Citizens for Global Solutions

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Citizens for Global Solutions

We work towards global governance innovations today and democratic world federation tomorrow. We now face threats that were unimaginable 75 years ago.

Nuclear proliferation, climate change, mass migration, and terrorism are a daily occurrence. We need a new UN, capable of handling these challenges. CGS has partnered with organizations worldwide to use the occasion of the UN’s 75th anniversary to push for meaningful change.

08/31/2026

Starvation is a slow death, and it is almost always preventable. That is what makes the last two years so hard to read about.

The World Food Program lost 40 percent of its funding in 2025. In Kenya, 720,000 refugees lost support entirely. In Nigeria, 150 clinics treating 300,000 small children closed. Today the agency counts 266 million people at crisis levels of hunger or worse.

Historian Lawrence Wittner walks through how it happened and what a durable fix looks like: funding for the UN's food agency that does not depend on the politics of one capital.

https://globalsolutions.org/updates/blog/world-hunger-and-starvation-have-reached-a-crisis-level/

08/28/2026

Fifty years ago Dr. Arthur Lyon Dahl was at the first UN environment conference in Stockholm. He was at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, helping write the oceans chapter. He was in Paris for the climate talks. Very few people have watched this system up close for as long as he has.

He just joined the CGS National Advisory Council, and he did not sugarcoat what he saw. Agreements get signed, he says, and then nothing happens, because nobody has been given the authority to make them happen.

His fix is practical: give the UN's environment arm real teeth, and treat the planet's life support systems as something the whole system is built to protect.

Welcome, Arthur. The full conversation is here: https://globalsolutions.org/updates/blog/welcome-arthur-lyon-dahl-cgs-national-advisory-council/

08/20/2026

Most of what gets written about the UN now reads like a eulogy. We wanted to publish the other half of that story.

The rule that lets five governments stop the rest of the world from acting was written by people in 1945. Rules written by people can be rewritten by people. That is not optimism, it is just how the document works.

The new issue of Mondial spends most of its pages on what the rewrite could look like. How to rebalance the veto. How citizens could ratify treaties directly. What happened the last two times public pressure forced nuclear disarmament. Why no one should be left without a country.

Have a read and tell us which piece you would hand to someone who has given up on the whole thing.

https://globalsolutions.org/updates/mondial-journal/

08/19/2026

We have a winner! Andrew Igdal took this year’s New Voices 4 Global Solutions Essay Contest with a piece on something most of us never think about: who keeps the shipping lanes open.

Eighty percent of everything traded in the world moves by sea. When one route through the Red Sea shut down, UN food shipments to Yemen fell 81 percent in a single year and the cost of a single voyage rose by about a million dollars. The 1982 law of the sea guarantees ships safe passage. It never said who has to make that true.

Andrew grew up in the foothills of western North Carolina and is now a PhD student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin, where he researches energy systems. At the end of the month he flies to Ventotene, Italy for a week with young people from around the world doing this kind of thinking together.

Read the announcement and his essay: https://globalsolutions.org/updates/blog/new-voices-essay-contest-winner-2026/

08/14/2026

Two Trinity Washington University students stood up at UN Headquarters this summer and gave keynotes on their own research.

Samara Husain, a senior nursing student, argued that housing is a public health issue: safe homes, clean water, sanitation, and healthcare people can actually get to. Anastasia Tomlinson, a junior studying politics and public health, examined how the UN measures rural road access in Brazil and showed the distance between the reported data and what rural women experience.

Both are alumni of our Global Governance Fellowship. Both were invited by Kehkashan Basu of Green Hope Foundation. This is what the fellowship is for.

Read the full story: https://globalsolutions.org/updates/blog/cgs-fellows-take-youth-led-research-to-the-un-high-level-political-forum/

08/10/2026

Larry Wittner has been writing about nuclear weapons since before most of us were born, and his newest piece lands hard. Nine countries, roughly 12,100 warheads, and all nine building more. Global spending on these weapons hit 119 billion dollars last year. The last US-Russia arms control treaty expired in February and nothing took its place.

The part that stays with me is the history. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, none of them came into office planning to cut nuclear arsenals. They did it because enough people in enough countries made it impossible not to. That kind of pressure is buildable. It has been built before.

Read Larry's piece here at the link in comments.

08/04/2026

The people who wrote the UN Charter in 1945 did not think they were writing something permanent. Truman said at the signing that it would be expanded and improved over time, and they put that expectation directly into the text. Article 109 is the clause that lets each generation revisit the whole thing.

It has never been used. It is still there.

We are asking writers, researchers, and practitioners to make the case for what happens when it is.

Together with World Federalist Movement-Canada, we are producing a special edition of Mondial on what an upgraded Charter could deliver, across climate governance, disarmament, global health, sovereign debt, Security Council reform, and more.

If you work in any corner of international policy, we want to hear what a rewritten Charter could unlock in your field. Articles run 700 to 2000 words, and expressions of interest are due October 15.

Read the full call and the nine proposed tracks: https://globalsolutions.org/updates/blog/call-for-papers-mondial-un-charter-article-109/

08/03/2026

Here is the part that stays with me. We are relatively safe inside our own countries because crimes get prosecuted and carry consequences. That is what law does. It replaces retaliation with a courtroom.

Between nations, none of that exists. International law is built on treaties, which are voluntary agreements. Nations can sign them and ignore them, and often do. So military power ends up making the rules instead.

Our recent article lays out what closing that gap would actually take, and why Article 109 of the UN Charter is the mechanism that already exists to start it. Link in comments.

07/28/2026

Eighty-one years ago this summer, delegates from fifty nations met in San Francisco and wrote a charter whose first promise was to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. The UN has mediated more than 170 peace settlements since then. It has also watched more than 285 wars break out, with the five veto holders among the leading participants.

This Thursday those same five sit down for a secret vote on who runs the place next.

Lawrence Wittner, historian of the peace movement and a CGS board member, traces what happened to the promise and why he thinks it is still alive.

🔗 https://globalsolutions.org/updates/blog/a-dream-deferred-but-still-alive/

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