The Diplomacy & World Affairs (DWA) department at Occidental has organized United Nations Week for at least two decades, Laura Hebert said via email. Hebert is a professor of Diplomacy & World Affairs and the chair of the William and Elizabeth United Nations Program (Kahane UN Program) advisory committee. She was responsible for coordinating planning for the week, which took place March 3–6.
“The intention behind UN Week is to allow the college to create a bridge between the New York-based UN program and the Oxy campus by generating campus-wide conversations on UN ideas, norms and practices, particularly related to social justice issues,” Hebert said via email.
According to Hebert, up until Spring 2017, UN week was limited to a keynote lecture and a panel featuring students that had participated in the Kahane UN program the previous fall. Hebert said via email that a generous gift by Bill and Elizabeth Kahane to support the UN program allowed the DWA department to expand their program and give students the opportunity to create their own events.
“More than 30 students signed up to volunteer to support the week, including by organizing a photo exhibit on the role of visual media in human rights protests, a UN SDG [Sustainable Development Goals] craft fair, UN trivia night and a screening of the documentary ‘Navalny,’” Hebert said via email. “Students also helped with photography, filming, publicity and tech support. The high level of student interest in the UN Program is pretty phenomenal.”
DWA major Chloe Peyton (junior) said via email she worked on organizing trivia night. According to Peyton, she will participate in the Kahane UN Program this upcoming fall semester.
“I think the most helpful event is the panel of past UN Program students [who] come and speak about their experiences and what they have done with that experience for their futures,” Peyton said via email.
Resident Assistant Professor Cynthia Rothschild is the faculty director of the Kahane UN Program. According to Rothschild, she has been steering the Occidental UN Program for the last five years. Rothschild said the motivation behind the UN Program at Occidental is to link what students learn about the UN, diplomacy, multilateralism and governance to a real life practical and unusual experience within the UN system.
“It is a unique program because it’s a full-time residency […] [and] undergraduate experience,” Rothschild said. “Most internships within the UN are for master’s students, so that’s part of what sets this apart.”
This year’s guest and keynote speaker was Azza Karam, president and CEO of Lead Integrity and a member of the UN for the past 20 years. According to Karam, she has worked as a consultant to different UN entities, an advisor for her own mission of Egypt to the UN and a non-governmental organization (NGO) representative.
Karam said she was invited to speak at Occidental a year ago by Jacques Fomerand, former assistant director of the Oxy at the UN Program, with whom she had worked at the UN. According to Hebert, Fomerand passed away in November, and Rothschild helped plan the Jacques Fomerand Memorial UN Program Alumni Panel March 5.
Karam said she has been involved with international development and human rights work her whole life, starting first in Egypt and the Arab world.
“When I decided to try to understand why human rights wasn’t working so well in my part of the world, I realized that a lot of the tensions that we struggle with in the Middle East have to do with that relationship between religion and governance and rights, and that’s what impacts on human rights,” Karam said.
According to Karam, when she started to learn about the tensions between religion and governance, she realized that it was a global phenomenon.
“I started developing a very healthy understanding of or appreciation for the fact of these dynamics, this intersection between religion and politics everywhere in the world and how it was impacting on human rights,” Karam said.
According to Karam, this led her to work in an international organization modeled off of the UN, called International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), and from there, she got involved in other international spaces and international NGOs.
Karam said she immigrated to the U.S., where she continued being a part of international NGOs until she was called by the United Nations Development Programme four years later to coordinate Arab human development reports.
According to Karam, it felt very isolating at first to be a part of such a large international organization.
“You’d think that when you work in an international context with people from different parts of the world, that this is where you would fit in, you know, as a different person,” Karam said. “But actually there’s a culture within the United Nations system, which is a very Western European culture.”
Karam said the biggest weaknesses of the UN are the governments and human resources.
“The quintessential failure is in the ability to manage diversity of people,” Karam said. “Its greatest strength is its greatest weakness.”
According to Karam, it is important for students to know about the UN system.
“I think the UN is often seen as this big idealistically wonderful job and the penultimate destination for one’s life and career,” Karam said. “I think it’s helpful to get to know –– and especially this program, which is so much designed around giving you [an] actual experience of being in some form there.”
According to Rothschild, the intention of UN week is to create a space that highlights the UN, to give an opportunity to feature guests and to give students a chance to create some of their own programming with their own vision.
Peyton said via email that the UN is an entity that most people are aware of but may not have a full sense of what happens inside, and UN week helps bring attention to it. According to Peyton, UN week also aims to encourage non-DWA majors to apply for the Kahane UN Program.
“I actually think the UN Program wants to attract more people who aren’t in the DWA major, because those students would bring a diversity of perspectives to the program,” Peyton said via email.
Contact Francine Ghazarian at ghazarian@oxy.edu
