The vast majority of UN member states still support multilateral cooperation, but disagreement over the scope of reform has been a major flashpoint.
Minh-Thu Pham is a nonresident scholar in the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her primary areas of interest are multilateral cooperation and summit diplomacy, international organizations, sustainable development, and global governance and democracy. She also runs Project Starling, a group that works on renewing institutions, and teaches at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and Bard Globalization and International Affairs program.
Minh-Thu was an advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, where she helped to steer the UN through a period of deep crisis after the Iraq War and played a key role in the 2005 World Summit. As executive director of global policy at the UN Foundation, she started and ran a global effort to help the UN create and deliver the Sustainable Development Goals and undertake institutional reforms. Minh-Thu has led dozens of track 1.5 and 2 dialogues with ambassadors and civil society actors that have resulted in political breakthroughs. She built a global network of stakeholders to shape summit negotiations, which included think tanks and civil society actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Her work helped to open up UN decision-making processes to a broader constituency. More recently, Minh-Thu has advised efforts to strengthen democracy globally and in the United States, and led an effort to mobilize immigrant voters and tackle misinformation.
Minh-Thu has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico, NBC Nightly News, the Tavis Smiley Show, and Cheddar TV among others. She serves on the boards of several nonprofits and is a fellow of the Truman National Security Project, a member of the Leadership Now Project, and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations (2007-2012). She came to the U.S. as a refugee from Vietnam and currently lives in New York City.
The vast majority of UN member states still support multilateral cooperation, but disagreement over the scope of reform has been a major flashpoint.
Join Stewart Patrick, senior fellow and director of Carnegie’s Global Order and Institutions program, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Richard Gowan, and Minh-Thu Pham for a deep dive into the rationale behind the Summit and what is—and is not—likely to be included in the Pact that emerges from it.
The sartorial wedding advice offers governments a framework to meet the moment and avoid an outcome that moves toward the slow decline of multilateralism.
In September 2024, the United Nations will convene a Summit of the Future, designed to address the crisis of multilateralism by modernizing outdated institutions of global governance. Join us for a conversation about the purpose of and prospects for global governance renewal at the UN Summit of the Future.
Meet Carnegie nonresident scholar Minh-Thu Pham.
The coming days will reveal whether the UN can remain relevant in a divided world.