Multilateralism Under Fire (Global Engagement Online Series)

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04:00 pm

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Zoom Online Event

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The United States of America has increasingly been taking unilateral stances and actions such as pulling out of the Paris Accord, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the UN Human Rights Council, and most recently, threatening to terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO).

With these moves, the United Nations-based multilateral system can be considered “under siege.” But UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said that “multilateralism is under fire precisely when we need it most.”

Join a conversation between Adam Lupel, Vice President of the International Peace Institute, and Peter Yeo, the President of the Better World Campaign and the Senior Vice President at the United Nations Foundation as they discuss multilateralism under fire.

Featured Speakers: 

Peter Yeo, President of the Better World Campaign and Senior Vice President of the United Nations Foundation

As President of the Better World Campaign and Senior Vice President at the United Nations Foundation, Peter Yeo leads the Foundation’s strategic engagement with Congress and the Administration to advance policy changes that support the UN’s work for global progress.

Under Yeo’s leadership, the Foundation has helped ensure multibillion dollar payments from the U.S. government to the UN; forged a strategic alliance with the United Nations Association of the USA to create the largest network of UN supporters across the U.S.; championed U.S. law standing against child marriage with the support of Girl Up; and advanced year-over-year increases in U.S. bilateral and multilateral global health spending.

Yeo joined the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Campaign in 2009 with over twenty years of legislative, analytical, and management experience, including senior roles on Capitol Hill and in the State Department. Prior to arriving at UNF, Yeo served for ten years as the Deputy Staff Director at the House Foreign Affairs Committee chaired by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA). He has worked on a broad range of foreign policy and foreign aid issues. On behalf of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats, he led the successful negotiations for the landmark HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Act of 2003, commonly known as PEPFAR, as well as the successful $50 billion reauthorization of the law in 2008.

He also shepherded into law several measures dealing with China, Tibet, Burma, and East Timor. Prior to his work with the Committee, he served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. State Department during the second Clinton Administration, where he led the negotiations around repayment of the U.S. arrears to the United Nations and was part of the U.S. delegation to the climate negotiations in Kyoto. Yeo holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Wesleyan University as well as a MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading independent nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, and a Board Member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

 

Dr. Adam Lupel, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at the International Peace Institute

Dr. Adam Lupel is the Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at the International Peace Institute. He is responsible for developing IPI’s long-term research agenda and for overseeing management and coordination among IPI’s offices in New York, Vienna, and Manama in close collaboration with the President. Between 2014 and 2016 he served as the director of research and publications for the Independent Commission on Multilateralism, a project of IPI. In 2015, he led IPI’s support to the General Assembly mandated “Lessons Learned Exercise” on the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, working in close collaboration with the Executive Office of the Secretary-General.

Dr. Lupel also conducts research on issues related to globalization, multilateralism, and the prevention of mass atrocities. He is the author of Globalization and Popular Sovereignty: Democracy’s Transnational Dilemma (2009) and the co-editor of Peace Operations and Organized Crime: Enemies or Allies? (2011) and Responding to Genocide: The Politics of International Action (2013).

Prior to 2006, when he joined IPI as Editor, he was the Managing Editor of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, and he taught modern and contemporary political theory at The New School’s Eugene Lang College in New York. He has a PhD in political theory and an MA in liberal studies from the New School for Social Research and a BA in international relations with a concentration in Latin America from Boston University.