In March 2024, United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths announced his intention to step down due to health concerns. His deputy, a Tanzanian woman, assumed the position on an acting basis once he officially left in June 2024. Many humanitarian and civil society experts saw this as an opportunity for the UN secretary-general to break the British monopoly and appoint a non-British national to replace him. In October 2024, the secretary-general chose Tom Fletcher, vice chair of Oxford University and British ambassador from 2011 to 2015, for the job. Despite open protest and significant controversy, Fletcher became the sixth British national in a row to assume the role of OCHA’s under-secretary-general.
This is far from an isolated case. Ringfencing—the ongoing practice of assigning individuals from certain states to particular roles—has a long history within the UN system, despite provisions in the UN Charter and several General Assembly decisions aiming to limit the concentration of posts by any state or group of states.[1] Ringfencing also perpetuates imbalances that go beyond nationality, such as gender and racial inequalities.
For example, a 2024 report on racial equality and representation in the UN system by Blue Smoke and Plataforma CIPÓ found that three UN entities —the Department of Peacekeeping (DPO), the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA)[2], and the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT)— have not been led by a non-white individual since 2007. These are entities whose leadership has historically been monopolized by the permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5): DPO by France, DPPA by the United States, and UNOCT by Russia.[3] As mentioned above, OCHA has also been ringfenced by one of the P5 (the United Kingdom) and has been headed by only one non-white woman during this period. According to the New York University Center on International Cooperation (NYU-CIC), despite composing less than 3% of member states, the P5 received more than 20% of senior nominations between 1995 and 2022.
Other statistics further reveal nationality and gender dominance in top positions. Research from NYU-CIC shows that from 1995 to 2022, Western Europe and Other Group (WEOG) countries, which compose just 15% of all member states, received around 48% of UN senior appointments. A study published in 2023 by Blue Smoke and Plataforma CIPÓ found that key UN environment and development bodies have been overwhelmingly led by men from the Global North since their creation, with entities such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), established in 1945, never having had a woman as director-general.
Racial Equity and Representation in the UN
Drawing on a hetero-identification process[4], the policy brief published in 2024 by Blue Smoke and Plataforma CIPÓ on racial equality and representation in the UN system analyzes the racial diversity of leadership and staff, as well as the existing mechanisms to further racial equality, in ten key UN bodies from 2007 to mid-2024.[5]
The results point to a leadership problem hidden in plain sight. Over the past seventeen years, of 31 individuals appointed to top positions in these key UN bodies, 20 (65%) were white. Of the remaining 35% of non-white professionals, there are no individuals from severely underrepresented regions such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Indigenous communities. With gender also factored in, white men comprise around 45% of the appointments (14), with men in general constituting over 64% (20) in these ten UN bodies. In the past seventeen years, only five non-white women (16%) have occupied senior positions in the entities analyzed, and one of them, the 2018 executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), assumed the role on an acting basis after her predecessor resigned due to financial controversies and was replaced the following year.
Gender, race, and nationality also intersect when it comes to the nomination of non-white professionals. The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) has never been led by a white individual in the period studied. However, all four of its under-secretaries-general since 2007 have been Chinese men. This pattern underscores how, even when white overrepresentation is challenged, male dominance can still be reinforced. Moreover, ringfencing can privilege non-white individuals from one country —in this case, China— which can obstruct the participation of non-white individuals from other historically underrepresented regions, countries, or groups.
Small Steps toward Increasing Diversity
Despite general underrepresentation, some UN bodies show relative balance in their leadership. In the last seventeen years, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has had two white high commissioners —a Chilean woman and an Austrian man— and two non-white —a Jordanian man and a South African woman. The last two executive directors of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) were Black or people of African descent: a Nigerian man and a Panamanian woman. Unfortunately, these UN organs are the exception.
Nonetheless, the UN has made some progress on measures to mainstream diversity throughout the system. In September 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched a Task Force on Addressing Racism and Promoting Dignity for All in the United Nations. The task force’s first system-wide initiative was the 2020 UN Survey on Racism, which invited all 37,276 employees to share their experiences of workplace discrimination. Based on the survey results, the task force created a strategic action plan on “addressing racism and promoting dignity for all” in the UN Secretariat. To oversee and coordinate the plan’s implementation, Guterres established the UN Anti-Racism Team (ART) in June 2022 —which became the Anti-Racism Office (ARO) in December 2023— and nominated a special adviser for addressing racism in the workplace in January 2023.
