Abstract

Critical and creative contributions by individual staff members who work at the United Nations (UN) are typically overlooked or cavalierly dismissed by analysts who stress that the real red meat of international organization consists of the national interest politics of 193 member-states and the supposedly iron-clad constraints on the so-called bloated bureaucracy that slavishly serves these masters. My proposition is different: people matter and the world organization should rediscover the idealistic roots of the international civil service, to make more room for creative idea-mongers as well as establish more mobile personnel and career development paths for a twenty-first century secretariat.