3 November 2024
By Katja Hemmerich
Last month, human resources (HR) practitioners from international organizations came together at the Career Development Roundtable to exchange experiences and best practices. A prevalent theme was how to attract more diverse employees and make them feel included in international organizations, so that these organizations can reap the benefits of their talent, expertise and perspectives. Despite participants’ strong commitment to this aim, it was striking how many organizations continue to face ongoing challenges in genuinely diversifying their workforces. Our spotlight this month, therefore, takes a closer look at the newest research related to diversity and inclusion in international organizations - specifically in relation to race.
Although a growing number of international organizations are developing anti-racism strategies and ensuring their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) interventions include questions of race, international organizations are coming to this issue relatively late. One reason for this is likely that most, if not all of us, who work(ed) at such organizations are motivated by building more just and equitable societies. So it’s hard to believe that we could also exhibit biases ourselves - although I suspect that most of us have seen it firsthand. Many years ago when I was a newly recruited P-2 in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), I distinctly remember a staff member telling me, in reference to a Moroccan and Indonesian Young Professional that these women of color had only passed the entrance exam because they were from underrepresented countries. They were easily just as well educated and capable as I was. Possibly only when I pointed out that I, too, had written the exam and we all had to put a sticker over our name and nationality on the exams (they were still handwritten at the time) to avoid influencing test scores on the basis of nationality or assumptions about a name, did that person realize I was also a Young Professional as well. I don't think however the same assumptions about how I passed the same exam as a white German/Canadian woman were ever made.
While I'm glad that I pushed back on that type of comment, I suspect that is also why I have quietly assumed that I don’t really need unconscious bias training. However, eye opening new research which highlights that organizations, including international organizations are not race neutral, has changed my mind. This research analyzes how the origins of an organization and its internal structures, processes and hierarchies can in fact be racialized, and thereby create or reinforce implicit biases and inequalities amongst its employees. It provides a useful framework to understand how a human rights officer can come to such obviously biased conclusions about very competent Young Professionals from underrepresented countries. So this spotlight article unpacks this new research on racialized international organizations and what that means for DEI interventions in the UN.
How are International Organizations Racialized?
‘Racialized organizations’ are a new concept and term, which you’ve probably never heard of (much like my autocorrect, which keeps trying to change it). It was coined in 2019 by Professor Victor Ray at the University of Iowa to connect race and organizational theories. His point is not to call out organizations as racist. Rather his point is that organizations are not always race neutral, as we often assume. Only by understanding how organizations are formed, the hierarchies within them and processes that guide organizational functions, can we really identify how organizations reinforce inequities and come up with effective solutions to address those inequities.
“Without understanding how racism and organizations are fundamentally intertwined, we, as a society, neglect the fact that organizational formation was partially created on the basis of excluding racially minoritized groups and should be analyzed as such.” - D. Hughes, "Linking Race and Organizational Theory to better understand organizations" (2022).
While the UN has always been an international organization made up of member states from across the globe, the reality is that many countries with predominantly non-white populations did not have a seat at the table when core structures and processes were agreed because they were colonies of countries with majority white populations. As decolonization proceeded and predominantly non-white countries gained a numerical majority in legislative bodies like the General Assembly, they have not always been able to exercise that majority. The intention behind agreeing on the UN Secretariat’s budget by consensus, for example, was to avoid having a majority of countries impose a budget and contribution level on the biggest budget contributors in particular the United States. There was no explicit racial intent behind it, but if we take a step back and consider its implications, it has prevented the majority of countries of the Global South or G77, which are predominantly non-white, from asserting their priorities over wealthy countries, which are for the most part are predominantly white.
Professor Ray’s framework of racialized organizations takes these realities as a starting point for an analysis of an organization’s structures, policies and processes and how they unconsciously create and reinforce inequities and bias amongst employees. Two experts on international organizations, Professors Kseniya Oksamytna and Sarah von Billerbeck have applied this framework to UN peacekeeping specifically and demonstrated that there are racialized features of the UN, which are in fact mutually reinforcing. These racialized features work to reinforce and legitimize unconscious biases amongst UN employees. Even those who, like myself, may think they are immune.
