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It's Our Turn
As president of the student association at the Geneva Graduate Institute this past academic year, I helped bring together a group of our students to join a rapporteur cohort for the GWL HER TURN initiative where we worked alongside students from other universities around the world, coming together to contribute to something bigger which is the ongoing process to select the next United Nations Secretary-General. We attended sessions on sustainable development, peace and security, and human rights, and then participated in a workshop together to build a Decalogue: a set of priorities to present directly to the UNSG candidates.
The workshop got all of us right into the thick of things from the beginning. We quickly realized we were a diverse group of people trying to agree on what matters most for this position and office, which is unsurprisingly tricky when everyone in the room comes with different contexts and pain points. For the first small group exercise, my group needed to decide on what we thought would be the biggest global threat by 2035, and we toggled between climate change and global inequality, even though of course these are not separable. For the second exercise, we took time to understand what we all understood by the concept "global democracy" before drafting our principles around it. Reader: this was not straightforward either! That being said, the cohort agreed on a lot. We all knew that this moment in time calls for a leader with courage, strength, a spirit of compromise, an understanding of working to resolve injustice, and top mediation skills. Armed with these ideas and the finished Decalogue, I had a lot to look out for at the debate the following day.
The debate included three of the five candidates – Michelle Bachelet, Rebeca Grynspan, and María Fernanda Espinosa – in-person at Maison de la Paix, Geneva, and I paid special attention to how the candidates talked about the manner in which they would hold the office, both directly and indirectly.
Grynspan said her goal was that "no one would ever have to ask again, 'Where is the UN?'", and spoke of how the office needs to show up, take risks, and be present.
Espinosa made a key point that is relevant way beyond this office: "Development cannot be delivered from New York." Indeed, it would be great to have a reorientation that the UN's job is to enable and support, not to centralize from a distance.
When asked whether being a woman would bring something different to the role, Bachelet gave a bold response that I loved: "Not just any woman… I'm not afraid of speaking up when it's needed."
Overall, I was glad to see the diversity of experience and opinions by women who are familiar with the system and still believe it can be more than it is right now. After the debate, we concluded our time together with a formal launch of the Decalogue we had built, and GWL Voices Co-founder, Susana Malcorra, said something that perfectly summed up a thought that was buzzing in my head probably since I started following this process: "The next UNSG is a Secretary-General. They must be a Secretary and a General, and they need to know the best time for which." This is my stance on everything I think this moment requires. Secretary and General. Either or both, fully, whenever the moment calls for it. With the world drowning and burning, and people starting and finishing their lives in conflicts and wars, we need someone who is ready to wield all the tools of the UNSG office–political, diplomatic, moral–and use them fully to coordinate, lead, convene, and, most importantly, act.
My experience as a Her Turn Rapporteur left me with a clearer sense of what I should be hoping for when it comes to reform of our global systems.
I definitely look forward to developing connections with my cohort and the GWL Voices Team as we advance in all the corners and spaces we occupy in this world!