How to effectively pressure a reluctant United Nations

This article How to effectively pressure a reluctant United Nations was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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As opinions on the Trump-Musk forced closure of USAID reverberate across the world — with progressive members of Congress protesting at the headquarters, and critics from the left highlighting its imperialistic reach — what institutions can ground our faith in humanitarianism?

The United Nations, established in the wake of World War II, has for generations been widely trusted as a major force to improve humanity. However, many seasoned campaigners agree the U.N. has lately regressed into a bulwark for the status quo — and I would argue, also for the neoliberal development aid system that entrenches inequalities. 

But not all hope is lost. Grassroots actors are confronting the unjust power relations that have come to characterize the U.N., as we have seen especially in East Africa.

On Sept. 22, world leaders who convened at the U.N. Summit of the Future in New York adopted the Pact for the Future, a 64-page document detailing agreed-upon priorities for our global cooperation. As an anecdotal window into the document’s spinelessness, the pact lacked any mention of Palestine at a time when more than 40,000 people had already been killed in Gaza.

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Perhaps it could be chalked up to mere oversight or diplomatic language. But just four months prior to the pact’s adoption, thousands of pro-Palestine nonprofit workers interrupted a town hall meeting for the pact’s preparation. This took place at the biggest global civil society convening of 2024, held at the United Nations’ massive secretariat premises in Nairobi, Kenya. Civil society organizations were convened to discuss their agenda points on various thematic areas to consolidate a collective voice for the summit. Their disruption in support of Palestine, which I had the privilege to join alongside fellow development workers, altered the official programmatic agenda to say that our globe truly has no future without Palestine.

Approximately 90 attendees had mobilized a WhatsApp thread, printed hundreds of #CeasefireNow and #RiseForRafah posters. (Rafah had experienced a brutal invasion a few days prior.) They also distributed flyers across the aisles during the final plenary session of the three-day event.

Although convenors put on a brave face and welcomed this democratic act of putting Palestine on the agenda, U.N. Secretary Gen. António Guterres, during his closing speech, offered little more than a parenthetical remark on Palestine. During this closing ceremony, several unidentified persons silenced the act of free speech by confiscating the protesters’ printed materials. 

Kenyan President William Ruto’s security forces were also on edge, as he too delivered a closing speech, guising his despotism with euphemisms just a day after his government introduced an IMF rubber-stamped finance bill that would soon cause nationwide resistance. Ruto’s neoliberal administration has been characterized by increasingly repressive measures against both his own critics and foreign critics of neighboring authoritarian regimes within his country’s borders.

His operatives brought this same autocracy into the room, forcefully confiscating pro-Palestine materials from delegates. When I refused to relinquish mine, a Kenyan officer attempted to arrest me. I refused to comply and a plain-clothes operative was placed next to me to box me in. 

All things considered, the town hall disruption was a rather modest action deploying typical advocacy tactics in a setting where advocacy is commonplace. For activists who find themselves engaging the U.N. often, there is a growing cynicism toward the U.N. itself. The idea that the U.N. can actually foster or catalyze substantive change is a tired one — including among the majority of U.N. workers with whom I’ve spoken.

The day before the town hall meeting, I facilitated a conference-approved session on how civil society organizations can become better allies to grassroots social movements. This breakout session had a packed house, with representatives from philanthropic institutions, international non-governmental organizations, community activism groups and government agencies.

I shared photographs of our comrades’ one-month nonviolent occupation of a U.N. office — the first ever in history, according to Sara Weschler who researched and supported the occupation. I asked attendees what we could have done better to get the U.N. to live up to its basic mandate. No one had a suggestion we hadn’t tried ourselves. It was apparent in the room that the U.N. was distrusted at worst, or had succumbed to internal bureaucratic paralysis at best.

“My father who worked with the U.N. used to tell me, if a U.N. boss wants to know whether it’s raining outside, he won’t look out the window,” explained activist lawyer Andrew Karamagi. “Instead, he’ll ask a colleague to inform the rank and file to go and investigate. After stepping out into the rain, that worker will return and draft a report that does not say it is raining, but instead reads something like ‘droplets composed of hydrogen and oxygen have formed in the air.’ After this report has gone through several edits to water it down more, it will eventually reach the boss, too vague and indirect to be actionable, let alone decipherable.”

These sentiments echo a broader working-class analysis of the U.N. from Uganda and wherever else the U.N. carries out regular, large-scale operations. Working with the U.N. is seen by many people across the Global South as a path for upward mobility. In my discussions with people across the world, especially in East and Southern Africa, it is not presumed that one works with the U.N. with noble intentions or for any motivation apart from the benefits of class privilege.

