The Third United Nations

The Third UN is the ecology of supportive non-state actors-intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media-that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second UN (staff members of international secretariats) to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN ’think’. While think tanks, knowledge brokers, and epistemic communities are phenomena that have entered both the academic and policy lexicons, their intellectual role remains marginal to analyses of such intergovernmental organizations as the United Nations.

Tatiana Carayannis

Tatiana Carayannis is Director of the Social Science Research Council’s Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum (CPPF) and Understanding Violent Conflict (UVC) program. She also leads the Council’s China-Africa Knowledge Project and has a visiting appointment at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Africa Centre, where she also serves as a Research Director for the Centre for Public Authority and International Development (CPAID). Her publications include UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice? (with T G Weiss, L Emmerij, and R Jolly, Indiana University Press, 2005), and Understanding the Central African Republic (with Louisa Lombard, Zed Book, 2015).

Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center; he is also Co-Chair, Cultural Heritage at Risk Project, J. Paul Getty Trust; Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs; and Eminent Scholar, Kyung Hee University, Korea. His most recent single-authored publications include Would the World Be Better without the UN? (Polity Press, 2018), What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It (Polity Press, 2016); and Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action (Polity Press, 2016).