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A World in Transition: Helen Clark on the State of the World 

This week, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security welcomed the Rt. Hon. Helen Clark, New Zealand’s longest-serving Prime Minister and the first woman to lead the UN Development Programme as its Administrator, for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of global governance at a moment of profound strain. Clark brought a wealth of experience and a unique perspective spanning both national and international governance to the standing-room-only roundtable, which was attended by almost sixty students and external guests and co-hosted by Georgetown’s Center for Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Studies.

Clark believes the international system, its institutions, and its legal order are under unprecedented strain, as political support from the very powers that built this system has come into question. She argued that the UN is in real need of reform, but that the UN80 reform process now underway has largely become a rushed exercise in managing the organization’s financial challenges. She thinks it needed a more holistic, anticipatory approach. Separately, she pointed to the growing number of conflicts around the world and the UN’s absence in resolving them as evidence that the UN has largely abandoned the hope and belief Kofi Annan once held for the institution to serve as a genuine peacebuilding and peacekeeping body. She reminded the room that the last time the UN played a truly significant role in conflict resolution was in El Salvador, back in 1992, over three decades ago.

Clark’s proposed remedy places her among those who believe the UN Charter itself needs to be reexamined, not merely reformed at the margins through institutional reorganization. She pointed to a rarely discussed provision written into the Charter’s founding, Article 109, which called for a review conference ten years after its founding, but which never took place. She believes we are long overdue for such a conference, as the UN Charter was written before the nuclear age and needs to be reimagined to meet today’s emerging threats and challenges. She also highlighted the need to expand global civil society’s influence and access at the UN. The Charter opens with the words “We the People,” she noted, but in practice it functions as “we the member states,” leaving civil society struggling to gain any meaningful influence beyond a ceremonial one. Some, she said, have proposed building a parliamentary body modeled on the European Parliament to close that gap. She also expressed concern that if the UN does not move, emerging economies will build their own institutions instead. BRICS has already met on precisely this question, and other countries are increasingly coming together to construct parallel structures of their own, which are not necessarily defined by the same values and commitments to human dignity, human rights, and global prosperity as the UN.

The conversation turned to some of today’s most urgent crises. Clark spoke with visible emotion about a recent trip to the West Bank with Mary Robinson. She did not shy away from difficult language, noting that what she and Robinson witnessed in Palestinian villages surrounded by settlements could be described as ethnic cleansing. She argued that a two-state solution remains, out of necessity, the only durable path forward. On artificial intelligence, Clark drew a stark parallel to nuclear governance, calling for a framework in the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, even as she acknowledged that the window for shaping AI’s trajectory is closing quickly. She was candid that only two powers are currently steering the AI race, leaving most of the world without a seat at the table, and that no binding treaty yet exists to govern lethal autonomous weapons, which have the potential to exacerbate conflict to catastrophic levels.

Audience questions pushed the conversation further, touching on the radicalization of young men online and the gendered dimensions of AI. Clark closed on a note that captured the throughline of the entire conversation: when institutions falter, the answer is not to abandon them, but to reform and reinvest in them before others build alternatives without us. With non-democratic and authoritarian governments already signaling their intent to construct parallel institutions, Clark suggested, democracies and the nations committed to a rules-based international order need to be more vigilant, and to find innovative ways to rebuild and reinvigorate multilateralism, perhaps at a plurilateral level, an idea she also develops in her recent op-ed, “The UN Cannot—and Need Not—Wait for Consensus.” And finally, when she was asked to predict the next UN Secretary-General, she noted that there are four serious candidates under consideration for the role, and that all four, she believes, should be, and are, women from Latin America.

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