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Members of the United Nations

The United Nations (UN) is a diplomatic

and political international organization with
the intended purpose of maintaining
international peace and security, developing
friendly relations among nations, achieving
international cooperation, and serving as a
center for coordinating the actions of member
nations. It is widely recognised as the world's
largest international organization.
 The UN is headquartered in New York City,
in international territory with certain
privileges extraterritorial to the United States,
and the UN has other offices in Geneva,
Nairobi, Vienna, and The Hague, where the
International Court of Justice is headquartered
at the Peace Palace.

The UN was established after World War II

with the aim of preventing future world wars,
and succeeded the League of Nations, which
was characterized as being ineffective. On 25
April 1945, 50 nations assembled in San
Francisco, California for a conference and
initialised the drafting of the UN Charter,
which was adopted on 25 June 1945. The
charter took effect on 24 October 1945, when
the UN began operations. The UN's objectives,
as outlined by its charter, include maintaining
international peace and security, protecting
human rights, delivering humanitarian aid,
promoting sustainable development, and
upholding international law. At its founding,
the UN had 51 member states; as of 2024, it has
193 sovereign states, nearly all of the world's
recognized sovereign states.
 The UN's mission to preserve world peace
was complicated in its initial decades due in
part to Cold War tensions that existed between
the United States and Soviet Union and their
respective allies. Its mission has included the
provision of primarily unarmed military
observers and lightly armed troops charged
with primarily monitoring, reporting and
confidence-building roles. UN membership
grew significantly following the widespread
decolonization in the 1960s. Since then, 80
former colonies have gained independence,
including 11 trust territories that had been
monitored by the Trusteeship Council.

By the 1970s, the UN's budget for economic

and social development programmes vastly
exceeded its spending on peacekeeping. After
the end of the Cold War in 1991, the UN shifted
and expanded its field operations, undertaking
a wide variety of complex tasks.
 The UN comprises six principal operational
organizations: the General Assembly, the
Security Council, the Economic and Social
Council, the International Court of Justice, the
UN Secretariat, and the Trusteeship Council,
although the Trusteeship Council has been
suspended since 1994. The UN System includes
a multitude of specialized agencies, funds, and
programmes, including the World Bank Group,
the World Health Organization, the World Food
Programme, UNESCO, and UNICEF.
Additionally, non-governmental organizations
may be granted consultative status with the
Economic and Social Council and other
agencies.

The UN's chief administrative officer is the

secretary-general, currently António Guterres
who is a Portuguese politician and diplomat.
He began his first five-year term on 1 January
2017 and was re-elected on 8 June 2021. The
organization is financed by assessed and
voluntary contributions from its member
states.
 The UN, its officers, and its agencies have
won multiple Nobel Peace Prizes, although
other evaluations of its effectiveness have been
contentious. Some commentators believe the
organization to be a leader in peace and human
development, while others have criticized it for
ineffectiveness, bias, and corruption.

Background (Pre-1941)

In the century prior to the UN's creation,

several international organizations such as the
International Committee of the Red Cross were
formed to ensure protection and assistance for
victims of armed conflict and strife. During World
War I, several major leaders, especially U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson, advocated for a world
body to guarantee peace. The winners of the war,
the Allies, met to decide on formal peace terms at
the Paris Peace Conference. The League of
Nations was approved and started operations, but
the United States never joined. On 10 January
1920, the League of Nations formally came into
being when the Covenant of the League of
Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, took
effect. The League Council acted as an executive
body directing the Assembly's business. It began
with four permanent members—the United
Kingdom, France, Italy, and Japan.
 After some limited successes and failures
during the 1920s, the League proved ineffective
in the 1930s, as it failed to act against the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1933. Forty
nations voted for Japan to withdraw from
Manchuria but Japan voted against it and
walked out of the League instead of
withdrawing from Manchuria. It also failed to
act against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War,
after the appeal for international intervention
by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I at
Geneva in 1936 went with no avail, including
when calls for economic sanctions against Italy
failed. Italy and other nations left the League.