Two key ways in which organizations can be racialized (intentionally or unintentionally) is by enabling different levels of agency across racial groups and by legitimizing the uneven distribution of material and non-material resources across different racial groups. In the UN, one of the most obvious examples of this is the differentiation between internationally and locally-recruited staff. Profs. Oksamytna and von Billerbek’s study is focused on UN peacekeeping and they point out that because peace operations (like all field-based UN organizations) are hosted mainly by predominantly non-white countries, locally-recruited staff are predominantly non-white. In contrast, international professional positions particularly at leadership levels in missions and at headquarters tend to be dominated by the Western European and Other Group, which is predominantly white. The international versus national staff categories therefore legitimizes different pay scales and employment conditions as well as non-material resources such as status and access to organizational processes and decision-making. The differentiation between internationally and locally recruited staff reflect economic realities and disparities between countries at the time of the UN’s founding that still exist today. At the same time it reinforces perceptions that local staff are less valuable or important to the UN, thereby feeding racial stereotypes.
The existence of such stereotypes, which are then continuously reinforced by the varying levels of agency and resources is another feature of racialized organizations. Profs. Oksamytna and von Billerbeck highlight how these factors come together in UN peacekeeping noting that:
"Overall, the perception that white peacekeepers are “professional, well-trained, and well- equipped, and...com[ing] with financial and political support” is reflective of both macro-level inequalities, whereby white majority countries are better able to provide material and political support to peacekeepers, and micro- level assumptions that peacekeepers from white-majority countries have desirable skills and values. As a consequence, at the meso or organizational level, whiteness serves as a credential in peacekeeping because it is taken as an indicator of aptitude in strategizing and leading, discipline, cosmopolitanism, and the ability to promote liberal values, all of which enjoy high status in the hierarchy of skills within the UN, and which therefore shape access to prestigious roles.” - K. Oksamytna and S. von Billerbeck, Race and International Organizations, 2024
From their 242 interviews with current and former peacekeeping officials, Profs. Oksamytna and von Billerbeck highlight a number of cringeworthy examples and quotes that demonstrate this interplay between macro-level inequalities and micro-level assumptions. A particularly salient point was how this plays out in terms of the skills that are valued or de-valued, which in turn links to questions of organizational performance. Repeated examples highlighted how peacekeepers from Western countries were assumed to have better skills in relation to strategic planning, intelligence gathering and capacity-building because they came from democratic countries, with greater access to technology and capabilities despite the fact that they often did not speak the local language or know the local context. Conversely, peacekeepers from the region or local staff, who spoke the language and had obvious advantages in human intelligence, for example, had their knowledge and contributions devalued because their written reports were considered poor quality or simply because they were excluded from processes where knowledge was synthesized for further action.
There were numerous similar examples in my own experience and that’s where I could also see how these biases start to negatively impact performance. In one memorable informal meeting on how the UN could improve its use of force training, I remember military officers from Western countries asserting that we needed to reflect a much more robust (and even aggressive) approach to the use of force in our training. This made their counterparts in the meeting from the main Troop Contributing Countries from South Asia visibly uncomfortable. Finally, a General from India politely asked, somewhat rhetorically, whether any of the Western officers had used force in a civil war context, where those against whom they had used force needed to be reintegrated into the same postwar society. I remember this meeting because his point was spot on, given that all of the UN peacekeeping operations at the time were engaged in civil war contexts. While I felt sure that the other UN civilian staff in the room also understood this point, none of us spoke up to acknowledge that these South Asian officers actually had a smarter and more appropriate perspective on the use of force. I now wonder if everyone really did understand the General’s point and whether our silence may have perpetuated stereotypes of superior Western military competence, causing us to devalue and miss an important strategic insight.
