Dr. Madeleine Albright passed away on March 23, 2022. She left an indelible legacy to her family, adopted country, and the world. While she is perhaps most well-known as America’s first female Secretary of State, who pioneered the Community of Democracies, helped to bring peace to Kosovo, and championed welcoming Central and Eastern European countries into NATO, she was also an unapologetic defender of the United Nations. Combining her nation’s unrivaled political, economic, and military power in the 1990s with the global reach and legitimacy of the world body, Dr. Albright coined and instituted—while serving as Permanent Representative to the UN—an “assertive multilateralist” approach that continues to inform post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy. 

Even after serving in high public office, Dr. Albright exceled as a global problem-solver and statesperson. Alongside her Columbia Ph.D. classmate, Professor Ibrahim Gambari, who similarly served as Nigeria’s foreign minister and UN representative, she co-chaired, from 2014 to 2016, the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance, a project of the Stimson Center and Hague Institute for Global Justice. As they co-wrote in their Foreword to the Commission’s report Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance:

In our lifetimes, we have witnessed unparalleled human achievements. At the same time, we are keenly aware of the shadows that threaten our progress: militant extremism continues to take root in the world’s poorly governed spaces, where the rule of law has collapsed, and discrimination threatens the rights of women, children, and minorities in many places. Our fragile ecosystem, new threats in cyberspace, and the downside risks of an increasingly interconnected world economy also remind us daily that we need a new approach to global governance, one that relies on different kinds of public and private institutions.

Applying the lens of “just security,” which considers the interplay and purposely gives equal weight to principles of justice and security in global governance, the Albright-Gambari Commission presented over eighty recommendations for improving global conflict, climate, and collaborative economic management, including a call for a World Conference on Global Institutions. The Commission and its co-chairs sought solutions to governance challenges at multiple levels of human experience that would enable humanity not only to survive but to thrive in peace with dignity. To date, some twenty of the Commission’s ideas have achieved policy uptake, and others are likely to be debated in September 2023 at UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ Summit of the Future in New York.

As recently as last Autumn, Dr. Albright and Professor Gambari stressed the danger of growing nativist and exclusive nationalist tendencies worldwide that are eroding fundamental norms and institutions for global cooperation. Dr. Albright never shied away from condemning the overt anti-multilateralist shift in global affairs of the past years, whether former President Donald Trump’s decision to remove the U.S. from several international bodies and agreements or the increasingly belligerent language and actions of Russia in the UN Security Council.  An accomplished scholar, she was always prepared to support her passionate positions with concrete evidence and creative policy choices that favored diplomacy over war, democracy over autocracy, and global cooperation over isolationism.

While her ideas—and pragmatic idealism—will live on, especially through her family, colleagues, and the thousands of students and young professionals she mentored and inspired over the years, Madeleine Albright will be deeply missed, including by her many affectionate admirers and partners at the Stimson Center.