Jeff Crisp, RSC Visiting Fellow, has been quoted in an Al Jazeera article among leading experts questioned about about what would happen if the world decide to get rid of the UN.
Under ‘What would happen to migration’ Dr Crisp writes:
“If you disbanded the UN on a Friday, you would be looking for a way to reinvent it by Monday.
So many of the challenges the world faces today are transnational. Take refugees, for example: there are at least 100 million refugees, displaced people and irregular migrants globally. That is not a problem any one state can solve; it needs a transnational response.
We are already seeing aid cuts, particularly from the US, reducing food security in UN-supported camps and driving up malnutrition and social tensions.
As assistance dries up, more refugees are moving from camps to urban areas. There, they can sometimes survive through the informal economy, but their arrival — through no fault of their own — can place new pressures on the resources and services available within those urban areas.
If the UN were to disappear entirely, some refugees would undoubtedly move [from camps] towards the Global North; a process that would probably have an impact on Europe within a year. But others would find themselves trapped in increasingly precarious situations. The poorer the refugees, the less able they are to travel.
Without the UN, states would no longer be held to account for how they treat refugees, and standards would quickly fall. You would see the US model of unilateral action spreading — and groups like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (the Israeli-US private aid model that has resulted in more than 600 people being killed trying to access food) stepping into the vacuum.
And of course, there are thousands of jobs — both within the UN and among its partner organisations and suppliers — that would also vanish overnight.