The UN at 70 - Still Relevant?, a Conversation Series Shashi Tharoor

Drawing from his 29-year experience of a UN in transformation, Dr Shashi Tharoor joins UNU Rector David M. Malone for a conversation exploring the debates about the UN’s role and relevance at 70 and its future prospects. Criticisms of the UN’s structure and functioning from the United States are now being complemented by the frustration of emerging countries that have been denied a place at the UN’s high table, the Security Council. Calls for reform, if not radical reinvention, are being heard. Is the UN still relevant in a world dramatically different from that in which it was founded?
About the speaker
Dr Shashi Tharoor is the bestselling author of fifteen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections on the Nation in our Time, besides being a noted critic and columnist, and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He served 29 years at the UN, culminating as Under-Secretary-General for Public Information under Kofi Annan’s leadership of the organization.
As India’s official candidate to succeed Annan as UN Secretary-General, he emerged a strong second (to Ban Ki-moon) out of seven contenders. On returning to India he contested the 2009 elections on behalf of the Indian National Congress, and was elected to Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Re-elected in 2014, he chairs the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs.
Dr Tharoor’s books include the path-breaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997) and the visionary Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century (2012), as well as India Shastra (2015). He has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, he was honoured as “New Age Politician of the Year” in 2010, and he pioneered the use of Twitter among Indian politicians, where he has three million followers as of 2015.
Dr Tharoor earned his PhD at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at the age of 22, and was named by the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1998 as a “Global Leader of Tomorrow”. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians.
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