United Nations Politics: Responding to a Challenging World

For use as a primary text in Political Science courses on International Organization, International Institutions, Global Governance, or the United Nations. Can also be used as supplementary readings in all of these courses, plus courses in International Relations. United Nations Politics takes a unique approach that focuses on the politics - that is, the persistent and mostly singular emphasis that all member states place on the pursuit of national political, economic, cultural and ideological interests - of UN affairs. The project began as an effort to research and write a ten-year-later sequel to The Challenge of Relevance written by Puchala and Coate in 1989. This earlier volume was an assessment of the United Nations and its operations in the late eighties. United Nations Politics builds from a series of some 200 interviews conducted at the UN and in various member-state missions between 2000 and 2005. Among other things , these interviews revealed that the existing English-language literature on the UN fails to take into appropriate account the dynamics and the impacts of the internal and external political contexts within which the UN operates. This book directly addresses this shortcoming in the academic literature.