As the United Nations faces mounting geopolitical tensions, financial pressures, and new global challenges, what would meaningful reform look like? In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Hoffman speaks with economist and Global Governance Forum Executive Director Augusto Lopez-Claros about the UN’s record of achievements and shortcomings, the limits of past reforms, and the prospects for more fundamental institutional change. They discuss Security Council reform, the veto, collective security and disarmament, UN financing, climate governance, artificial intelligence, and the role of the next Secretary-General. Rather than simply making the existing system more efficient, Lopez-Claros argues for rethinking the institutions and structures needed to address the global challenges of the 21st century.

Transcript

Peter Hoffman  00:07

Multilateralism is predicated on the historical experience that confronting global problems requires global solutions, and since the end of World War II, the United Nations has been its organizational embodiment. In recent times, the UN has been simultaneously celebrated as the last hope for a vehicle to address worldwide afflictions such as war, poverty, pandemics, and climate change, and at the same time, the UN is castigated as corrupt and inefficient. Certainly, two things can be true at the same time, but it begs the age-old question: What is to be done? How can what is good about the UN be preserved, and how can what’s bad about the UN be fixed? Maybe we even need to consider the views of the more striding critics and first ask: Can the UN even be saved? These questions are all the more urgent as the UN is overtaxed and under siege, with some calling for greatly cutting the organization’s budget and retooling its mandates. In essence, shrinking the UN and having it do less. This is a good time to take stock of the UN and the ideas and debates surrounding reform of the organization. First, there are surging demands for global public goods and everything from ensuring peace and security to access to food and clean water. Second, resurgent geopolitics, the rise of new powers, and an emerging multipolarity are reconfiguring multilateralism. That is to say, shifts in power are changing the character of cooperation. And third, the UN will soon have a new leadership, as currently there is an election for the next Secretary-General of the organization. In fact, today is the third straw poll. I’m Peter Hoffman, senior fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Today, I’m in conversation with Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros, an international economist who worked at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for many years, and presently serves as executive director of the Global Governance Forum, where he is focused on UN reform. Dr. Lopez-Claros has advised governments and businesses, lectured at universities and think tanks around the world, and written extensively on issues of governance and economic integration. Dr. Lopez-Claros, thanks for joining us today. I know you have much to say about current reform efforts, but before we get to your prescription and prognosis, I want to start with your diagnosis. So my first set of questions is really about the need for reform across the political spectrum. Whether it’s conservative isolationist governments or more radical elements, all seem to agree that the UN needs to change, but they disagree as to how. Furthermore, they insist the glass is certainly at least half empty, as they almost all mostly overlook what the UN has actually accomplished, so I want to begin with a two-parted question for you. From your perspective, what does success look like for the UN? And in thinking about why the UN needs reforming, how has the organization failed?

Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros  03:20

Peter, thank you very much for hosting this podcast. It is really a pleasure to be with you and to engage in what I hope will be an interesting conversation. I guess the United Nations record is definitely mixed, but some of its successes have been extraordinary, and they tell us something important about what the organization is actually for. So let me let me give you three examples. You know, to begin with, what’s best about this organization? For me, one of my favorite ones is the eradication of smallpox By 1980, humanity had eradicated a disease that had killed hundreds of millions of people over the centuries. In fact, you know, it was like having COVID-19, except every year, you know, with a couple of million fatalities. No country acting alone could have achieved that. It required sustained international cooperation, surveillance, vaccination, and coordination across borders, and the UN was very much at the center of that. The second, perhaps a little more conventional example, is the process of decolonization. By 1945, much of humanity still lived under colonial rule, and the UN, as is well known, became an important institutional setting for the process through which scores of countries achieved independence and acquire the ability to determine their own political and economic futures, and that is an important achievement. And of course, as we know, it led to a remarkable increase in the number of member states of the United Nations. And then a third example, which I particularly like, is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. People sometimes don’t know that this was actually a General Assembly resolution. It created a common normative language about human dignity, and that simply did not exist internationally in comparable form before 1948. I think it is fair to say that its principles subsequently found expression in treaties, constitutions, and national legislation around the world. Now, if I ask myself what connects these three achievements, and I suppose we could come up with a few other examples to add to this list, the common element is that the UN provided a locus for cooperation on problems that individual states could not adequately solve by themselves, and to me, that’s the standard against which I would judge success today. Does the UN enable countries to accomplish collectively what they cannot accomplish individually. Now, of course, I don’t want to sound optimistic or naive, and you know we need to focus on the failures as well. And some of these have been profound. I guess the one that comes near the top of my list is, you know, concerns the unfulfilled promises of the of the charter itself, especially in the areas of security and disarmament. You know, the charter was not simply intended to prevent another war. It actually sought to create a system in which aggression would be collectively deterred, and international disputes would not repeatedly descend into catastrophic violence as we see today in many parts of the world. True, we have avoided World War III for now, and that’s enormously important. But let’s not kid ourselves, right? Tens of millions of people have died in war since 1945. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass atrocities have repeatedly occurred, while the international community has been unable or are willing to act effectively, I could say something along the same lines in respect of Article 26 and other provisions in the Charter, which envisioned a process of disarmament, or as it is called in the Charter of Regulation of Armaments, instead, what we have built is a world containing thousands of nuclear weapons and annual military expenditures in trillions of dollars. Right, and on the development human rights side, the record is also incomplete. You know, we continue to have extreme poverty. It has fallen dramatically true enough, but it’s still very, very high, according to the World Bank. You know, one out of every two individuals, according to a somewhat less stringent poverty line than the poverty line used for extreme poverty is poor. Their struggle, hunger and malnutrition remain an unacceptable problem and of a huge scale.

