After 75 years of the UN, a global outlook has never been more important

If humanity is successfully to tackle its most significant current challenges—from Covid-19 to climate change—this will be in no small part thanks to a document signed 75 years ago.

The United Nations Charter, which came into force on 24 October 1945, not only created the UN, but also sought to commit the world’s sovereign nations to peaceful co-operation. It is thanks to this agreement that we have institutions like the World Health Organisation, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Change Agreement of 2015, all of which serve as focal points for tackling grand challenges, from global warming and conflict to poverty and pandemics.

Yet nurturing international co-operation didn’t stop with the Charter in 1945. Indeed, it has never stopped. And nor should it. We should always seek to maintain our shared values of peace, justice, equality, and sustainable living. This requires a free transnational exchange of ideas, a willingness to co-operate even when times get tough, and a determination to focus on our similarities, rather than our differences.

At the British Academy, we celebrate these values and these efforts with the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, awarded annually since 2013 in recognition of works of non-fiction that promote a cosmopolitan view on global issues.

Scholarship, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, contributes an enormous amount to international cooperation. The study of languages opens our minds to limitless possibilities and multifarious cultures. The study of history and archaeology reveals the complexity of human lives and societies in every age, as well as our own. From philosophy to psychology, all these SHAPE disciplines help us to form a broad and global outlook.

And this helps us to re-examine what we mean by peace, justice, freedom and equality, and how we can co-operate on transnational grounds to do what is in the broader human interest, rather than putting sectional and individual self-interest first.

New discoveries can, for example, challenge our assumptions about human potential for peaceful cooperation. In one of the works shortlisted for this year’s prize, Pekka Hämäläinen argues in Lakota America that "two Americas" once existed side by side in the push for western expansion. His history of the Lakota people explains how they cohabited with the emergent American nation, carefully balancing military advancement with culture, trade and—for at least half a century—peaceful allegiance.

A global, historical outlook on injustice is essential in the contemporary world, too. In All Our Relations, Tanya Talaga illuminates a cause which has inspired the First Nations people of North America and indigenous peoples across the world for over fifty years: their protest against historic injustice, which have resonated globally since the Occupation of Alcatraz. As Talaga shows, injustice has been the key to motivating and understanding their struggles against (for example) poverty, mental illness, opioid addiction, which can be traced back to colonial invasions into their territory, separating them from their former ways of life.

Recent new studies have also revealed how cross-cultural understanding has paved routes towards racial and gender equality. Hazel V. Carby, in Imperial Intimacies, adds new dimensions to our understanding of racial equality with a historical examination of the lasting impact of the slave trade on modern Britons and Jamaicans. Priyamvada Gopal argues in Insurgent Empire that the British values that inspired the Abolition of the slave trade—liberation and emancipation—have important cross-cultural origins. Like Carby, Gopal’s profound historical account of global Britain challenges many preconceptions, not least the idea of a discrete British ‘white working class’.

And The Reinvention of Humanity, by Charles King, the final book on this year’s shortlist, is a deeply researched story about the small circle of four pioneering anthropologists—all of them women—who at the beginning of the 20^th century unpicked many of the deep-rooted scientific assumptions behind sexuality, gender and race. They built the firm foundations for any constructive discussions on equality that we can have today.

The belief in the importance of promoting greater global understanding across countries and cultures and continents that inspired the UN Charter remains as important and relevant today as it was then. The annual award of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize is one of many efforts the British Academy is making to explore and proclaim our common humanity.