When war broke out in 1939, the League

effectively closed down.
Declarations by the Allies of World War II
(1941–1944)

The first step towards the establishment of

the United Nations was the Inter-Allied
Conference in London that led to the
Declaration of St James's Palace on 12 June
1941. By August 1941, American President
Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill had drafted the Atlantic
Charter; which defined goals for the post-war
world. At the subsequent meeting of the
Inter-Allied Council in London on 24
September 1941, the eight governments in exile
of countries under Axis occupation, together
with the Soviet Union and representatives of
the Free French Forces, unanimously adopted
adherence to the common principles of policy
set forth by Britain and the United States.
 Roosevelt and Churchill met at the White
House in December 1941 for the Arcadia
Conference. Roosevelt considered a founder of
the UN, coined the term United Nations to
describe the Allied countries. Churchill
accepted it, noting its use by Lord Byron. The
text of the Declaration by the United Nations
was drafted on 29 December 1941, by
Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harry Hopkins. It
incorporated Soviet suggestions but included
no role for France. One major change from the
Atlantic Charter was the addition of a provision
for religious freedom, which Stalin approved
after Roosevelt insisted.
Roosevelt's idea of the "Four Powers", refers
to the four major Allied countries, the United
States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and
China, emerged in the Declaration by the United
Nations. On New Year's Day 1942, Roosevelt,
Churchill, the Soviet Union's former Foreign
Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the Chinese Premier
T. V. Soong signed the "Declaration by United
Nations", and the next day the representatives of
twenty-two other nations added their signatures.
During the war, the United Nations became the
official term for the Allies. In order to join,
countries had to sign the Declaration and declare
war on the Axis powers.
 The October 1943 Moscow Conference
resulted in the Moscow Declarations, including
the Four Power Declaration on General Security
which aimed for the creation "at the earliest
possible date of a general international
organization". This was the first public
announcement that a new international
organization was being contemplated to
replace the League of Nations. The Tehran
Conference followed shortly afterwards at
which Roosevelt, Churchill and Joseph Stalin,
the leader of the Soviet Union, met and
discussed the idea of a post-war international
organization.

The new international organisation was

formulated and negotiated amongst the
delegations from the Allied Big Four at the
Dumbarton Oaks Conference from 21
September to 7 October 1944. They agreed on
proposals for the aims, structure and
functioning of the new organization. It took
the conference at Yalta in February 1945, and
further negotiations with the Soviet Union,
before all the issues were resolved.
Founding (1945)

By 1 March 1945, 21 additional states

had signed the Declaration by the United
Nations. After months of planning, the UN
Conference on International Organization
opened in San Francisco on 25 April 1945. It
was attended by 50 nations' governments and
a number of non-governmental organizations.
The delegations of the Big Four chaired the
plenary meetings. Previously, Churchill had
urged Roosevelt to restore France to its status
of a major power after the liberation of Paris in
August 1944. The drafting of the Charter of the
United Nations was completed over the
following two months, and it was signed on 26
June 1945 by the representatives of the 50
countries. The UN officially came into
existence on 24 October 1945, upon ratification
of the Charter by the five permanent members
of the Security Council: the United States, the
United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and
China — and by a majority of the other 46
nations.
 The first meetings of the General Assembly,
with 51 nations represented, and the Security
Council took place in London beginning in
January 1946. Debates began at once, covering
topical issues such as the presence of Russian
troops in Iranian Azerbaijan and British forces
in Greece. British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb
served as interim secretary-general.

