Yves here. Given the joint trajectories of more and more accumulation of wealth and power at the top of the food chain, accompanied by a teardown of rules and institutions that had constrained their actions, it’s hard to be hopeful about what passes for democracy. As we’ll briefly recap, we have been skeptical of BRICS, but the article below sets forth an alternative model, that of a Global Citizens’ Assembly. In a time of organizational breakdown, more decentralized approaches could become viable but clearly this effort is too new to tell how far it might get and where it could be effective.
Many have vested hope in the emergence of a fairer order under BRICS. However some commentators, notably Eric Toussaint, have described in detail how BRICS does not provide a new model for financing and trade to the Global South, in his article The BRICS are the new defenders of free trade, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. Similarly, Vanessa Beeley and Fiorella Isabel have fiercely criticized BRICS inaction on Gaza, when key member states had levers to pull. As Beeley said:
They’re condemning the West for violating international law. And yet, effectively, they’re turning a blind eye to what Israel is doing, which, in my opinion, is the greatest transgression of international law since the UN was created and has been since the creation. of the state of Israel. And I’m struggling with people’s inability to understand that the central cause right now is preventing global genocide, because it’s also ongoing in Sudan, in other countries. But of course, Palestine is center of all of our humanity, compassion, and drive to end this kind of oppression of, I’m not going to call them a defenseless people, but they are disproportionately unable to defend themselves against a US-backed Zionist aggression against them that’s been ongoing for 100 years.
And I guess what I’m trying to say is morally, I’m not understanding why people are so clinging to a bias which blinds them to holding these countries to account and saying to them, you have the power to do something. We don’t expect, the West is never going to do anything because we know they’re absolutely joined at the hip with Israel. But these countries have an opportunity. They have literally, they have the only capability in the world today, apart from the armed resistance in the region, to actually do something economically, not militarily, economically, to stop what is happening in Palestine.
And they’re failing to do it.
One appeal of the citizens’ assembly idea is that its members are chosen at random. But that would have the effect, were this to get going, of putting countries like the US that have sorely neglected public education at a disadvantage.
By Rich Wilson. Originally published at DeSmogBlog
On Saturday, 17 January, world leaders gathered at Westminster Central Hall to mark the 80th birthday of the U.N. General Assembly. The same room where it first convened in 1946.
At the same time, something quietly historic happened.
For the first time, the permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly met.
Selected by lottery and representative of the world’s population, a group of 105 people began deliberating on the climate and food crises. By 2026, more than 100,000 people will have taken part. Later this year, discussions on Artificial Intelligence (AI) will follow.
It’s an experiment in global governance reform. A kind of anti Trump–Monroe spheres of influence project.
Instead of carving the world back up into competing empires, it connects communities, cities and countries into a living global network, designed not to replace governments, but to act where they increasingly cannot.
That matters because demand for global governance reform has rarely been higher. As Sir George Robertson, ex-Nato Secretary-General, said on Saturday: “It’s not an underestimate to say that today we face our most acute crisis since 1946.”
When the U.N. first opened its doors, many of its staff still bore the visible wounds of war. As the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres reminded us, they understood that: “Peace, justice and equality are the most precious, practical and necessary pursuits of all.”
Today, many governments are turning away from multilateralism. Yet around two-thirds of people worldwide want stronger international cooperation on climate, AI and global security.
That gap matters. It’s where citizens’ assemblies come in.
A citizens’ assembly brings together a group of everyday people, selected by lottery, to reflect the wider population, to learn, deliberate and make recommendations on major public issues.
Our research suggests that more than 7,000 formal citizens’ assemblies have been organised over the last decade. This does not include the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of community-level assemblies operating below the radar. This global movement of deliberative democracy has grown because we now know assemblies produce more effective policy, reduce polarisation, and act as an antidote to misinformation.
The task of the Global Citizens’ Assembly is simply to connect and strengthen what already exists. Linking local assemblies into a global fabric that can begin to plug some of the gaps in the existing multilateral regime.
The U.N. has never been the whole of global governance. In 2021, the UN Foundation, Climate Analytics and E3G published The Value of Climate Cooperation, which mapped a far wider ecosystem of climate action: spanning science networks, businesses, investors and civil society alongside the U.N.Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Global governance, in other words, is already far more distributed than our institutional imagination tends to acknowledge.
This was exemplified during the pandemic when many now agree that the most important parts of the response emerged from a partnership between governments, academia and corporate manufacturing and distribution, rather than from any single multilateral institution.
AI is also transforming what’s possible, making it feasible to run thousands of high-quality citizen conversations at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional assemblies.
In a world where crises now move faster than parliaments or summits, this kind of human–machine collaboration opens the door to a new form of civic infrastructure continuous, distributed and capable of matching the speed and scale of global challenges.
