In this interview, Daniel Högsta discusses his journey into ICAN, beginning as a law student interested in public international law, eventually interning with ICAN in 2013, and now working as an advocacy coordinator. He views nuclear weapons as destabilizing and highlights ICAN’s role in advocating for nuclear disarmament through a humanitarian lens, contrasting ICAN's approach with traditional deterrence views. Högsta emphasizes ICAN's unique, coalition-based structure, which collaborates with governments, academics, and civil society, each focusing on eliminating nuclear weapons while complementing the NPT. He is optimistic about the future impact of ICAN’s efforts, even if immediate results may not be visible, and he envisions a world without nuclear weapons as one founded on international norms and cooperation.

This document summary was generated by an artificial intelligence language model and was reviewed by a Wilson Center staff member.

As other documents in this collection on Moroccan nationalists in 1947 and 1950 have exemplified, the United Nations was an important arena in decolonization struggles for Arabs, as it was for Asians and Africans as e.g. Alanna O’Malley’s The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo crisis, 1960-1964 (2018) has shown. In this regard, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 and taken over by the Fatah movement in 1969, was no exception.

To be sure, Palestinian organizations including Fatah and the PLO decried key UN actions. One was the UN Palestine partition plan of 1947; another was UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. Calling upon Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied” during the Six-Day War in June and calling for the “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace,” it did not mention Palestine or the Palestinians. Even so, the PLO sought to get access to the UN and UN recognition. A crucial landmark on this road was the address to the UN in New York in November 1974 by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004), a Fatah co-founder in 1959 and from 1969 PLO chairman.

Arafat did not speak at the Security Council, which was and is dominated by its five veto-carrying permanent members Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR/Russia. Rather, he addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where from the 1960s Third World states were in the majority; his speech was the first time that the UNGA allowed a non-state representative to attend its plenary session. The UNGA invited the PLO after having decided, in September, to begin separate hearings on Palestine (rather than making Palestine part of general Middle Eastern hearings), and after the PLO was internationally recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, a landmark accomplishment for the organization. The UNGA president who introduced Arafat, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1937-2021), was the Foreign Minister of Algeria, which since its independence in 1962 had supported the Palestinian cause organizationally, militarily, and politically. Arafat spoke in Arabic; the below text is the official UN English translation. Arafat did not write the text all by himself; several PLO officials and Palestinians close to the PLO, including Edward Said, assisted, as Timothy Brennan has noted in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021). Later in November 1974, the UNGA inter alia decided to give the PLO observer status and affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Discussion with Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former Defense Secretary and Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, about the 1990s and the new relationship that formed after the Cold War.

Discussion with Polish Minister Andrzej Olechowski about his life and Poland in the 1990s.

This issue begins by denouncing British and French aggression against Egypt during the Suez Canal Crisis. It also includes a Chinese statement about the Soviet Declaration "to Strengthen Friendship and Cooperation [with] Other Socialist States," which acknowledges tensions between socialist countries and the need to address people's demands in Hungary and Poland. The next sections feature a message from Zhou Enlai to János Kádár, who would lead Hungary after the failed Revolution of 1956, and Sino-Nepali correspondence.

Expert member of the German delegation to the NPT review conference.

Senior Advisor for Non-proliferation and Deputy Director of the Non-proliferation, Arms Control and Disarmament Division of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs.

President of the 1995 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference

Chile’s domestic situation after the military coup. The Indian embassy has not accepted any refugees and India is currently unpopular with the ruling Junta.

Minister Kim speaks on the humanitarian law at the humanitarian commission at New Delhi.