This new series of Roundtables, entitled The State of Multilateralism, seeks to bring together the deep desire in academia, in civil society and within the UN itself, to seize this moment to create a dialogue that is deeper than before. There is a need to mobilize the vast repositories of critical knowledge that are available among scholars, to listen to the experiences and institutional know-how of officials from international organizations, and to engage with civil society and other stakeholders in a global manner to (a) understand the historical roots and trajectories of multilateralism; (b) take stock of the current challenges and opportunities of multilateralism; and (c) to boldly and creatively discuss future avenues of multilateral collaboration.
With this in mind, the first The State of Multilateralism roundtable, provisionally entitled “Multilateralism: A global view”, seeks to to start this necessary conversation by placing the United Nations within the broader infrastructure of multilateralisms – temporally, geographically and functionally.
