The UN System and Global Economic Institutions

Prerequisites: International Institutions — overview · World History

The Hook: The UN at Eighty

The Core Concept

The United Nations

• Charter signed at San Francisco on 26 June 1945; came into force on 24 October 1945 (UN Day).
• 51 original members — India among them, having signed the Charter in 1945 before independence. Membership today: 193 (South Sudan, admitted in 2011, is the newest). The Holy See and the State of Palestine are non-member observer states.
• Headquarters: New York; other major offices in Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi.

The six principal organs

Security Council — the rules UPSC tests

• Non-permanent members are elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms, five each year; a retiring member is not eligible for immediate re-election (Article 23).
• The Council was enlarged from 11 to 15 members by a Charter amendment that came into force in 1965.
• Substantive decisions need nine votes including the concurring votes of the permanent members — the veto (Article 27). An abstention by a permanent member is not treated as a veto in practice.
• Chapter VI — peaceful settlement of disputes; Chapter VII — action with respect to threats to the peace, including sanctions and use of force.
• India’s terms: 1950–51, 1967–68, 1972–73, 1977–78, 1984–85, 1991–92, 2011–12 and 2021–22 — eight in all.

UNSC reform — who wants what

Reform is negotiated through the Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) in the General Assembly, which began in 2009. Any reform requires a Charter amendment — two-thirds of the GA and ratification by two-thirds of members, including all five permanent members (Article 108).

The Bretton Woods institutions

Created at the Bretton Woods conference (July 1944) in the United States; India was a founding member of both.

The World Bank Group — five institutions

The World Trade Organization

• Established on 1 January 1995 under the Marrakesh Agreement (April 1994), at the end of the Uruguay Round; it replaced the provisional GATT (1947) framework.
• HQ Geneva; 166 members as of 2024. Decisions are by consensus.
• Structure: Ministerial Conference (at least every two years) → General Council (also sits as the Dispute Settlement Body and the Trade Policy Review Body) → councils for goods, services and TRIPS.
• Dispute settlement crisis: the Appellate Body stopped functioning in December 2019 because appointments of new members were blocked.
• India’s core positions: a permanent solution for public stockholding for food security (the “peace clause” agreed at Bali, 2013); special and differential treatment for developing countries; protecting small fishers in negotiations on fisheries subsidies; caution on the moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions.

graph TD
    A[Ministerial Conference] --> B[General Council]
    B --> C[Dispute Settlement Body]
    B --> D[Trade Policy Review Body]
    B --> E[Council for Trade in Goods]
    B --> F[Council for Trade in Services]
    B --> G[Council for TRIPS]
    C --> H[Panels and Appellate Body]

UN agencies and other bodies — headquarters

Who publishes which report

India and peacekeeping

India has taken part in UN peacekeeping since the 1950s (the UN Emergency Force in Gaza and Sinai from 1956, the Congo operation in the early 1960s) and is consistently among the largest troop contributors. In 2007, India deployed the UN’s first all-women Formed Police Unit, to Liberia. India argues that troop-contributing countries should have a greater say in how mandates are drafted.

Memory Anchors

Six organs — “GSE TIS”: General Assembly · Security Council · ECOSOC · Trusteeship Council · ICJ · Secretariat.

Geneva cluster — “I Will Wait With Hope, Uncle” → ILO/ITU · WHO · WIPO · WMO · UNHCR · UNCTAD.

Rome trio: FAO, IFAD, WFP — “Food in Rome”.

World Bank Group — “I I I M” → IBRD, IFC, IDA (India is in all three), MIGA (India in) — and ICSID is the one India is out of.

One-line Mains hook: “An institution that reflects 1945 cannot manage the problems of the 2020s — reform is not India’s ambition, it is the UN’s need.”

For Prelims

For Mains

• Dimensions: legitimacy (representation of Africa, Latin America, Asia), effectiveness (veto paralysis), equity (IMF quotas, voting shares), development (finance for the Global South), law (dispute settlement, ICJ).
• Keywords: reformed multilateralism, representativeness, veto paralysis, quota reform, rules-based order, Global South, plurilateralism, institutional fragmentation.
• Value-addition: Article 108 (amendment procedure) as the hard constraint on UNSC reform; the Ezulwini Consensus; India’s G20 presidency push for multilateral development bank reform; India’s first all-women FPU (2007); the ICJ’s July 2019 judgment in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case (India v. Pakistan), which found that Pakistan had breached the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Common Traps

In the News

• January 2025 — the United States announces its withdrawal from the World Health Organization.
• October 2025 — the United Nations marks 80 years since its Charter entered into force.
• Follow elections to UN bodies and WTO ministerial outcomes in the monthly current affairs.

Practice

Prelims

Mains

Quick Revision

Key Takeaways

Related Topics

• International Institutions — quick revision
• International Institutions — practice questions
• Regional and Global Groupings
• International Environmental Conventions
• External Sector and Trade