The General Assembly selected New York

City as the site for the headquarters of the UN.
Construction began on 14 September 1948 and
the facility was completed on 9 October 1952.
The Norwegian Foreign Minister, Trygve Lie,
was the first elected UN secretary-general.
 Cold War (1947–1991)

Though the UN's primary mandate was

peacekeeping, the division between the United
States and the Soviet Union often paralysed the
organization; generally allowing it to intervene
only in conflicts distant from the Cold War.
Two notable exceptions were a Security Council
resolution on 7 July 1950 authorizing a US-led
coalition to repel the North Korean invasion of
South Korea, passed in the absence of the
Soviet Union, and the signing of the Korean
Armistice Agreement on 27 July 1953.
 On 29 November 1947, the General
Assembly approved resolution 181, a proposal
to partition Palestine into two state, with
Jerusalem placed under a special international
regime. The plan failed and a civil war broke
out in Palestine, that lead to the creation of the
state of Israel afterward. Two years later, Ralph
Bunche, a UN official, negotiated an armistice
to the resulting conflict, with the Security
Council deciding that “an armistice shall be
established in all sectors of Palestine”. On 7
November 1956, the first UN peacekeeping
force was established to end the Suez Crisis;
however, the UN was unable to intervene
against the Soviet Union's simultaneous
invasion of Hungary, following the country's
revolution.

On 14 July 1960, the UN established the

United Nations Operation in the Congo (or
UNOC), the largest military force of its early
decades, to bring order to Katanga, restoring it
to the control of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo by 11 May 1964. While travelling to meet
rebel leader Moise Tshombe during the
conflict, Dag Hammarskjöld, often named as
one of the UN's most effective
secretaries-general, died in a plane crash.
Months later he was posthumously awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1964,
Hammarskjöld's successor, U Thant, deployed
the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, which
would become one of the UN's
longest-running peacekeeping missions.
With the spread of decolonization in the
1960s, the UN's membership shot up due to an
influx of newly independent nations. In 1960
alone, 17 new states joined the UN, 16 of them
from Africa On 25 October 1971, with opposition
from the United States, but with the support of
many Third World nations, the People's Republic
of China was given the Chinese seat on the
Security Council in place of the Republic of China
(also known as Taiwan). The vote was widely seen
as a sign of waning American influence in the
organization. Third World nations organized
themselves into the Group of 77 under the
leadership of Algeria, which briefly became a
dominant power at the UN. On 10 November 1975,
a bloc comprising the Soviet Union and Third
World nations passed a resolution, over
strenuous American and Israeli opposition,
declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. The
resolution was repealed on 16 December 1991,
shortly after the end of the Cold War.
 With an increasing Third World presence
and the failure of UN mediation in conflicts in
the Middle East, Vietnam, and Kashmir, the UN
increasingly shifted its attention to its
secondary goals of economic development and
cultural exchange. By the 1970s, the UN budget
for social and economic development was far
greater than its peacekeeping budget.
Post-Cold War (1991–present)

After the Cold War, the UN saw a radical

expansion in its peacekeeping duties, taking on
more missions in five years than it had in the
previous four decades. Between 1988 and 2000,
the number of adopted Security Council
resolutions more than doubled, and the
peacekeeping budget increased by more than
tenfold. The UN negotiated an end to the
Salvadoran Civil War, launched a successful
peacekeeping mission in Namibia, and oversaw
democratic elections in post-apartheid South
Africa and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. In
1991, the UN authorized a US-led coalition that
repulsed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Brian
Urquhart, the under-secretary-general of the
UN from 1971 to 1985, later described the hopes
raised by these successes as a "false
renaissance" for the organization, given the
more troubled missions that followed.
 Beginning in the last decades of the Cold
War, critics of the UN condemned the
organization for perceived mismanagement
and corruption. In 1984, American President
Ronald Reagan withdrew the United States'
funding from the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organisation (or
UNESCO) over allegations of mismanagement,
followed by the United Kingdom and
Singapore. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the
secretary-general from 1992 to 1996, initiated
a reform of the Secretariat, somewhat reducing
the size of the organisation. His successor, Kofi
Annan, initiated further management reforms
in the face of threats from the US to withhold
its UN dues.

