Lifestyle
On Wednesday 21 October, the United Arab Emirates sent a nomination letter from President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to the presidents of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council, putting forward Lana Nusseibeh, UAE Minister of State, as a candidate to succeed António Guterres, whose second five-year term as Secretary-General ends on 31 December, and she became one of seven candidates in a race for a post that has been held by nine men since the organisation was founded eighty years ago.
Born in 1978 in Abu Dhabi, Nusseibeh belongs to a prominent Jerusalem family that has been politically active for decades, and her father, Zaki Nusseibeh, is a cultural adviser to the UAE President, while her grandfather, Anwar Nusseibeh, held several ministerial posts in Jordan and served as its ambassador to Britain in the 1960s. She took a bachelor’s and master’s degree in History at the University of Cambridge and a master’s with distinction in Israeli and Jewish Diaspora Studies at SOAS, and her early career took her to Paris as a UNESCO consultant and to the Gulf Research Center as an analyst before she joined the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she established the ministry’s Policy Planning Department in 2009.
Nusseibeh represented the UAE at the United Nations from 2013 to 2024, and she was the first Emirati woman to hold the post of Ambassador and Permanent Representative. During those years she was elected Vice President of the 72nd session of the General Assembly, served as President of the UN Women Executive Board in 2017, and co-chaired the intergovernmental negotiations on Security Council reform while also co-chairing the Friends of the Future of the UN with her British counterpart. She led the UAE’s successful campaign for a seat on the Security Council, and in 2023 she helped advance a Council resolution creating a mechanism to facilitate humanitarian aid deliveries into Gaza. When her tenure ended in April 2024, Palestine’s UN observer, Riyad Mansour, presented her with the Shield of Palestine in appreciation of her efforts, and she returned to Abu Dhabi to become a Minister of State in September 2025.
Her campaign was launched with an eight-page vision statement titled A United Nations for the Next Eighty Years, which ranges from preventing conflicts and reforming peacekeeping to emerging technologies and greater accountability over how the UN spends its money. At its centre sits a belief that the organisation should engage earlier in disputes and aim for achievable first agreements, such as humanitarian access and prisoner exchanges, which can then be built upon through persistent diplomacy. She has taken a leave of absence from her government responsibilities to focus on the campaign, a step her statement presents as a reflection of the independence the Charter demands of the office, and in her announcement she offered to serve by “speaking frankly with every government and answering to none.”
Nusseibeh has been careful about how her gender features in the campaign. She has said it would be wonderful for the next Secretary-General to be a woman, yet she is standing because of her optimism about the future of the UN and her conviction that the job calls for someone relentless about diplomacy, and she describes herself as a “stubbornly optimistic” diplomat who credits her two young sons with teaching her more about patience and urgency than any negotiation. Were she to succeed, she would be the first woman to lead the UN, the first of Palestinian descent, and the second Secretary-General from the Arabic-speaking world after Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Support has gathered quickly around her. The Gulf Cooperation Council’s Secretary-General, Jasem Mohamed Albudaiwi, said its member states unanimously endorsed the nomination, and Dr Anwar Gargash, Diplomatic Adviser to the UAE President, described it as a reason for pride in national talent and its growing presence on the international stage. Cyprus’s Foreign Minister, Constantinos Kombos, has also voiced his backing, and the Maldives has given its support as well.
The road ahead is a demanding one. Rebeca Grynspan, the former Costa Rican vice president who now heads the UN Trade and Development body, has led in straw polls so far, and the field also includes Rafael Grossi, who has led the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2019, and Guyana’s UN ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett. The Security Council usually selects the candidate before the General Assembly approves the recommendation, and she will need to win over the veto-wielding permanent members while answering questions about the UAE’s human rights record and its role in the war in Sudan, an allegation that critics have linked to the UAE’s reported backing of the Rapid Support Forces. As Secretary-General, she would be bound by the UN Charter to act independently of all governments, including Abu Dhabi, and the successor is due to take office on 1 January 2027.
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