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The Risks from Breaking the Bridges the UN Built, the Benefits of Saving Them and How to Do That

Thursday, October 9, 2025 12:30to14:00
Arts Building Room 160, 853 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 0G5, CA

A guest lecture by Neil Buhne, Professor of Practice, ISID.

Abstract:  Building bridges among people, communities and countries is an underlying principle of the international system set up in 1945. It’s done this, if not as well as hoped, since then, contributing to near continuous improvements in human development. Until the last months the basic principles the system is built on were not questioned. But now the bridges on which that international system was based have been undermined and broken. Drawing on his personal experience of 40 years with the UN, and the current UN80 reforms, Neil Buhne will look at the costs of this, the benefits from saving and improving the system, and ways this can be done.

Neil Buhne

Neil Buhne served the United Nations for over 37 years in 9 countries from 1984 to 2021 before joining McGill University’s Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) as a Professor of Practice in 2022. He also is research associate with the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP) at Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and in 2025 he became part of the Strategic Advisory Board of The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (2025 OPHI), a research centre within the University of Oxford.
Category: 
Fri, 10/03/2025 - 15:06
Source Site: 
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