And the international system remains, you know, weak when governments systematically violate the basic rights of their own citizens, as we see today in places like Afghanistan and Iran, in respect of women, in respect of religious minorities, and so on. So, to conclude, my diagnosis would be: the UN has demonstrated that international cooperation can produce extraordinary results. The problem is not that multilateralism has failed. The problem is that in some of the areas where multilateralism matters most, we never built the institutions necessary to make the promises of 1945 effective.

Peter Hoffman  09:41

Thank you. That’s very sort of insightful nuance. I think that a lot of people overlook about the UN and its actual record of performance. That’s a very substantive way of interpreting it. It gives us a way of actually having a scorecard for evaluating the organization.

Well, I mean, now that you’ve sort of presented for us what some of the shortcomings are, let’s talk about the reform aspects and the reform process. Let’s begin with the UN has previously undergone reform on only a few occasions. The ones that stand out for me are the in 1965 the Security Council was expanded, growing the number of rotating members to bring the total from 11 to 15, and at the same time the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) as it is known, grew from 18 to 27 members, and in 1973, ECOSOC was again expanded up to 54 members. Both of these are probably associated with decolonization. How were these reforms achieved? I mean, what is the actual process for UN reform? What governs reforming the organization? What does the charter say about this?

Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros  11:03

Thank you, Peter. That’s that’s an interesting and I think a very good follow-up question. I would begin by making a kind of a fairly sharp distinction between, you know, what I would call adjustments and what I would call structural reforms-the changes that you mention, you know, the expansion of the Security Council in 1965, ECOSOC, and so on later on-were useful adaptations, you know, to rapidly expanding membership. But I hesitate to describe them as fundamental reforms. I think they were cosmetic, and you know certainly today against the challenges that we face, you know that is that is how I would characterize them. They did not address the deeper structural problems, the veto in the Security Council, you know the extraordinary privileges inherent and inherited from the settlement of 1945, the absence of direct representation of the world’s citizens. You know the UN remains an organization of states, not states and peoples. Inadequate financing, as we see in the crisis today, or the failure, as I noted earlier, to create, you know, the collective security machinery envisaged in the Charter, actually, but which was never operationalized. There are essentially two Charter reform routes. You know, one is Article 108, which provides for amendments, but amendments require approval by two thirds of the General Assembly and ratification by two thirds of the member states, including all five permanent members of the Security Council. That is a fairly high hurdle, you know, when reform touches the privileges of the permanent members of the of the Security Council. Article 109 is potentially a much more interesting creature avenue. It explicitly provides for a general conference of UN member states to review the charter. You know, it makes a point that yes, at some point we may need to bring the organization into the present to adjust to changing world conditions, and here there is a kind of an important historical point. Article 109 contemplated such a review because the architects of the charter themselves understood that these institutional arrangements devised in 1945 might eventually need reconsideration. I mean, it’s such an obvious point to make if you really think about it, right? I mean, retrospectively, when we look back into the past, it seems you know enlightened and so on. But it you know, President Truman, when he closed the San Francisco conference on June 26 of 1945, he drew a parallel to the U. S. Constitution, which he said had been amended multiple times precisely to adjust to changing world conditions. And he said that the UN Charter would be likewise. The conference itself can recommend charter changes by a two-thirds vote. Those changes still ultimately require ratification, including by the permanent members. So, Article 109 is not a magic device for eliminating the veto, but its political importance is much greater. Than that, it seems to me, it allows us to move from you know negotiating isolated amendments to asking a much larger question. You know, the question posed by the Secretary-General, Mr. Guterres, ahead of the Summit of the Future a couple of years ago: What kind of United Nations does the world actually need in the 21st century, and how do we get there? And if you are going to answer that question honestly, you know, then that you have to say that could put Security Council reform, financing, representation, collective security, climate governance, and other structural questions into a single, coherent negotiation. To conclude, let me just emphasize that this will probably require a coalition of willing states. You know, working closely with civil society, scholars, former officials, other reform constituencies. You know, I don’t think we should expect the major powers that benefit most from the present arrangements to initiate fundamental reform themselves. Quite aside from the fact that, of course, they are very much focused on the day-to-day, you know, dealing with a national crisis, and so they don’t have the bandwidth to focus on these broader, broader issues.

