Curated playlist
Organisations based in Geneva
- International Organization for StandardizationThe International Organization for Standardization, known the world over simply as ISO, was founded on the 23rd of February 1947, and in the decades since it has published over 25,000 international standards. That is a staggering output…
- League of NationsThe League of Nations was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation built to keep the peace, and its founder won a Nobel Prize for it before failing to bring his own country aboard. In 1919, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson was…
- International Organization for MigrationThe International Organization for Migration was born in the wreckage of the Second World War, in a Europe where nearly a million people had nowhere to go. It was 1951, and the urgent question was not whether to help displaced people move…
- International Red Cross and Red Crescent MovementOn the evening of the 24th of June 1859, the Swiss businessman Jean-Henri Dunant arrived in the small Italian town of Solferino. He had come to meet the French emperor Napoleon III about business troubles in Algeria. Instead he walked into…
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was born from an unusual political tension. In 1988, the Reagan administration worried that if independent scientists were left to shape international climate policy on their own, governments…
- International Committee of the Red CrossThe International Committee of the Red Cross began with one man staring at a battlefield and making an unexpected choice. In June 1859, a Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant arrived in the small Italian town of Solferino intending to meet…
- World Economic ForumThe World Economic Forum holds its annual gathering in Davos, a mountain resort tucked into the eastern Alps of Switzerland, where around 3,000 paying participants spend up to five days debating the state of the planet. Founded on the 24th…
- World Meteorological OrganizationThe World Meteorological Organization exists because weather has never respected borders. Rain clouds forming over one country deliver their consequences in another. Storms that begin over open ocean arrive at coastlines that belong to…
- International Committee on Intellectual CooperationThe International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation held its first session on the 1st of August 1922, with the philosopher Henri Bergson in the chair. Twelve people gathered under the auspices of the League of Nations with a task that…
- International Union of Pure and Applied PhysicsThe International Union of Pure and Applied Physics was born in Brussels in 1922. A group of physicists assembled there declared that forming such a union was imperative. That single word, imperative, captures something essential about the…
- Building and Wood Workers' InternationalThe Building and Wood Workers' International speaks for more than 12 million workers across 135 countries. That is a vast constituency, spread across industries as different as forestry in Burkina Faso and construction in South Korea. What…