The members of the Global Citizens’ Assembly are on the front line of today’s crises, just as the first members of the U.N. General Assembly were 80 years ago. They know what suffering looks like. And they know that peace, justice and equality are not abstract ideals, but practical necessities.
That’s why nation states committed to global collaboration in 1945.
And that’s why people, ordinary people, need to be at the heart of global governance today.
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The second from last para is rose tinted nonsense:
Israel formation and Partition in 1948, then Korean War, then Iran in 1953, plus the French and British colonial uprisings.
The violence simply continued unabated in different forms.
But really it was about peace in Europe. The Garden. Those other nations were just inherently violent places anyway, right? /s
The trouble with the Citizens’ Assemblies will be the same as the trouble with the UN in general: it has no bite to go along with its bark. Like Stalin’s question about how many divisions the Pope has, the question for the UN is how does it enforce anything when the Security Council members can veto any deployment of force that gets in the way of their plundering and resource theft, and when the countries who could contribute the most troops and weaponry to a UN force are the same ones that have veto power. The UN has no power at all against any nuclear armed state, so countries like Israel just ignore whatever it demands.
It is sad that we need to rely on violence. With the exception maybe of Pinochet, violence is almost always stopped by greater violence (looking at you, Israel). The human race needs to evolve to the point where everyone shares the understanding that the rule of law is about having a culture of respect for law as a legitimate product of democratic institutions. If law only has “power” in the sense of boots, bullets, and nukes, then we are not talking about the power of law at all. That’s just the age-old power of violence.
> AI is also transforming what’s possible, making it feasible to run thousands of high-quality citizen conversations at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional assemblies.
My imagination is failing me here. I can’t think what is meant except possibly real time autotranslation of remote conferences.
> … this kind of human–machine collaboration …
Thanks for the elaboration, I guess.
No need to resort to AI for real time auto translation. Plain old ML will do. From a certain point of view AI tops global warming in the hierarchy of crises; accurate and timely information being both a sine qua non for effective action and a thing most threatened by “AI” – being sloppy about what one means about AI is surely a bad idea at this point.
I think that yes, the author must be referring to auto-translation. It’s both wonderful, think babelfish or the Star Trek universal translator, but also dangerous in that when it gets something wrong, it gets it spectacularly wrong. Hopefully people who use it are mindful of its limitations, which I doubt.
I also think so long as AI is being used, state actors will use the AI for man-in-the-middle attacks on peoples assemblies like this, inserting things not said, altering or blanking things said, steering conversation, influencing direction from selected canned/pre-packaged ideologies.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also say I’m very glad to be introduced to Global Citizens’ Assemblies and the other themes of this timely article.
I would answer yes to the title of the article while also emphasizing that democracy is meant to be majority rule with consideration for minorities; that includes everybody. Thus, unilateralism, and a unipolar system are clearly anti-democratic.
Moreover, the US government in Washington is currently at odds with the state of Minnesota. It’s also at odds with Iran. Yet, it doesn’t place sanctions on Minnesota that are intended to collapse its economy, cause suffering and hunger as it waits for an opportunity to assassinate the governor, which it does to the people of Iran.
Furthermore, there are things human beings need. The US goes nuts because Iran wants to enrich uranium for civilian use; especially for medical use. Enriching uranium can be done globally at six or seven or whatever locations, monitored by the IAEA, fully transparent, and allow all countries access to buy what they need for home use.
The world needs medicine. Some countries do not have enough while in the US it’s available but many people can’t afford it. Again, pharmaceuticals, which are rarely expensive to produce, could be under democratic control globally to insure medicine is available to all.
We don’t have to wait until every country in the world is a democracy but much can be accomplish solving global problems democratically.
Hmh, the last (?) government introduced some form of citizens assemblies here in Germany. They are a fig leave of “Look we listen to you” to decorate the ever more apparent “nothing is gonna change”. Lot’s of handshaking and listening, then silence and then burying any contradicting “recommendations” very deeply. It’s just more circus to channel increasing dissatisfaction and disassociation. Let’s look at what actually worked in the last 150 years to give us Weekends, insurance, an end to child Labor and women votes – I am not sure those came about by existing elite organisations implementing “citizens assemblies” top down or co-opting existing independent associations for window dressing. Rights are fought for and granted when a) those in power feel a very hard concrete wall in their backs and need to prevent the lid from blowing off; b) promise a bit more than a competing elite group to stay in power – or maybe that is just my subjective cynical world view. Imho, The UN or BRICS are just a reflection of what’s happening on the local and national level. To win back control we need to start there and not with castles in the sky on a global level. If we claw back more democratic influence on the local & national level this would automatically translate to more sane policy on a supranational level, not the other way around.