The Glass Tower

By Angela Carlisle, Global Voices, CSW Fellow 2026

The glass tower of the United Nations Headquarters has always occupied a space in my mind that was more mythological than physical. A grand, unattainable stage where the "important people" of the world decided the fate of the rest of us from a distance. However, arriving in New York this past March for the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), that perception underwent a radical shift. Being in the very rooms where global decisions affecting everyone are made, was a visceral, confronting experience that stripped away the abstraction of global diplomacy and replaced it with something far more complex and human.

Walking through the gates of the UN building, there is an immediate sense of the weight of the institution. You are surrounded by the flags of 193 nations, a visual shorthand for the sheer scale of human diversity. For the first few days, the experience was overwhelming. I tried to make a conscious effort to take it all in.

A highlight of CSW for me was hearing Padma Raman, the Australian Executive Director of the Office for Women, speak in the UN General Assembly. As a delegation, we were lucky to have met her in Canberra ahead of CSW. She was kind, intelligent and approachable. There was a quiet intensity to the UN General Assembly Hall when she spoke that has stayed with me.

Perhaps the most unexpected takeaway from my time in New York was the humanisation of the institution. The CSW is a hive of raw human energy. Meeting and observing people like Padma: passionate, flawed, intelligent and persistent humanised the institution. Watching her speech in the same space where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted made the history feel tangible, shifting it from something I had only ever read about to something I was actively breathing in. The UN stopped being an untouchable ivory tower.

As the CSW progressed, the unattainable nature of the UN began to dissolve. The grandeur of the architecture is, in many ways, a mask for the grinding, granular work that happens within its walls. I realised that the UN is not a monolithic entity that acts upon the world. Instead, it is a platform, sometimes fragile, often frustrated, where the world attempts to speak to itself.

When you are reading about the CSW from a distance, the debates over terminology or the placement of a comma in a resolution can seem like pedantic legalism. But when you are there, witnessing the tension between delegates, you see that those words represent hard-fought concessions on reproductive rights, economic autonomy, and safety for all women and girls. 

The energy inside the CSW was a furnace of collective intent. I entered the building feeling like an outsider looking in on a world I didn’t belong to. I left realising that the "unattainable" nature of these spaces is a myth that we must dismantle. It is essential that all people impacted by these decisions are represented in the room. For this reason, I think it is crucial that States invest in centring the voices of those with lived experiences. The integrity of the judicial and political systems I study relies on this very human engagement. Just as procedural fairness in a courtroom requires a strict adherence to protocol to protect the vulnerable, the international arena requires a rigorous, almost mechanical commitment to dialogue with all people it impacts. 

-------

The views and opinions expressed by Global Voices Fellows do not necessarily reflect those of the organisation or its staff.