The United Nations And The Anti-War Protest

The prevalent myth casts the UN as a response to wars that had disrupted the world, and the most special reason for the UN's origination, we are told, was for the prevention of a war such as the second world war. But in fact the UN did not arise to problematize and prevent war. It is clear that war is not being prevented in the world today; there have been numerous wars waged since the UN's inception. Instead, the UN was founded to respond to a particular outgrowth of war: the UN was founded to respond to the act of the anti-war protest. The war was not the issue of concern for the UN, but the anti-war protest was the main outgrowth of war where the UN was to find its true purpose, and thereafter intervene and restore the world to an order.

The UN only intervenes when a particular kind of protest takes place: for the UN to act, the protest must fulfill certain requirements, and thus problematically the UN normalizes the population towards protesting in a certain way. If the protest is outside the boundaries of the UN's requirements, the protest fails to get the scrutiny in the global stage that a “UN-normalized” protest would get. The UN does not just communicate the protest to power, but takes control of the protest and how it progresses, and tries to form itself as the only legitimate link between power and the protesters. Thus it seeks only the normal protest, and if the normal protest seems impossible, it seeks to actively normalize the protest before intervening to stabilize the place.

Protests which are too angry/violent, protests composed entirely of marginalized identities and protests which are “too small” in the number of people involved are all examples of abnormal protests for the UN, which the UN attempts to normalize before publicizing them. By influencing and controlling the types of protests which take place, the UN gets a handle into the problematic region's politics and society, and also mediates the relation between the protesters and the powerful. If a protest does not have a stamp of recognition from the UN, it does not make it to the ears of power at all, and therefore power may be unaware that there is a problem. Moreover, the UN acts not when the power is harmful to the protesters, but rather when the protesters are beginning to become harmful to the way power operates and what power is.