The United Nations Meets the

Twenty-first Century:
Confronting the Challenges of
Global Governance
United Nation Roles and Function
UN supporting roles in preventing and managing conflicts, regulating
armaments, championing human rights and international humanitarian
law, liberating the colonized, providing economic and technical aid in
newly liberated countries, organizing elections, empowering women,
educating children, feeding the hungry, sheltering the dispossessed and
displaced, housing the refugees, tending to the sick and coordinating
disaster relief and assistance. And all of this occurs on a 24/7 basis.
The United Nations' role in world affairs is irreplaceable by any other
international or regional organizations. The United Nations has made
enormous positive contributions in maintaining international peace
and security, promoting cooperation among states and international
development.
The UN’s role as an ‘intellectual actor’ for global governance consists of
identifying and diagnosing problems; developing norms (principled ideas);
and formulating recommendations (operational ideas).

The three United Nations

• The arena for state decision making
• The professional secretariats
• Civil society
Have filled these ideational functions for five types of gaps:
1. Knowledge
2. Norms
3. Policies
4. Institutions
5. Compliance
The main gaps that the UN meets in the twenty-first century are those
that it has confronted since 1945: knowledge, norms, policy,
institutions and compliance.

A critical hole in any of the five stages can cause efforts at problem
solving to collapse. The world organization has played and will continue
to play four essential roles in identifying and diagnosing problems and
thereby filling gaps: managing knowledge; developing norms’
promulgating recommendation; and institutionalizing ideas.
An Unfinished Journey
The story of global governance remains an unfinished journey because
we are struggling to find our way and are nowhere near finding a
satisfactory destination.
Based on human solidarity across borders and transcending national
perspective and working in partnership with governmental and civil
society actors, the UN provides and manages the framework for
bringing together the world’s leaders to tackle the pressing problems of
the day for the survival, development and welfare of all peoples,
everywhere.
Relevance of state amid globalization
The primary dimension of globalization concerns the expansion of
economic activities across state borders; the growing volume and
variety of cross-borders flows of finance, investments, goods and
services; ideas, information, legal systems, organizations and people;
the rapid and widespread diffusion of technology; and cultural
exchanges.
A few clarifications are required.
First, even in this globalizing era, the movement of people remains restricted and
strictly regulated and, in the aftermath of 9/11, even more so.
Second, economic interdependence is highly asymmetrical: the benefits of linking
and the costs of delinking are not equally distributed among partners.
Third, compared to the post-war period, the average annual rate of world growth
has steadily slowed during the age of globalization from 3.5 per cent per capita in
the 1960’s to 2.1, 1.3 and 1.0 per cent in the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, respectively
(Nayyar, 2002, 2006: 153-4)
Fourth, and long before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was a growing
divergence, not convergence, in income levels between countries and peoples, with
widening inequality among and within nations.
Fifth, globalization has also unleashed many ‘uncivil society’ forces like
international terrorism; drugs, people and gun trafficking; and illicit money flows
(Heine and Thakur, 2011).
In short, globalization creates losers as well as winners and entails risks
as wee as providing opportunities.

So, a State has relevance in the beginning, but as we see, things could
go bad if the public isn’t aware, which is mostly the case. This is why we
see poverty and wars in nations that rich in resources. This is why it is
important to elect leaders that clearly cares about the people.