A final feature of racialized organizations is that when actual practices deviate from what is agreed on paper as a rule or a process, it tends to enable greater deviations of rules and norms by white members of the organization. Although not quite so recent, an example of concessions made to European peacekeepers to entice them to participate in UNIFIL in Lebanon highlights the detrimental performance and efficiency implications of such deviations:
“The deployment of French and Italian troops to Lebanon was conditioned on the creation of a temporary unit at UN headquarters, the Strategic Military Cell, staffed mostly by European military experts. France and Italy demanded this arrangement because the mission entailed 'high risks for the troops', revealing an unwillingness to place the lives of their soldiers in the hands of UN military planners who also direct the work of non-white peacekeepers. The UN Secretariat, keen to lure hesitant European contributors back to peacekeeping, reluctantly accepted the Strategic Military Cell, even though other troop contributors viewed it 'as an unjustified concession to the European states...[that] created a two-tier system, one for the global North and another for the South'. Indeed, non-white contributors wondered 'why European troops deserved professional expertise while their troops had to deal with the overstretched UN officials'. Moreover, accommodating peacekeepers from white-majority countries came at a steep administrative cost that all other countries collectively bore: 'for the UN Secretariat, Western contributions have added in terms of bureaucracy to its workload.'” - K. Oksamytna and S. von Billerbeck, Race and International Organizations, 2024
Such examples are by no means limited to UN peacekeeping. In October of this year, less than three weeks after the Pact for the Future agreed specific countries should not have a monopoly on specific senior posts, an exception was made to appoint the sixth consecutive Brit as the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC). This is not a racist decision per se, but the political assumptions (which analyzed in our June 2024 spotlight) are certainly racialized along the same lines as the examples delineated by Profs. Oksamytna and Billerbeck.
Implications for DEI interventions & Unconscious Bias Training in International Organizations
The examples of how the UN is a racialized organization reflect the political and financial realities of the multilateral system and its history. DEI specialists, HR and learning teams will not be able to change these realities. However, acknowledging these realities may be the first step in making interventions more effective. This is because understanding this specific context in which the UN is operating and was founded and the realities of who donor and recipient countries are, can help build a consensus across all UN employees that there is in fact a problem with respect to race.
As Robert Livingston of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership has pointed out:
“To effectively address racism in your organization, it’s important to first build consensus around whether there is a problem (most likely there is) and, if so, what it is and where it comes from. If many of your employees do not believe that racism against people of color exists in the organization, or if feedback is rising through various communication channels showing that Whites feel that they are the real victims of discrimination, then diversity initiatives will be perceived as the problem, not the solution. This is one of the reasons such initiatives are frequently met with resentment and resistance, often by mid-level managers. Beliefs, not reality, are what determine how employees respond to efforts taken to increase equity. So, the first step is getting everyone on the same page as to what the reality is and why it is a problem for the organization.” - R. Livingston, How to Promote Racial Equity in the Workplace, 2020
The question of where Whites feel they are the real victims of discrimination is an interesting one to contextualize for the UN. UNESCO’s evaluation of its Human Resources Management Strategy (2017-2022) highlights clearly that creating desirable recruitment ranges by country or nationality has created perceptions that efforts to improve diversity conflict with merit-based recruitment (para. 89). Evaluators noted that this issue does not seem to be exclusive to UNESCO, and the distrust and resentment they found will likely resonate with HR practitioners, in particular in the five other organizations that measure diversity in recruitment by nationality rather than by regions. This may be one important area for further exploration by DEI and HR specialists where it is important to really engage with employees for a genuine consensus around what their respective international organization’s problem is in relation to racism.
Another area where greater contextualization is likely to improve impact is in the unconscious bias training that virtually all international organization are implementing. A good training evaluation aims to capture behaviors change, not just knowledge transfer. This new research starts to highlight areas where realistic and relevant KPIs can be designed and tracked for implicit bias training. For example, after a team has undergone such training, are local staff included in more organizational processes and decision-making such as strategic planning or management meetings; do local staff feel that their contribution and skills are valued more after the training? Particularly in field locations, one could also examine how effectively a team adapts to local conditions and uses local knowledge to come up with solutions, a point which many different UN evaluations are already highlighting as a problem for programming and operational impact. DEI interventions to uncover and mitigate implicit biases that may be causing this problem could part of effective solutions and simultaneously illustrate the return on investment of DEI interventions more clearly.
The work by Profs. Oksamytna and von Billerbeck is the first that specifically looks at the question of race and international organizations, and there is clearly more work needed to fully flesh out the practical implications of their research and these concepts. This may be one area in particular where collaboration across international organizations and with academe could be particularly relevant. Some food for thought, for next year’s Career Development Roundtable.