Though the UN Charter had been written

primarily to prevent aggression by one nation
against another, in the early 1990s the UN
faced several simultaneous, serious crises
within Somalia, Haiti, Mozambique, and the
nations that previously made up Yugoslavia.
The UN mission in Somalia was widely viewed
as a failure after the United States' withdrawal
following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu.
The UN mission to Bosnia faced worldwide
ridicule for its indecisive and confused mission
in the face of ethnic cleansing. In 1994, the UN
Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to
intervene in the Rwandan genocide amidst
indecision in the Security Council.

From the late 1990s to the early 2000s,

international interventions authorized by the
UN took a wider variety of forms. The United
Nations Security Council Resolution 1244
authorised the NATO-led Kosovo Force
beginning in 1999. The UN mission in the
Sierra Leone Civil War was supplemented by a
British military intervention. The invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001 was overseen by NATO. In
2003, the United States invaded Iraq despite
failing to pass a UN Security Council resolution
for authorization, prompting a new round of
questioning of the UN's effectiveness.
 Under the eighth secretary-general, Ban
Ki-moon, the UN intervened with
peacekeepers in crises such as the War in
Darfur in Sudan and the Kivu conflict in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and sent
observers and chemical weapons inspectors to
the Syrian Civil War. In 2013, an internal review
of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri
Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the
organization had suffered a "systemic failure".
In 2010, the organization suffered the worst
loss of life in its history, when 101 personnel
died in the Haiti earthquake. Acting under the
United Nations Security Council Resolution
1973 in 2011, NATO countries intervened in the
First Libyan Civil War.
 The Millennium Summit was held in 2000
to discuss the UN's role in the 21st century. The
three-day meeting was the largest gathering of
world leaders in history, and it culminated in
the adoption by all member states of the
Millennium Development Goals (or MDGs), a
commitment to achieve international
development in areas such as poverty
reduction, gender equality and public health.
Progress towards these goals, which were to be
met by 2015, was ultimately uneven. The 2005
World Summit reaffirmed the UN's focus on
promoting development, peacekeeping, human
rights and global security. The Sustainable
Development Goals (or SDGs) were launched in
2015 to succeed the Millennium Development
Goals.

In addition to addressing global challenges,

the UN has sought to improve its accountability
and democratic legitimacy by engaging more
with civil society and fostering a global
constituency. In an effort to enhance
transparency, in 2016 the organization held its
first public debate between candidates for
secretary-general.
 On 1 January 2017, Portuguese diplomat
António Guterres, who had previously served
as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,
became the ninth secretary-general. Guterres
has highlighted several key goals for his
administration, including an emphasis on
diplomacy for preventing conflicts, more
effective peacekeeping efforts, and
streamlining the organization to be more
responsive and versatile to international needs.

On 13 June 2019, the UN signed a Strategic

Partnership Framework with the World
Economic Forum in order to "jointly
accelerate" the implementation of the 2030
Agenda for Sustainable Development.
 Haile Selassie I at the
League of Nations appealing
Italy's invasion in 1936
which the League
failed to intervene.
1943 sketch by Franklin Roosevelt
of the UN original three branches:
The Four Policemen, an executive
branch, and an international
assembly of forty UN member
states.
The UN in 1945: founding members
in light blue, protectorates and
territories of the founding
members in dark blue.
Flags of member nations at the
United Nations Headquarters,
seen in 2007.
 WOODROW WILSON
Led the United States into World War I. He was
the leading architect of the League of Nations.
 FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
The term United Nations, originally suggested by
United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Made known “certain common principles in the
national policies of their respective countries on which
they base their hopes for a better future for the world”.
 WINSTON CHURCHILL
Led Britain to victory in the Second World
War. Made known “certain common
principles in the national policies of their
respective countries on which they base their
hopes for a better future for the world”.
UNITED NATIONS
HEADQUARTERS
IN NEW YORK CITY