Author and former employee of the UN, Thant Myint-U, reflects on a varied and fascinating career spanning humanitarian work, academia, and political reform.
Can you start by giving us an overview of your career and how you’ve arrived at where you are today?
I suppose you could say I’ve had three fairly distinct careers. My first real interaction with the UN began right after university when I worked as an intern at the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO) on the Thai-Cambodian border. Like many interns, my supervisor at the time didn’t quite know what to do with me. Incidentally, that supervisor went on to work with UNHCR in Afghanistan.
At one point, I was sent off with a young Italian aid worker, Filippo Grandi, who later became UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to count every chicken and pig in Site 2 refugee camp, which had around 200,000 people. That was the very unglamorous start to my UN career.
In 1991, I sought career advice from Brian Urquhart at the Ford Foundation. He told me plainly that think tanks were for “old pensioners like me” and encouraged me to get back into the field. Through a few introductions, I ended up working with the Cambodia peacekeeping operation.
I spent about a year and a half there and later served in Bosnia with the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) during the Yugoslav conflicts in 1994, 1995, and again in 1996.
After that, I left the UN for a while, only to return in 2000 in New York, working with both OCHA and DPA, and later in the Secretary-General’s office under Kofi Annan. I left again in 2007 and haven’t worked full-time for the UN since.
In parallel to my UN work, I was also pursuing an academic career. During the 1990s, when I wasn’t deployed, I was completing my PhD and was elected a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.
My academic work was focused not on the UN but on British imperial history, particularly British India and Burma in the 18th to early 20th centuries.
Then, after leaving the UN in 2007, I became involved in Myanmar’s reform process. By 2010, things were moving forward positively, and I relocated there in 2011, spending the next decade immersed in Burmese politics. I left the country a few months before the 2021 military coup.
Reflecting on your time in Cambodia and elsewhere, what stands out to you about those early peacekeeping efforts?
In Cambodia, at least from my young and perhaps naive perspective, there was a strong sense among my colleagues and me that we were doing something genuinely worthwhile. There was a solid peace agreement in place, and the UN was really trying, despite the inevitable problems and mistakes.
At that time, in the early 1990s, there was still a great deal of optimism about the UN’s potential. People believed the organization was moving in the right direction and would continue to play a growing role in resolving conflicts.
What do you think are the biggest barriers to peace today, particularly regarding the UN’s role?
First, it’s important to recognize that the UN has had significant successes. It was founded to prevent another world war, and by that measure alone, it has largely succeeded as we’re 80 years in and counting.
We’ve also seen, particularly in the last decade, a worrying increase in conflict-related civilian casualties. The problem isn’t simply the UN’s actions or inactions; it’s the growing irrelevance of the UN to many of today’s major conflicts. In too many cases, it’s hard to see what meaningful role the UN can play.
Too often, the organization spreads itself thinly across numerous priorities, which shouldn’t come at the expense of its fundamental purpose.
Do you believe the UN today remains aligned with Article 1 of its Charter, particularly in terms of openness and inclusivity?
In one sense, yes. The UN’s near-universal membership is a tremendous achievement. That wasn’t inevitable. The world could have taken a different path post-World War II, with the UN becoming a much more exclusive body. Instead, we’ve seen the near-complete decolonization of the world and universal membership.
That said, inequality is baked into the system. The Security Council’s five permanent members hold veto power over core peace and security issues.
This doesn’t just affect decisions in the Council; it trickles down to influence staffing, job allocations, and which countries wield more power within the Secretariat. That imbalance remains a fundamental challenge to the UN’s credibility and effectiveness.
Do you think the UN could engage more effectively with other states to ensure better outcomes for peace and conflict resolution?
The UN is a unique institution where states come together and have built a bureaucracy with its own culture and ways of working. Over time, the intergovernmental bodies have also developed distinct practices and language. We need to think carefully about where the UN has been successful, where it has failed, how the world is changing, and what the current threats to peace and security are.
We should consider how the UN might better engage with its Member States, not just in specific actions, but in generating ideas. No single actor has a monopoly on the ideas that could lead to peace or prevent conflict. We need to take a broader view of what drives conflict today, not just locally but globally.
Do you think the next Secretary-General should focus more on active conflict resolution?
Absolutely. Peace-making is central to the UN’s mission and to the role of the Secretariat and the Secretary-General.
It’s really a question of what the UN can bring to any given conflict. The UN cannot do everything, everywhere, but it should always be asking what role it can and should play.
Turning to your own work and writing, what inspired you to start writing? Was it your career, your interest in literature, or both?
My first books were history books, rooted in my academic career and my interest in Asian history, particularly Burmese history, the British Empire, and colonialism. My last book on Burma was very much tied to my ten years living there, combining reflections on contemporary politics and the country’s history.
My current book, about my grandfather U Thant and his time as Secretary-General from 1961 to 1971, came about almost accidentally. In the evenings, I started looking through UN archives related to him, much of which had been declassified and digitized during COVID. I found material that hadn’t been published before and told a different story of the 1960s, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, and the Six-Day War from the UN’s perspective.
This project was a kind of discovery for me as my grandfather and I lived in the same house in New York during and just after his time as Secretary-General. But he died when I was eight. Even when I worked at the UN, people rarely mentioned him.
As I read more, I realized these perspectives weren’t reflected in recent books on those events. I wasn’t an expert on the Cold War, so I consulted scholars who were. I also revisited sources like the New York Times, where the UN was front-page news during those years.
That contrast between what I was finding and what’s commonly written today drove me to write the book.
Finally, what do you hope for the UN’s future?
It’s clearly a difficult time for the UN, financially and politically. There’s a crisis of relevance, particularly on major peace and security issues. In conflicts like Ukraine or the Middle East, the UN plays a more peripheral role than it did not so long ago. I would like to see that change and for the UN to regain its primacy in conflict resolution and in preventing war.
But the path forward isn’t about the organization for its own sake. It’s about what people on this planet need. We must ask: What future conflicts are most probable? How do we prevent a catastrophic third world war or nuclear conflict? Then we can work backwards to figure out how to de-escalate tensions and what role the UN could play. From there, we can think about reform and what kind of organization we need for the rest of the 21st century.