UN’s rhetorical toolkit: How colonial-era texts and Western canon obscure global wisdom in climate justice discourse
Original framing: “UN speakers’ go-to quotes: Ancient texts, modern greats and a little Talking Heads - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Women, racialized scholars, and Global South intellectuals are systematically excluded from the UN’s 'go-to quotes,' despite their critical insights. For example, *Wangari Maathai’s* work on eco-feminism or *Arundhati Roy’s* critiques of neoliberalism are never cited in the same breath as Milton or Keats. The 2020 *UN Women* report on gender and climate change highlighted how Indigenous women’s knowledge is erased in policy, yet the UN’s rhetorical toolkit remains unchanged. Even the *Dalit* philosophers of India or the *Black feminist* theorists of the Global South offer frameworks that challenge the UN’s Eurocentric canon, but their voices are absent from the podium.
The UN’s rhetorical toolkit is not a neutral collection of 'go-to quotes' but a colonial artifact that reinforces whose knowledge is deemed 'universal.
' By centering dead white males and Eurocentric texts, the UN obscures the living epistemologies of Indigenous peoples, African scholars, and Global South feminists—systems that offer direct solutions to crises like climate collapse and inequality. The trickster here is the *illusion of inclusivity*: the UN pretends to seek global wisdom while excluding 90% of human thought, a pattern that mirrors its institutional failure to address systemic injustice. To break this cycle, the UN must treat knowledge as a *relational* rather than *extractive* process—amplifying voices that have been silenced for centuries, not just quoting the same figures that justified empire. The path forward lies in structural changes: mandating Indigenous curation, decolonizing education, and creating platforms for marginalized knowledge to shape global discourse, not just be cited as footnotes.