Join us on Tuesday, January 24th from 5:00PM - 6:15PM in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day for a virtual StoryFile AI conversational video with a holocaust survivor.  StoryFile is an interactive memory keeping application that allows you to record stories so that future generations can connect and interact. 

The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.

As political instability around the world displaces larger and larger numbers of people, the international community struggles to institute an adequate and equitable arrangement to meet its obligations to protect refugees; repatriation is more often than not impossible, refugees face deplorable conditions in camps as well as inadequate paths to local integration and resettlement, and burden sharing amongst states is highly inequitable.

In 2020, 86% of the world’s 25.6 million refugees were hosted by low and middle income countries.  An increasing number of critical scholars are bringing a decolonial lens to the analysis of these failures, tracing the root causes to the colonial origins of international refugee legal frameworks.

As Antony Anghie writes in his seminal book Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, international law cannot be separated from the European colonial project that it was created to support, justify, and prolong. These analyses connect the historical use of international refugee law as an instrument of racial discrimination, cultural subordination, and economic exploitation to the unequal burden-sharing, inadequate standards of protection, and racial undertones of today’s international refugee governance regime.This discussion will trace the international refugee governance regime from the racism and colonialism embedded in its epistemology to the ideological fallacies of the mainstream discourse on reforming the regime, ultimately arriving at the question: what would it mean to decolonize refugee governance? And how do we get there?

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The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) is seeking  motivated interns to support the work of the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. The interns can take up assignments with any team in the Office, including the Strategic Planning and Monitoring Unit; the Political, Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Human Rights Unit; the Rule of Law Unit; the Sustainable Development Unit; the Policy Advisor’s Office; or other units.

Interns report to full-time professional staff and focus on one of the three tracks set out under Responsibilities.

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The Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) / Division for Inclusive Social Development (DISD) internship is for two months with the opportunity for extension up to a total of six months, depending on the needs of the Division.

The internship is UNPAID and full time. Interns work five days per week (35 hours) under the supervision of a staff member in the department or office to which they are assigned.

The DMSPC/BTAD Analytics and Project Management team develops dashboards and other online platforms to support monitoring and reporting on performance; promotes business innovation and new ways of working, taking a long-term view of how the UN’s business model is aligned with evolving mandates, changing operational environments, as well as changes in the workplace and society-at-large; coordinates portfolio of transformational projects, ensuring projects are designed, communicated and implemented according to best practices in change and project management.

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The internship with the Inter-organizational and Inter-institutional Support Branch (IISB) of the Office of Intergovernmental Support and Coordination for Sustainable Development (OISC) of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) is for two months, with an opportunity for extension, pending on the needs of the Department.

The internship is UNPAID and full time.

Interns work five days per week (35 hours) under the supervision of a staff member in IISB to which they are assigned.

Apply Here

The intern shall support OHCHR in fulfilling its mission: to work for the protection of all human rights for all people; to help empower people to realize their rights; and to assist those responsible for upholding such rights in ensuring that they are implemented.

This internship is an UNPAID and full-time engagement that provides a framework through which students from diverse academic backgrounds gain exposure to the work of the United Nations by way of their service within Secretariat entities. 

Based in New York, United States of America, under the overall leadership of the High Commissioner, the intern reports to the respective Chief of Section or Human Rights Officer in the area of assignment. This internship will be offered for an initial period of two (2) months, renewable for a combined period of six (6) months.

Apply Here