UN Chronicle.

Few phrases have seen as much citation as the resolve in the United Nations Charter to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war", and the Organization, from its inception, has legitimately been seen as a needed securer of the peace, whether through dialogue, diplomacy, sanctions or enforcement.

It is instructive to recall how, on 26 June 1775, exactly 170 years before the Charter was adopted, a statesman had written: "When we assumed the soldier we did not lay aside the citizen." George Washington had been a student at Virginia's College of William and Mary, where Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently observed (page 4) that it is "by our success or failure in fulfilling (our) Millennium Goals, and not just in Iraq, that the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century will be assessed". That success is not going to be easy; to quote our Chronicle interviewee (page 51): "The United Nations goes around the world talking of development. The World Bank goes around talking of development. But there are more poor people today in the world than ever."

That was something the 57th General Assembly (page 6) noted as well. Its Economic and Financial Committee specified targets, set time frames and decided upon measures to evaluate achievements in the context of the many global conferences relating to development; these decisions, in the phrase of the Chairman of that Committee, "became a turning point for how the United Nations is doing business with the Bretton Woods institutions". Also, even as the United Nations commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, one of its newer members--the Republic of Tajikistan--proposed that water should be seen as the common property of humanity (page 30). A million people are estimated to die each month as a result of water scarcity or water-borne disease; a special section in this issue brings together distinguished thinkers on the subject.

It has been this publication's aim to help bridge the distance between sound theory and difficult practice, and we're encouraged by the thoughtful and, well, implementable ideas our invited experts continue to offer. They underscore, as two scholars put it (page 55), that "economic and political causes form not a pair of opposites but a continuum" and the solutions that emerge must necessarily subsume both. This at a time when, as Michel Rocard observes (page 74), "globalization is a fact", but its processes coexist with the continuing "humiliation of millions of people" (page 76), in the phrase of an assembly of Nobel Peace laureates.

There may well be an "absence of strong social and environmental pillars to balance the developed system of economic exchange" (page 64); equally, there may be an underestimation of "the importance of using the UN infrastructure to create spaces, where social, environmental and human rights issues can come to the fore of the international development agenda" (page 65).

But eventually, as always, it's not about policies, or even about people. It's about a person and what all of this will mean for her or for him. It's humbling, and evocative, to share the thoughts of our anonymous HIV-positive contributor who writes (page 58):" I am grateful for the years ahead and I value them. So many people die ... not having enjoyed the life they were granted." It was to that enjoyment that the ideals of the United Nations aspired, and this issue continues our exploration on how far we've reached on that voyage.

Read on! ... and write ...