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Late nights, early starts, behind on everything. That’s the feeling after UNGA High-level Week, so mainline the electrolytes, pour another cup of coffee, and settle down for the UNGA Hangover edition of the [Re]Group Weekly.
Inside today:
Liner notes and bonus tracks from our World’s Toughest Job UNGA Live special, plus an interview with Liechtenstein’s Christian Wenaweser, in partnership with Global Dispatches.
Our analysis of 190+ UNGA speeches, with AI doing the hard work of detecting what demand signals emerge when everyone gets their 15 minutes of diplomacy.
A bumper ICYMI that catches you up on the [Re]Group content you might have missed in the New York rush.
And if you haven’t: read Mariana Samayoa Martinez and Bojan Francuz’s review of what was on-trend at UNGA and Tuesday’s [Re]Group Weekly Xtra with all the news on the latest Secretary-General straw poll.
World’s Toughest Job Live — From the Vault
On Tuesday, our live UNGA 81 bonus episode of World’s Toughest Job asked: Where should the next Secretary-General start on day one?
Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal referees a round of The Triage Game with Comfort Ero (International Crisis Group) and historian Thant Myint-U, asking them to choose what the new Secretary-General should OWN, DELEGATE, or DROP.
Which brings us to today’s bonus tracks:
Blessed is the Peacemaker. Don’t Manage, Lead. Fewer Ops and Much Less Oversharing. And Yes, But What About? Four takeaways from the new episode.
The Bridgetown Dubs: unreleased outtakes from Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s interview with Lord Mark Malloch-Brown and her ideas for the next leader’s first 100 days.
And a new release: Mark Leon Goldberg sits down with Christian Wenaweser, Liechtenstein’s UN Ambassador since 2002, in a joint Global Dispatches and [Re]Group Live broadcast.
Fifteen Minutes of Diplomacy
In the Intergovernmental Club
“The UN System is complicated.”
So says… the UN. Its densely packed org chart maps out 113 entities of various kinds, and that is only a partial picture (read Eugene Chen for more).1 Then there’s the broader “cooperation ecosystem,” which Elizabeth Cousens and Susana Malcorra explored recently for Devex.
But there is a sense in which the UN is actually very simple. It’s a club of 193 Member States (plus two observer states).
That’s only slightly above Dunbar’s number of 150 — defined as the maximum number of individuals with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, or “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”2
Once a year, the ambassadors take a back seat (literally) as “capitals” converge on New York for High-level Week. This is when the UN remembers its roots and settles down for what is essentially the annual general meeting of that 193-member club.
The agenda is simple. Each country’s leader takes to the podium for their 15 minutes of diplomacy (a limit most famously ignored by Fidel Castro). It’s a chance to explain their foreign policy to the world and set out what they want from the UN over the coming year.
Signal From the Noise
“I lost count of how many people told me last week that this was the #AI #UNGA,” wrote Claire Melamed in her LinkedIn review of the week. So it’s fitting we are all using AI to extract the signal from the noise, given that all those 15 minutes of diplomacy add up to 50-plus hours of speaking.
Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo fed 194 speeches3 (411,697 words in total) to a bootleg blend of Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Bot. His popup site has comprehensive coverage, an interactive graphic, and an interface for DIY analysis.
What did our AI overlords report back? That leaders had most to say about protecting their sovereignty (mentioned in 78% of speeches) and fixing the club (multilateralism, UN reform, and the Security Council all topped 71%). Palestine (50%), Israel (40%), and Ukraine (40%) were the conflict hotspots, while human rights were mentioned by 58%. Of the global issues, climate change (76%) and AI (60%) were top of mind.
David McNair worked with just 167 speeches and only one model (Claude Opus 5.5). But he makes up for it with a fascinating analysis that you should read in full. A few points jumped out at me:
The UN’s fanbase is growing. Leaders representing 95% of the world’s population want to defend or reform the club. Those who want to bypass or defund represent few people, but have deep pockets (26% of global GDP).
McNair’s single model reaches similar conclusions to Elizondo’s blend, finding leaders most concerned by peace (94%), international law (92%), and sovereignty (84%). But he casts a wider net on global issues, with climate and sea-level rise (76%), commodity shocks (71%), AI (62%), and the SDGs (57%) topping the list.
Leaders from the Global South “mostly frame bad news as a problem to be solved together, while Northern leaders frame it as a threat to be deterred.” The former want the club to pool resources to tackle shared crises like climate, debt, and food security. For the latter, it’s primarily a place to manage security, contain risks, and deter threats.4
Detecting Demand
At [Re]Group, we asked a different question: How strong are the UN’s demand signals?
This has been a standing frustration throughout the UN80 reform process, with the Secretary-General’s team complaining that Member States rarely give clear direction on what they actually want the UN system to do.
So I asked Mariana: “Can we grade leaders’ speeches by whether they asked for anything concrete?” What came back was first an “ohh fun” and then (frighteningly fast for what was once a three-month research project) a spreadsheet: “UNGA81 General Debate Demand Signals.”
She let Claude Opus 5.5 loose on the UN’s automatic transcripts, pulling out 931 demand signals and sifting the actionable from the rhetorical. That left 377 concrete “instructions” that named an instrument, resolution, fund, seat, candidate, or deadline for a specific entity to act on.
When it comes to concrete demands, leaders split into four camps: 23% made speeches that were primarily rhetorical, 25% made one actionable request, 18% made two, and a third (33%) made three or more. The data also shows who has skin in the game: over 75% of concrete demands came from the Global South, while smaller nations were most likely to use their 15 minutes to fire off targeted policy demands.