U.N. compounds are revered for their intensive security and exclusionary walls. Their offices are unapproachable, and attitudes toward their workers by society are generally negative, or at least envious. It is assumed that these are workplaces for actual and aspiring members of the bourgeoisie. “U.N. workers have become part of a global elite who pay no tax,” said ActionAid International’s head of programmes and influencing, David Archer, who had joined the Palestine solidarity protests. “This is absurd given their already inflated salaries.”

Opportunists tend to flock wherever the most money is to be made. When a national economy becomes dependent on the humanitarian sector — as is often the case where there are mass U.N. operations — there is a disincentive to resolve the crises that are bringing so many resources into the country. This “humanitarian” economy perversely incentivizes war, the arms trade, ecological violence, privatization and other forms of destabilization.

Uganda’s dictator Yoweri Museveni is a prime example. His war profiteering consists not only of stakes in extractive industries in the region, but also in positioning his country as a hospitable place for refugees. The U.N. and the Museveni family fundraise jointly for refugee camps in Uganda, the creation of which notoriously results in forced evictions of Ugandan residents, almost always without adequate (if any) compensation. The Museveni family has supported the warmongering of their close friend South Sudanese President Salva Kiir. Museveni and his son — Kainerugaba Muhooz, who heads the Ugandan military — have also cluster bombed South Sudan directly, ensuring a steady stream of refugees into Uganda’s borders. Starting in February 2022, 1,500 members of one community affected by forced evictions for refugee projects occupied a resident district commissioner’s office for nearly two years, without redress from the Ugandan government or U.N.

This pattern of U.N.-despot collaboration raises cynical questions about the aforementioned occupation of a U.N. office in 2018. During that nonviolent occupation, Nicole Bjerler, the head of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or OHCHR, Uganda office failed to take any concrete action despite repeated requests for her organization to make an appeal to the Ugandan government to stop its violent land grabs in Amuru. 

Instead, according to members of the occupation and organizations that allied with the occupation, her office connived with the Ugandan state to suppress media freedom, curtail access to food, clean water and sanitation for the occupiers, and silence the cause of the occupiers — all clear violations of rights the U.N. famously enshrines globally. Was the U.N. leadership in Uganda protecting cordial relations with the Museveni mafia state? Why has there never been an internal or independent investigation of U.N. leaders’ collusion with Uganda’s military dictatorship? Can we expect the U.N. to take any substantive concrete action in contexts that are increasingly authoritarian?

If we are to continue to spend our time, energy and resources engaging the U.N. as a global institution that brings the world together to solve problems (albeit, under the hegemony of majority western imperial superpowers), we may need to embrace alternative strategies rather than go through formal channels. There may be a few ways we can still circumvent institutional lethargy and apathy, until U.N. leaders get their house in order.

First, we can befriend U.N. special rapporteurs, many of whom are not only motivated by personal experiences pertaining to their focus areas, but also are intimately aware of the sluggish culture of their workplace and committed to helping others navigate it. For those rapporteurs who are less accessible, arranging calls with advocacy organizations in close proximity to their niche issues may be useful.

Second, we can learn from the experience of those who occupied a U.N. office and embrace the U.N. as a secondary target. Although U.N. leaders failed to act in accordance with their institutional mandate, the pressure mounted during that time coerced the Ugandan state into putting its violent land grabbing campaign on hiatus. Wherever the U.N. is a long-term partner of an oppressive actor, targeting its institutions with actions may prove useful in challenging that oppressor.

Torture Survivors of Uganda took heed of this realization in February 2022. When the U.N.-funded and dictatorship-captured Uganda Human Rights Commission, or UHRC, refused to take action in demanding the release of disappeared satirist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, members of Torture Survivors of Uganda crawled and crutched their way to the OHCHR office in Kampala to call for a freezing of UHRC’s funding. UHRC Director Mariam Wangadya frantically convened a press conference to do damage control for their organization and the Museveni dictatorship. 

Months before the torture survivors’ action, Javier Sanjuan, working in that very same OHCHR office, told activists that protests against the U.N. were not “the right way to do things.” He cautioned them toward soft diplomacy. The members of Torture Survivors of Uganda, on the other hand, are still raising hell against Museveni’s dictatorship, with only a tiny fraction of the resources that were at the OHCHR’s disposal.

Confrontational tactics work. Respectability politics and collusion with autocrats don’t get us very far, as the U.N.’s OHCHR office would learn the hard way. The institutional reluctance — or culpability — of the United Nations in East Africa is indicative of a need to pursue change through alternative means and channels.

This article How to effectively pressure a reluctant United Nations was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/how-to-effectively-pressure-a-reluctant-united-nations/