A SEAT AT THE TABLE: New Zealand and the United Nations Security Council 2015-2016.

• Jurisdiction: New Zealand
• Date: 01 January 2021
• Author: McIntyre, W. David

A SEAT AT THE TABLE: New Zealand and the United Nations Security Council 2015-2016

Editors: Graham Hassall and Negar Partow

Published by: Massey University Press, Auckland, 2020, 392pp, $45.

In this amazingly meaty symposium, 26 contributors provide a revealing analysis of New Zealand's fourth term, during 2015 and 2016, as one of the ten elected non-permanent members of the UN Security Council. The contributors are mainly the diplomats who participated in New York and Wellington, plus a sprinkling of politicians and academics. Their mini-biographies appear as a helpful appendix. The book starts with an essential glossary of the many messy acronyms which afflict the jargon of diplomacy. The most colourful is WYSIWYG to characterise New Zealand's 'honest broker' strategy--'what you see is what you get'. The work is divided into four parts: the campaign, the term, case studies and assessments. There are 26 photographs.

The campaign to get elected as a representative of WEO, the Western European and Other Group, was started by the Clark government in 2004 (ten years before the vote) and taken up by the Key government in 2009. Simon Draper, who headed MFAT's United Nations, Human Rights and...