Of the concrete demands, only 40% were directed at the UN or wider multilateral ecosystem. The rest were largely aimed at other countries, like asking major emitters to pay up for climate damage. Even when leaders gave the UN explicit instructions, the power to execute them often lies with states themselves (“reform begins with us,” as one put it). The most popular “ask” — reforming the Security Council (52 demands) — requires a Charter amendment to be ratified by two-thirds of countries, including all the P5.
Leaders are most concrete when they can identify a lever or want a greater decision-making role. Conflicts trigger rhetorical condemnations of adversaries rather than plans for peace. On other issues, proposals become concrete when hooked to a specific resolution, fund, or multilateral treaty. Leaders are clear about who deserves a Security Council seat or a leadership role, but vague on how the UN should actually be run. Mariana’s analysis found few concrete proposals for how to take forward the UN80 reform proposals.
The Bridgetown Proposition
I once had a colleague who wanted everything to be “propositional.” It’s an ugly word for a useful concept: we can only take others on a journey when we can tell them where we want to go and convince them we have a plan to get there.
Probably I am reading too much into UNGA speeches that leaders deliver with one eye firmly on their domestic audience. But I reckon that being more propositional is by far the easiest way for most countries to get more bang for their multilateral buck.
As the guests [Re]Group featured this week made clear, two countries have turned being propositional into an art form. First, Barbados.
I reckon Prime Minister Mottley talks propositional in her sleep. Her UNGA speech was a masterclass of clear proposals: natural disaster pause clauses in sovereign debt contracts, reallocating unused Special Drawing Rights, and establishing global solidarity levies on shipping and fossil fuels to generate predictable climate funding.
She also came with a coalition. Just as African countries banded together to demand permanent Security Council seats, Mottley and her fellow leaders of small island developing states united behind a push for multilateral banks to use climate vulnerability to determine who gets access to concessional finance.
From Potatoes to Peace
Our second propositional masterclass comes from one of the world’s smallest states.
In her General Debate address, Liechtenstein’s Deputy Prime Minister Sabine Monauni pushed for tighter enforcement of the Security Council Veto Initiative (Resolution 76/262), demanded explicit veto bans during mass atrocity cases, and called for a legally binding treaty to regulate Lethal Autonomous Weapons. As Ambassador Wenaweser explains in his interview with Mark Goldberg, this is a classic small-state strategy: use what the international system can offer as a shield against great-power muscle.
Mark asks the Ambassador whether there has been a “vibe shift” as small and middle powers work out they only have agency if they band together. Wenaweser agrees this is one of the main takeaways from UNGA 81. States have “silenced” themselves over the past year or so, but are now developing “overlapping circles of states” prepared to push back against the “chaos” of a lawless world — one that threatens the supply chains and systems on which they depend for their peace and prosperity.
For Wenaweser, reform is about cutting distractions as much as cutting costs, like the International Day of the Potato that was recently proclaimed by the General Assembly.
“We think the UN is not focused sufficiently on what it should be doing and what people actually expect the UN to do,” he says. “We want to see a political UN. We want to see a UN that plays a role in the major conflicts of the world… and we want a Secretary-General who takes a leading role.”
ICYMI
It’s been a busy month on [Re]Group. Here are some greatest hits:
Jeff Feltman proposes a five-point peace and security playbook for the next Secretary-General: Sudan, humanity in war, security in the Gulf, securing the AI revolution, and “get the envoys appointed.”
Aarathi Krishnan, founder of RAKSHA Intelligence Futures, explores multilateralism in an age of transactional sovereignty and asks how the UN’s new leader can help protect the space countries need to make independent choices.
Stéphanie Fillion examines why journalists only cover the UN when it fails, tracing the decline of the UN press corps and making the case for independent watchdog journalism over public relations.
Mariana and I make sense of a wave of new public polling data for UNGA and break down the four tribes of global governance: True Believers, Fed-Up Pragmatists, Impatient Allies, and Holdouts.
And don’t miss our scenarios for the Secretary-General race and our calculation of the “invisible ROI” of multilateralism.
The SG Roundup
Not much to report that you didn’t hear already from us on Tuesday. But for an alternative perspective on where things stand, check out Stéphane Bussard’s roundup in Geneva Solutions. He explores veto threats facing the two leading candidates, Rebeca Grynspan and Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, and gives some names to the dark horses that may be waiting in the wings.
Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
Weirdly, a copyright notice bans reproduction of The United Nations System chart. So click the link, or take our numbers on trust.
Member States create their own complexity. They sit on around 400 intergovernmental “organs” that range from the Security Council to the Group of Experts on Geographical Names. They tell the system what to do through 40,000 mandates. And they sit in tens of thousands of meetings each year, generating “some 2,300 pages of documentation on average every day.”
113 Heads of State or Government, 48 Ministers, 11 Vice Presidents, seven Deputy Prime Ministers, and Crown Prince Sabah Al-Khalid Al-Sabah of Kuwait.
McNair explores other differences. Northern leaders were three times more likely to bring up AI and twice as likely to mention human rights, while the South was twice as likely to invoke colonialism. “Between the U.S. and Europe, the fault line is whether to develop global standards (Europe) or accelerate innovation (U.S.). For Southern governments the debate is on who has access, who makes the rules, and who decides on the placement of data centres.”