Events

Event summary:

In her lecture at the Schwarzman Centre, Amina J. Mohammed, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations and Chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, framed global cooperation not simply as an institutional question, but as a profoundly humanistic one. The architecture of international order, she argued, rests on questions long explored by the humanities: who we are, how we relate to one another, and what we owe one another. She invoked the idea of ubuntu – “I am because we are” – as an ethical language of interdependence that predated the United Nations but spoke directly to its best aspirations. The Deputy Secretary-General also drew a deliberate connection to Oxford itself, recalling how the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) emerged during the Second World War from debates over the Allied blockade of Greece and from the insistence that relief should be guided by need alone. In doing so, she suggested that Oxford remains an important site for reflecting on the moral foundations of global order.

The Deputy Secretary-General situated the United Nations within a longer history of both achievement and exclusion. The post-1945 order, she argued, was built on the conviction that suffering anywhere demands a response everywhere, and she pointed to successful examples of international cooperation such as the eradication of smallpox, the repair of the ozone layer through the Montreal Protocol, and UN peace missions in Liberia and Timor-Leste. Yet the architecture was flawed from the outset. The Deputy Secretary-General argued that the UN system was marked by a foundational contradiction: the Charter spoke in universal language, but it was created in a world still shaped by empire and reflected the priorities of the most powerful states. As decolonised countries entered the system, they did so within institutions not designed around their needs, especially since development had never been given the same standing as peace and security. She presented the Millennium Development Goals, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the 2030 Agenda as efforts to write development more fully into that system, but warned that this promise is now under threat as powerful states turn away from both the SDGs, the broader principles of the Charter, and multilateralism more generally.

The current crisis of multilateralism, the Deputy Secretary-General argued, reflects both unmet commitments and active political dismantling. She described a fracture “from below”, as people facing hunger, climate disaster, and political exclusion increasingly lose faith in the promises of dignity and inclusion, and a fracture “from above”, driven by leaders embracing strongman politics and weakening institutions built over the past eighty years. She stressed that this is all the more significant because the multilateral system had, through pressure from the Global South and from civil society, gradually become more representative and more responsive, slowly becoming more “We” than “I”. That more inclusive architecture is now being hollowed out, even as crises in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and the wider Middle East expose its fragility. The Deputy Secretary-General also pointed to the paralysis of the Security Council, arguing that the veto has become “a shield for impunity” and has enabled a selective application of international law in which “might equals right”. While acknowledging that new initiatives to build peace are emerging outside the UN framework, she warned that parallel structures risk weakening the one body with a universal Charter mandate to act on peace and security.

Yet the lecture was not a eulogy for multilateralism. The Deputy Secretary-General instead argued for its rebirth, stressing the role of actors too often marginalised within the existing order, from small island developing states to countries such as The Gambia, South Africa, and Liechtenstein. She linked that argument to the need to reform the international financial architecture and to govern artificial intelligence more equitably, warning that AI could reproduce old exclusions in new forms if left in the hands of a narrow group of powerful actors. She noted in particular that AI systems trained on partial and biased data are already putting women at risk, citing healthcare tools built predominantly on male data. For the Deputy Secretary-General, this made the governance of AI inseparable from the wider question of representation: the world cannot afford to repeat, in the age of artificial intelligence, the exclusions on which the post-war order was founded.

The panel discussion, chaired by Andrew Thompson, Professor of Global and Imperial History (Nuffield College), developed these themes in complementary ways. Baroness Valerie Amos, Master of University College and former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, shifted the focus from institutional questions to lived experience by asking how people encounter the UN in their everyday lives and how those encounters shape perceptions of accountability and legitimacy. She also stressed that the Global South is already back at the centre of the negotiating table and should not be framed as merely asking for a place within the system. International jurist and human rights expert Adama Dieng pushed the reform argument further by insisting that, if multilateralism is to be reborn, its foundations must be rewritten and not merely adjusted at the margins. He claimed that reform “cannot be cosmetic” and argued, quoting Léopold Senghor, that the Global South is asking not for charity but for a voice. Anneliese Dodds, Labour Member of Parliament for Oxford East and former Minister for Development, connected the debate to present policy challenges, referring to cuts to aid programmes such as the World Food Programme, while also offering a more optimistic account of AI as a tool that, in the right hands, could strengthen the practical work of UN agencies and help build a better world.