Despite these recent achievements, significant gaps remain in UN policies aimed at promoting racial equality. According to the Joint Inspection Unit review of measures for addressing racism at the UN, “Racism and racial discrimination are mentioned or often implied as wrongdoing and acts of injustice. They are seldom fully conceptualized or operationalized.” For instance, the secretary-general’s reports on the Secretariat’s staff demographics provide data on job position, gender, age, and nationality, but not on staff’s racial identification. Similarly, the human resources statistics of the UN system’s Chief Executives Board for Coordination disaggregate the UN workforce by a wide range of categories, but not race. Race is also overlooked in key documents, including the secretary-general’s bulletin on discrimination, harassment, and abuse of authority, where race is acknowledged as a source of discrimination, but no provision properly conceptualizes or addresses the specific issue of racial discrimination.
Some of these system-wide obstacles have been gradually tackled by the efforts of particular entities. UNFPA, for example, has a page on its website providing disaggregated data on the ethnic identification of its personnel. The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and World Food Programme (WFP) have been working on anti-racism action plans to address the issue more pointedly. Some bodies, such as OHCHR, UNDP, UNEP, and UNFPA invest in young professionals and fellowship programs aimed at promoting workplace diversity. However, most of these measures still lack a specific racial lens, do not develop proper definitions and terminology, and depend on the implementation of strategic plans in each organization rather than being mainstreamed and institutionalized throughout the whole UN system.
Source: Uncovering Blind Spots: Racial Equality and Representation in the UN System. Plataforma CIPÓ/Blue Smoke, 2024. To check the table footnotes, please access the full document at: https://plataformacipo.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/BlueSmoke-Uncovering-Blind-Spots.pdf
UN bodies and the UN Secretariat thus need to invest in adopting policies to address racial inequalities across the system as a whole. In order to understand the depth of the problem and work on appropriate policies, the United Nations must collect and publish transparent and disaggregated data on the racial makeup of its personnel, including its leadership. In addition, all UN bodies should integrate racial diversity, equity, and inclusion goals into their recruitment processes and ethical guidelines, accompanied by accountability measures to ensure implementation. The UN needs to invest in anti-racism plans that go beyond general commitments and translate data and principles into time-bound, goal-oriented actions.
This is not just a matter of appearance; it’s a matter of policy. Many of the issues the UN deals with —such as climate change, development, and security— have disproportionate effects on countries in the Global South and on marginalized and minoritized populations. Racial diversity is a crucial indicator that a multiplicity of experiences, perspectives, and life stories are making their way into discussions, decision making, and actions. This means that representation of individuals from minoritized groups not only carries symbolic weight but also has material implications by granting access to power and resources, thus affecting society in concrete ways.
Racial diversity also can improve policy outcomes by providing innovative grassroots perspectives for contemporary global challenges. This is particularly true of the UN, which has a broad mandate to promote respect for human rights, including the principles of equality and nondiscrimination. In this context, representative leadership and effective policies against workplace racism would enable the UN to be internally consistent with the values it claims to promote. It is critical to focus on the sociocultural asymmetries in the top positions of global governance institutions and how they are (or fail to be) addressed by workplace policies affecting staff members at the very bottom.
In addressing the relevance of UN values and practices for future generations, the recently adopted Pact for the Future reiterated past UN commitments in saying “there should be no monopoly on senior posts in the United Nations system by nationals of any State or group of States.” The P5 and Global North dominance over the UN is not only connected to nationality but also perpetuates the overrepresentation of white men in senior positions within the organization. Unfortunately, the secretary-general’s choice of another British national to head OCHA shows that the commitment to upend monopolies on positions has yet to be realized. If we only look at the geography of power and forget about the identities and experiences shaping the organization from within, these fundamental asymmetries that distances the UN from the values it espouses will continue to be hidden in plain sight.
Nycolas Candido is a Researcher at Plataforma CIPÓ and PhD candidate in International Relations at IRI/PUC-RIO. Vitória Gonzalez is a Project Coordinator at Plataforma CIPÓ and Assistant Editor of Global Dialogue.
[1] See, for example, Article 101 of the UN Charter, and General Assembly Resolutions 57/305, 63/250, and 67/255.
[2] In 2019, both the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) were renamed and restructured, becoming the Department of Peacekeeping (DPO) and the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) respectively.
[3] UNOCT was only created in its current form in 2017 and has since been led by one individual —Vladimir Voronkov from Russia. While this single appointment is insufficient to establish a pattern, it reinforces the dominance of white male individuals representing the P5 in senior positions of UN bodies dedicated to peace and security.
[4] Hetero-identification is a well-established and legislated method of ethno-racial identification based on the evaluation of third parties, commonly a diverse committee of scholars, professionals, and/or civil society actors. The limitations of this approach are acknowledged; nonetheless, this method is seen as a valuable tool for analyzing the racial landscape within the UN leadership. Given the lack of public data on this topic, hetero-identification remains the most viable option available.
[5] The ten UN bodies analyzed were the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), Department of Peace Operations (DPO), Department of Peacebuilding and Political Affairs (DPPA), Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), UN Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT), World Food Programme (WFP), Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and UN Population Fund (UNFPA).
