and far from that space. 

While we have done our level-best to continue our monitoring and outreach activities post-Covid, we have done so with limitations of capacity and even of UN acceptance.  We are grateful to institutional partners such as FIACAT, Soka Gakkai, Green Map and especially  the aforementioned LCNP for helping us sustain and expand key aspects of our work despite a bevy of impediments which we often did not experience pre-Covid and which allowed us to sustain a reputation which has somehow carried over to the present.  

This archive’s categorical divisions represent our priorities at what was probably the high-watermark of our influence as an NGO.  Disarmament (and institutional matters) led by Katherine Prizeman.  Women, Peace and Security and Genocide Prevention led by Melina Lito. Media led by Lia Petridis Maiello.  Each helped to gather around us partners who, for the most part, trusted our professional instincts and shared our innovations.  These women have all gone on to more responsibility (and better pay) in other, related contexts, but each helped establish priorities and agendas that continue to be binding on our current work. 

And we’re not done.  Thanks to some wonderful colleagues and supporters including Lois Whitman, Hope Hanafin, Robert Thomas and Hiro Sakurai, we are still able to welcome interns and overseas guests, still able to apply our institutional memory to the assessment of UN processes, still able to help colleagues in other global regions incarnate their own caring impulses in the communities they serve.  This archive will only partially reflect some of these more immediate concerns and investments. 

We now operate, post-Covid, on the basis of our institutional memory and partnerships which have often transitioned but not entirely disappeared.  This archive describes the pathways leading us from one global crisis and one pathway of response to the next. We welcome your questions and comments.