The place Does the Secretary-General Go? Travel as a Proxy for Effort

In February 1998, with the United States making ready to bomb Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, Kofi Annan flew to Baghdad. The danger of failure was excessive: he didn’t have a proper mandate to barter, the Americans had been skeptical, and Hussein was unpredictable. He had been secretary-general for barely a yr. At the eleventh hour, he met Hussein on the Republican Palace and negotiated an settlement that was endorsed by the Security Council on March 2, 1998, in Resolution 1154. His go to to Iraq prevented a army escalation—a minimum of for some time.

Much has been written about what the subsequent occupant of the thirty eighth ground should do to revive the group’s relevance. One piece of recommendation is so simple as it’s efficient: go to the exhausting locations the place the UN is most wanted and deal with failure as an choice.

Two latest research based mostly on a knowledge set of secretary-general journey between 1997 and 2021 present a scientific quantitative evaluation of its impression. The first, revealed within the Journal of Peace Research, finds that international locations that the secretary-general visits present important subsequent enhancements in human rights situations. A companion study by 4 of the identical authors finds that help donors enhance their commitments to visited international locations.

These findings are an necessary affirmation of what any UN employees member who has served within the subject already is aware of. Secretary-general visits matter, and their absence can also be seen. These visits are worthwhile not just for quantitative achievements comparable to human rights developments or elevated funding; they’re additionally important for constructing relationships and popularity—the secretary-general’s “soft power.” This is figure that takes effort and time and can’t be accomplished instantly when it’s wanted at a time of disaster.

Travel has necessary symbolic worth, too. When 17 UN employees had been killed in a bombing in Algiers in 2007, Ban Ki-moon flew to the city within a week, visited the bomb website, met employees and the households of the lifeless, and introduced again to New York the tattered flag that had been flying outdoors the UN workplaces on the time of the assault. He did the identical when a terrorist assault killed 5 UN employees in Kabul in 2009 and when the Haiti earthquake struck in 2010, killing greater than 100 employees and plenty of hundreds of Haitians. The UN neighborhood seen, and so did the world.

Not all secretary-general journey is equal. Visits to multilateral conferences and summits are necessary for the aim of institutional illustration however sometimes carry restricted danger and reward, with the occasional exception, comparable to Ban’s function in facilitating the 2015 Paris Agreement on local weather change. State visits and bilateral diplomatic engagements occupy a center tier: they construct the relationships and political capital that maintain the secretary-general’s authority and make disaster diplomacy potential when it’s wanted. The third class—visits to lively crises and UN operations—is the rarest and probably the most consequential. The first two are largely choreographed and politically protected; the latter will be unpredictable and dangerous.

An evaluation of the journey information of the final three secretaries-general, carried out by this writer utilizing the information of the above-mentioned publications, along with publicly accessible UN journey information to increase it till May 2026, reveals a unique strategy by every of the final three incumbents. The evaluation excludes visits to the United States and Switzerland, the place the UN’s headquarters are situated, to permit a cleaner comparability.

Annan made 379 visits throughout his ten-year tenure, together with 89 to sub-Saharan Africa, the place most UN operations are situated. Ban carried out 542 visits, together with 84 to sub-Saharan Africa. Guterres undertook 278 visits by way of May 2026, the ultimate yr of his tenure, together with 41 to sub-Saharan Africa. COVID-19 doesn’t clarify the hole. Even discounting two years of pandemic restrictions, Guterres averaged two-thirds of Ban’s tempo and practically 10% lower than Annan’s general—and in sub-Saharan Africa, the place most UN operations are situated, he visited 40% much less regularly than Annan and 37% lower than Ban, even after eradicating the height COVID years from the calculation.

Like his predecessors, Guterres has demonstrated the worth of high-stakes journey. His April 2022 visit to Moscow, the place he met Vladimir Putin and secured settlement in precept for the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to evacuate civilians from the besieged Azovstal metal plant in Mariupol, confirmed what such journey can obtain.

Yet the information additionally exhibits how hardly ever he has chosen to aim it. As secretary-general, Guterres has not visited South Sudan, Sudan, Kosovo, Cyprus, or Western Sahara, all of which hosted a long-standing UN presence throughout his tenure and had been visited by his predecessors. In reality, he has made no visits to peacekeeping operations in sub-Saharan Africa in his second time period. Nor did he journey to East Africa in 2023 when Sudan collapsed into chaos, Syria following the autumn of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, or Southeast Asia in 2025 throughout the Thailand–Cambodia battle. After the Iran conflict began in February 2026, he carried out his response completely from New York other than one quick solidarity journey to Lebanon.

The distinction between Guterres and his predecessors runs all through their tenures however is sharpest towards the top. Both Annan and Ban travelled most of their last years. Annan made 70 visits in 2006, and Ban made 80 in 2016. Guterres has moved in the wrong way, peaking in his first yr with 55 visits in 2017 and declining thereafter. In 2026, his last yr, he made 13 visits by way of May thirtieth, lower than half the speed of both predecessor.

There is not any clear justification for this decline. Secretary-general journey requires no governing physique approval, so it shouldn’t be affected by rising geopolitical fractures. Travel has additionally change into simpler since 1997 when the deputy secretary-general put up was established to handle the group throughout the secretary-general’s absence. Adverse safety or political situations shouldn’t preclude journey both. When visiting a sure nation is unimaginable, a decided secretary-general can go to a different nation within the area as a substitute. Facing a disaster in South Sudan in July 2016, Ban flew at the last moment to Kigali to immediately foyer heads of state at a unprecedented summit of the East African Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). When the door is closed, a decided secretary-general can discover a window.

Actions converse louder than phrases. To make sure, the secretary-general’s phrases matter. But journey is a quantifiable measure of a secretary-general’s degree of effort on the job—a proxy for a way exhausting they’re making an attempt to make a distinction. From their first day in workplace, the subsequent secretary-general can be judged partly on the place they journey, how regularly they achieve this, and whether or not they proceed to journey on high-stakes missions after their first inevitable failures.

Annan understood this. The settlement he negotiated in Baghdad in February 1998 collapsed by the top of the yr. Hussein resumed blocking inspectors, and the US and UK bombed Iraq in December 1998. The disaster Annan had traveled to avert was merely postponed. But no critical analyst of that interval argues he shouldn’t have tried. The try mattered. The willingness to place your title and popularity on the road in a scenario the place failure is an choice—that’s the job.