UN Secretary-General António Guterres speaking at a press conference in New York. Photo/UN Women
António Guterres takes office on 1 January as the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations; the ninth man to take this role. He faces a greater concentration of crises than anyone can remember, at a time of growing skepticism about multilateral solutions, while the UN’s credibility as a trustworthy humanitarian actor has been crushed by sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers. As the world’s 'secular pope’ he will have to deal with inflated expectations about his capacity to resolve these crises and repair the UN in the process. Trump’s win in the November US presidential elections makes it urgent that the new SG fronts a powerful feminist agenda to hold firm against a rising tide of misogyny in the US and elsewhere. For Guterres to do this effectively, he must distinguish clearly between an internal UN project of achieving gender parity, and a wider project of democratising gender relations and enabling women’s leadership in national and global problem-solving.
Implications of the Trump win for multilateral work on gender equality
