In New York, some 8,500 delegates from 192 countries are meeting at the United Nations this week for the summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the U.N. General Assembly.
 
The big issues on the U.N.’s agenda this year include development, peace and security, conflict prevention, human rights, the environment and climate change, and U.N. reform, among others, said Abiodun Williams, vice president of the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the United States Institute of Peace.
 
The MDGs Summit, which precedes the U.N. General Assembly, will review progress made to end poverty, combat HIV/AIDS, improve education and health, gender equality, as well as other goals originally adopted in 2000.
 
“Progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals has been uneven and we only have five years left to meet the goals by the 2015 deadline,” Williams noted.
 
"Governments need to fulfill their commitments to the global development agenda, and the poorest countries need increased international support in order to meet the goals,” Williams added. He expects world leaders to acknowledge progress made toward some of the goals and is hopeful they will continue with their commitments despite the current economic crisis.
 
On human rights, Williams said U.N. Member States need to take concrete steps to operationalize the Responsibility to Protect, which states that governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide and mass atrocities, and that the international community must act in cases where governments fail to do so.
 
Additionally, "we need to negotiate a global agreement on addressing climate change,” he said. “Governments also need to deliver on commitments made in Copenhagen,” he added, referring to the 2009 meeting to prevent global warming and climate changes after the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.
 
Furthermore, with the election of a new secretary-general in 2011, there needs to be a more systematic way of choosing the U.N. leader instead of the haphazard process that has always been followed, Williams said.
 
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama speaks at the MDG summit, and on Thursday, the U.S. president will address the U.N. General Assembly.
 
Major objectives for the U.S. at this year’s U.N. General Assembly include human rights, reaffirming U.S. support for the MDGs, stressing the importance of nuclear non-proliferation, tackling environmental changes, and improving the U.N.’s tools for peace and security.
 
Last year, President Obama had met with leaders of major peacekeeping troop contributing countries, and this year, strengthening the U.N.’s peacekeeping operations remains a priority for the administration, Williams observed.
 
"Peacekeeping forces should not be sent into areas where there is no peace to keep,” Williams said, adding, “that is, you don’t send them into the midst of a war.
 
As part of enhancing the U.N.’s peacekeeping efforts, Williams said, “they must have clear and achievable mandates, and they must have adequate resources to implement their mandates.
 
Williams observed that “there is a tendency to pile on additional tasks to existing mandates with little or no consideration to the existing resource allocation.
 
At the same time, he said, there needs to be sustained political engagement by the U.N. Security Council to see a job through. This political will and engagement must be extended to other areas beyond peacekeeping strategies – notably conflict prevention.
 
"Prevention is preferable to peacekeeping or post-conflict peacebuilding for moral, strategic and financial reasons,” Williams said. He underlined that U.N. Member States need to strengthen the U.N.’s capacity to prevent conflict, and use the secretary-general’s “good offices” to greater advantage.
 
Indeed, conflict prevention is increasingly an important policy matter -- one that must be addressed not only in policy, but in practice. 
 
In a recent Peace Brief based on a day-long USIP conference, Williams and his co-authors assessed the U.N.’s range of prevention capabilities:
 
"Conflict prevention is a fundamental purpose of the U.N, but it has not been well articulated as a strategy. There is a need to clearly articulate the difference between structural versus operational prevention. In terms of capacity, the U.N. has an early warning capability, if only a rudimentary one. It does not lack information, but there are several major streams of information disconnected from each other.
 
One of the major challenges for prevention is creating political will where it may not exist. Concepts like the ‘responsibility to protect’ can be important in creating that political will. The question remains how to put together a multifaceted, effective peacebuilding strategy. Since the changeover of secretaries-general, the U.N. has unfortunately dropped below the radar."
 
On a broader level, USIP has collaborated with the U.N. on genocide prevention and other issues, such as internal reform and strengthening relations with the United States.
 
In 2004, Congress directed USIP to create and facilitate the work of the bipartisan Task Force on the United Nations, co-chaired by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.  The task force was charged to assess how well the U.N. was fulfilling its mandate, and released its report in 2005 on how the U.S. could help the U.N. become more effective and better respond to genocide, mass killing and sustained human rights violations.
 
Additionally, the Institute's U.S.-U.N. Forum, led by Williams, works to re-examine relations between the U.N. and U.S., their shared interests and the prospects for strengthening the partnership.
 
On the heels of President Obama’s 2009 call for a more multilateral approach to international relations and renewed engagement with the United Nations, the U.S-U.N. Forum held its inaugural meeting in April that year with Jan Eliasson, former president of the U.N. General Assembly and former foreign minister of Sweden; B. Lynn Pascoe, the U.N.’s undersecretary-general for Political Affairs; and Thomas Pickering, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The participants discussed some of the questions regarding the U.S's engagement with the United Nations: What are the top priorities for a renewed partnership? Can the U.S. fulfill the global expectations for its multilateral agenda? Do both the United States and the United Nations have the will and capacity for engagement?
 
Future meetings of the U.S.-U.N. Forum will focus on other critical topics including peacekeeping, peacebuilding, non-proliferation, humanitarian assistance, human rights, development, climate change and global health. The Institute also collaborates on a wide range of peace and security issues with several U.N. departments, agencies, offices and programs.
 
In President Obama’s 2009 address to the General Assembly, he pledged greater U.S. cooperation on international affairs – and in effect providing a contrast to what many U.N. member states viewed as unilateralism during the Bush administration. This year, President Obama is expected to highlight the benefits of such renewed U.S. engagement with recent successes, such as pushing for tough U.N. sanctions against Iran and North Korea, building greater momentum on nuclear non-proliferation, and helping to coordinate a global effort for Haiti’s post-earthquake recovery.
 
"U.S. support and leadership has always been crucial to a strong and effective U.N. And a strong U.N. enhances the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy,” Williams noted.