United Nations

The United Nations, commonly abbreviated UN, is an intergovernmental organization established by the Charter of the United Nations, a binding multilateral treaty that entered into force on October 24, 1945. Its founding members were the fifty states that signed the Charter at the San Francisco Conference in June 1945, together with Poland, which signed shortly afterward. The organization replaced the League of Nations, which had been established after the First World War and which had proven unable to prevent the aggressions of the 1930s or the outbreak of a second global conflict. The UN was designed to correct the weaknesses of its predecessor while preserving the underlying idea of collective action by sovereign states.

The organization's purposes, set out in Article 1 of the Charter, fall under four broad headings. The first is the maintenance of international peace and security, including the prevention and suppression of acts of aggression. The second is the development of friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples. The third is the achievement of international cooperation in solving problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character. The fourth is to serve as a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends. The Charter's Preamble, drafted by the South African statesman Jan Smuts among others, frames the entire project as a commitment by the peoples of the United Nations to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.

The United Nations is not a world government. It has no independent police force, no standing army, and no authority to tax individuals. Its powers derive from the consent of member states, who retain sovereign control over most areas of policy. Nonetheless, the Charter gives the organization some of the strongest legal instruments available in international law, including the binding enforcement powers of the Security Council under Chapter VII. The UN has grown from fifty-one founding members in 1945 to 193 today, making it the most nearly universal organization in world history. The last state admitted was South Sudan, which joined in 2011 after obtaining independence from Sudan.

The organization operates through a system of six principal organs and a large family of specialized agencies, funds, programmes, and related bodies. Its main headquarters stands on an eighteen-acre international territory along the East River in Manhattan, New York. A second major campus, the United Nations Office at Geneva in the historic Palais des Nations, houses the human rights, disarmament, and humanitarian affairs machinery. Additional duty stations in Vienna and Nairobi complete the network of core UN offices. The International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ, sits at the Peace Palace in The Hague. Collectively, the UN system employs more than forty thousand international civil servants and operates in almost every country on Earth.