You know, I think Article 109 is important because charter reform is not some kind of revolutionary idea, you know, coming from outside the United Nations. If we don’t reform the UN, it will it will become it will lose legitimacy, and I think that for that reason, I don’t think we have an alternative but to go ahead, unless we want the institution to collapse and we want other organizations to emerge as centers of power to deal with the problems that we face. Let me stop here.

Peter Hoffman  16:55

Well, no, I think you put your finger on something really truly important. You know, sometimes when you think about the UN and try and explain it to people, I feel like we’re delving into a field of political archaeology where we’re looking at the bones of order in 1945 and assuming the world hasn’t changed. When you look at the charter, it doesn’t include words like artificial intelligence or climate change because those just weren’t in, you know, on the horizon at that time, so it’s very timely that we revisit all of this when we talk about issues of reform, and particularly as you put it, you know, avoid, you know, very much distinguish between superficial reforms and something much more substantive.

So, let’s continue, though. I mean, you mentioned the summit of the or the yes the summit of the future, and so I want I want to talk about the recent reform initiatives. This current historical period is a fraught one. Great power politics are contesting the principles that underlie the UN. Wars and genocide are raging. Violations of international law are spiraling, acute underdevelopment and debt persists, and threats not imagined when the UN was created lurk, such as artificial intelligence and climate change. How realistic is UN reform in this contemporary moment? What are the challenges to this? I mean, you mentioned the two-thirds thresholds being high hurdles and all that. So is it realistic to expect it now? And I mean, maybe you also want to take up what you make of the 2024 pack for the future that came out of the summit, and also the more recent declaration of the UN80 process. What are your thoughts on those? Those the Pact for the Future and UN80.

Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros  18:48

Let me begin by conceding, you know, sort of the underlying premise of your question. There is no doubt, you know, this is an extraordinarily difficult geopolitical moment. Relations among the major powers are deeply strained, and perhaps that’s an understatement. Wars are underway. International law is frequently disregarded. Nationalism has strengthened in you know multiple places in the planet, and I suppose one can quite reasonably ask, you know, if governments cannot agree on relatively modest reforms, how could they possibly agree on fundamental charter reform? That’s a legitimate question. But you know, I think that there is a kind of a paradox here. If you really think about it, the very conditions that make reform difficult are the conditions that make reform increasingly necessary. In other words, I’m turning the question around in some sense. You know, if the UN continues to lose legitimacy and effectiveness, then the question is, you know, what becomes the local of international cooperation for the very serious global problems that we that we face today, including you know one as you mentioned that has emerged recently, which is sort of AI and its you know ramifications. Now there are some people, and I have had this conversation before, you know, with UN ambassadors and so on. You know, there are some people, and you know, including scholars and you know politicians who allude to several possibilities. You know, great power understandings, for instance, competing geopolitical blocs, okay, spheres of influence, as the expression goes, increasingly transactional bilateral relationships, or ultimately, you know, a world in which power, economic, political, you know, determines outcomes through coercion, tariffs, war, and so on. But the problem with these alternatives, as they are called, is that none of them provides a basis, a sustainable, a sensible basis for managing our interdependent world. I mean, tell me, can any of these possibilities solve climate change? Can they adequately govern artificial intelligence? Can they protect us from the next pandemic? Can they manage nuclear proliferation or you know address the problem of extreme poverty, inequality, and so on? No, not at all. Not at all. In fact, you know when I have come back to some of these proposals and have asked them, you know, how are these, you know, arrangements or alternative possibilities going to solve the problems of the world? I have not heard a single word, a single answer that is credible that cannot be quickly disposed of in about 60 seconds. Right? Now, on the Pact for the Future, it was certainly important because you know 193 countries were able to negotiate a broad political statement reaffirming multilateral cooperation at a fairly difficult moment. It explicitly recognizes the need to transform global governance and calls for, as you know, a more representative, inclusive, and effective Security Council. So all of that is not trivial. I think that you know we could recognize those achievements, but the challenge or the problem is that the pack largely operates within the existing institutional architecture. It says, in effect, let us make the existing system work better. My concern is that the accumulation of crisis that we have seen in recent years now probably requires us also to ask whether parts of the system itself need redesigning, and so that’s my fundamental sort of quibble, if I can call it that. You know, with the Pact for the Future. Now, you also raise a very important issue, which is UN80, and I think in a way the same distinction applies to UN80. You know, surely there are genuine efficiency problems. You know, the kinds of questions that have been raised under the UN80 umbrella are legitimate. The UN system has accumulated layers of bureaucracy. There are overlapping mandates. There is institutional duplication, and so on. All those things need to be addressed. Okay, but it seems to me that reform cannot simply become a kind of an austerity exercise. All right, a kind of an exercise in retrenchment, you know. You know, I have spent much of my professional life work life working for international organizations, and you can take it from me. Austerity doesn’t work because it’s not it’s not something that ultimately delivers results.

It seems to me that, and in fact, I argued this recently in a short article I wrote on this subject, a kind of a revisiting of UN80 one year later. You know, we actually need to ask ourselves. You know, rather than ask you know how can we economize. You know, we need to ask ourselves what do we actually need the United Nations to do, and then you know, in a world of global problems, which can only be solved through stronger international cooperation, and then, of course, we design and we finance the institution so that it is capable of doing these things. The UN is being asked. Essentially, to address more problems, while its financial base is under increasing pressure, you know, two thirds of UN system funding in 2024 was earmarked. In this, you know, fragments priorities. It gives individual donor countries, you know, about a dozen or so countries that basically have outsized influence in terms of allocating priorities, so that in the end the UN ends up doing what is in the interest of these donor countries rather than the interest of the of the collectivity. You know, the Global Governance Forum has put forward very interesting proposals on how to establish a more solid foundation for UN finances, one possibility that we have put on the table is you know a predictable contribution of you know something like 0.1% of each country’s GNI towards a consolidated UN budget would go a long way to establish a more solid basis, you know. The Pact for the Future and UN80 are both, in some sense, asking how can we make the present system work better. And the second UN Charter project launched by the by the Global Governance Forum, you know, asks a kind of a complementary question: What system would we design today if we wanted the United Nations to be, you know, actually capable of dealing with 21st century problems?

Peter Hoffman  26:36

First, I have to give you your flowers. I think the formulation of what makes UN reform difficult as evidence of its necessity is a brilliant form of political jujitsu that sort of throws the critique back at those critics. So I think that’s a really very useful formulation, and I share your concern that you know the UN is being you know asked is doing less with less ultimately as a result of some of these reform proposals. I want to follow up though on you know those more concrete illustration examples of ways forward for true reform. You know what would real UN reform look like. We could talk about each of the three main pillars of the UN and choose sort of an idea, you know, a representation for peace and security, development, human rights, and humanitarian affairs. What would reform look like in each one of those? What sort of true reform, and how would we know reform has been achieved. You reference the second charter. I know you also worked on some new ideas around collective security disarmament. Can you give us a sense of those sorts of concrete proposals for reform?

Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros  27:56

All right. You know, when I meet with the UN ambassadors and the issue of UN reform comes up, I’m not surprised that the first item at the top of the list is Security Council reform. This is the area that perhaps you know generates the greatest misapprehension and discomfort among member states. There are two issues here. The council needs to become more representative of today’s world, rather than the sort of geopolitical configuration of 1945. But representation is alone is not is not insufficient. Enlarging the council while retaining an unrestricted veto could simply produce a larger institution suffering from the same paralysis and dysfunctionality that we see today. So the veto, therefore, it has to be addressed in some fashion. The objective, it seems to me, should be to prevent one permanent member from disabling the collective security system when overwhelming international support exists for action. In the second charter, we actually have introduced what we call a veto override. You know, basically the way the system, this proposal would work is that if a country puts forward a Security Council resolution, which is then vetoed by one of the permanent members, then that resolution goes to the General Assembly, and if two thirds of the members do not agree with the veto, the resolution goes forward. All right. So, so the permanent members manage to keep the veto, but the but the implementation of the veto is subject to a much higher standard. A second area would be you know to deal with the with the with the peoples you know as an institutional expression. You know those are the opening words of. Charter, and yet, as I said before, the UN remains pretty much an organization representing governments. In the second charter, we put forward a proposal for a UN parliamentary assembly, which would introduce an additional source of democratic legitimacy by providing representation connected more directly to citizens rather than exclusively, you know, to the UN ambassadors who typically are politicians representing the party in power back in the home country. Right? In our in our vision, this parliamentary assembly would initially complement and not replace the General Assembly. It would play. It could begin by playing a kind of an advisory role to the General Assembly and other bodies in the in the UN system. I think a third area of importance, and this often doesn’t come in the radar screen when we talk about reform, but this I feel very strongly that collective security and disarmament, you know, are perhaps the most radical, but also the most faithful to the to the original charter. You know, the charter, as I said before, established these two concepts, but they were never operationalized. They are unkept promises of the original charter. We need eventually to move away from a world in which in which national security depends upon countries maintaining enormous military establishments, and in some cases nuclear arsenals capable of destroying civilization. This is just not acceptable, you know. It has never been acceptable from the moment nuclear weapons made their appearance. But today, in this world that is so integrated, you know, the consequences of a war that use these weapons would be truly cataclysmic. Take it from me as an economist. You know, it would lead to a complete collapse of all the financial markets across the world. Okay, we would be impoverished overnight, and that’s putting it mildly. Our recent work at the Global Governance Forum explores a kind of a strengthened system of collective security, including eventually a standing UN peace capability, accompanied by a staged and verifiable process of disarmament. The two have to come together. Obviously, countries will not relinquish military capabilities unless they have confidence that there is a credible alternative security system. The fourth area that comes to mind, and this addresses the pillars that you mention. You know, the 1945 chapter is absent on the on the issue of climate. It was not in the agenda of the countries at that time. Perhaps understandably so, because the focus was on the on peace after the calamities of World War II. Our second charter introduces what we call an Earth System Council. Climate change, biodiversity loss, oceans, and other planetary problems cannot be managed adequately through institutions built primarily around what I call national jurisdiction, right?

So, an Earth System Council would give kind of environmental security an institutional standing commensurate with its importance to human survival. I’ve already referred to UN financing. I don’t want to sort of repeat myself on this point. You cannot have an effective international organization whose basic capabilities are continually vulnerable, you know, to the political decisions of a handful of large donors, and not to speak of, you know, coercion and blackmail financing needs to become more predictable. It needs to be rules based and less dependent upon so-called voluntary earmark contributions. Now you raise a very interesting question. To conclude, you know how would we know reform has succeeded well. I guess we would know because the UN would begin producing outcomes rather than declarations, right? Aggression would encounter credible collective resistance, so we would deal with the problem of impunity, which we see in display today in many parts of the world, the veto could no longer routinely produce paralysis, right? Which is, you know, it’s the price that we pay today for this privilege-a Security Council which is fully dysfunctional and paralyzed, right? Do we want this, you know, forever? Do we think that it is continuing? Forever, it’s not going to undermine in some fundamental way the legitimacy of the organization, and therefore make the organization increasingly ineffective in dealing with the challenges that we face. Disarmament would become an operational process rather than an aspiration, which it is today. Citizens would acquire a voice along states. Climate governance would have an institution capable of matching the scale of the problem, and the UN would produce or would possess predictable resources to perform the functions that member states have assigned to it. I mean, I think it seems to me this would be some of the some of the benchmarks that we would use, and that we would know that the process of reform has succeeded. Let me let me emphasize here just to conclude: the objective is not world government. Okay, it’s effective governance in those limited but critically important areas where sovereignty exercised exclusively at the national level, you know, can no longer protect citizens from global risks. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Peter Hoffman  36:15

Well, I want to be mindful of our time, but I do want to get in one last question because I think that when you talk about realizing reform, it’s going to take strong leadership to achieve that. Right now, there is a an election ongoing for the next Secretary-General, who will take office on January 1st, 2027. How does the current race for the next SG impact prospects and directions of UN reform, are there proposals from any of the candidates that align with fundamentally transforming the organization?

Dr. Augusto Lopez-Claros  36:53

You know, you’re absolutely right, Peter. You know, the current selection is an important opportunity because institutional reform ultimately requires leadership, for sure. My own reading is that so far the debate has, understandably, maybe if you want to be generous, been you know excessively cautious. You know there is a structural reason for that. Anyone seeking the position knows that the permanent members exercise enormous influence over the selection process. Candidates therefore have powerless incentives not to advocate reforms that could alienate one or more of the of the permanent members. Okay, but that this creates a kind of a paradox, right? The institution may need precisely the kind of courageous leadership that the selection process discourages candidates from demonstrating, right? And I think this is one of the regrettable features of the way in which we, you know, currently elect the Secretary-General. It leads to you know it has an implicit danger, which is that eventually you know you move to the lowest common denominator. Now, in terms of the let me let me mention three areas where I think are very important for the incoming Secretary-General. I already mentioned one of them, which is the question of financing. You know, there has been much discussion of managing scarcity and improving efficiency. Right, one of the one of the unwelcome tasks of the secretary general would be basically to address this particular issue. Right, The next secretary general should be willing to ask how the UN can obtain adequate, predictable, and less politicized resources, rather than simply becoming, you know, a kind of a more efficient manager of austerity, which I think is not the way we want to go. Artificial intelligence has come up in your in your questions earlier on. You know, if you had asked this question a year ago, I’m not sure that I would have put artificial intelligence as one of the three priority areas for the new Secretary-General. But you know, when it comes to artificial intelligence, two years is 100 years, right? So, so I think AI governance is rapidly becoming, you know, one of the more defining governance challenges of this century. I think the digital compact was a useful beginning. The pact itself explicitly addresses digital cooperation, AI governance, and so on, but we remain very far from a credible global regulatory architecture. You know, these are very, very big questions. You know, questions of privacy, surveillance, misinformation, cyber security, autonomous weapons, accountability. I mean, another perturbing problem, which is increasingly being recognized, is the. Concentration of economic power in the hands of a few, which of course, as you know, immediately leads to a concentration of political power, and I think it risks undermining, you know, the stability of our democratic regimes. So my own private view is that some form of international, maybe supranational oversight will be necessary at some point, and the UN obviously because of its universal membership is the natural place to negotiate this. All right, and then the third the third item I want to mention is mediation and prevention. You know, the Secretary-General has an enormous important convening and diplomatic role that will be strengthened. You know, another way to put this is that you know the good offices of the Secretary-General are an underused asset. It seems to me, you know, we spend billions of dollars dealing with humanitarian consequences of wars that might have been prevented at vastly lower human and financial costs, right? So it seems to me the Secretary-General, you know, the new Secretary-General, you know, could remarkably strengthen professional mediation, early warning, preventive diplomacy capabilities, and so on and so forth, right? So this is this is most important. I would like, in the end, the next Secretary-General not simply to be an excellent administrator of the United Nations we inherited, but an advocate for the United Nations we will need.

Peter Hoffman  41:40

We’re coming to the end of our time today, Augusto. I want to thank you for taking the time to share your analysis and views with us. We’re now much better equipped to understand and evaluate the true meaning of UN reform, and unpack, you know, in what ways and how it will unfold-truly essential knowledge for being an engaged global citizen. So thank you. Also, I want to express my gratitude to Sebastian Conseco and Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for technical assistance with the podcast. Last, thank you to our listeners. We appreciate your interest and support for the International Horizons podcast, and look forward to you joining us for the next one. Have a nice day.