Analysis ·
The median UN mission has nine diplomats. The largest has 153.
Every member state gets one vote in the General Assembly and one turn at the rostrum. What they can do with the rest of the building depends on a headcount that varies by a factor of more than a hundred.
The United Nations is built on the sovereign equality of its members, and in the General Assembly that is literally true: one state, one vote, one turn to speak. Almost everything else at the UN happens somewhere other than the Assembly floor — in committee rooms, in negotiating groups, in the corridor before a vote — and being in those places requires people.
Across 193 permanent missions there are 2,747 accredited diplomats. The median mission has 9. The smallest has 1. The largest has 153.
| State | Officers |
|---|---|
| United States | 153 |
| People's Republic of China | 108 |
| Germany | 91 |
| Russia | 75 |
| United Kingdom | 57 |
| Japan | 53 |
| Brazil | 45 |
| France | 42 |
| Cuba | 42 |
| South Korea | 37 |
Those ten missions hold 703 of the 2,747 diplomats accredited to the United Nations — about 26 per cent of the total, for about five per cent of the membership.
| State | Officers |
|---|---|
| São Tomé and Príncipe | 1 |
| Afghanistan | 2 |
| Dominica | 2 |
| Grenada | 2 |
| Palau | 2 |
| North Macedonia | 2 |
| San Marino | 2 |
| Federated States of Micronesia | 2 |
A mission of two or three covers the Security Council, six main committees, the budget negotiations, dozens of subsidiary bodies and every regional group meeting, with the same twenty-four hours everyone else has. A mission of a hundred and fifty can put someone in each of those rooms at once and still have people left to draft. The vote is equal; the capacity to shape what is being voted on is not.
What the ranks look like
| Rank | Officers |
|---|---|
| First Secretary | 458 |
| Counsellor | 453 |
| Attaché | 277 |
| Second Secretary | 267 |
| Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary / Permanent Representative | 174 |
| Third Secretary | 152 |
| Minister Counsellor | 115 |
| Adviser | 114 |
Who is counted. Accredited officers only, from the Secretariat’s published Blue Book. Members of diplomats’ households appear in the same document and are held in this corpus — under Article 37(1) of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, who enjoys diplomatic immunity is a matter of public record — but they hold no office, and counting them as mission capacity would assert a job nobody has. They are excluded from every figure here.
A mission’s size is not the whole of a state’s presence: some delegations are reinforced from capital for a negotiation, and a state can punch far above its headcount through a regional group. The count is what the Blue Book lists, on the date of the edition it lists it.
Where this page comes from
- Permanent Missions to the United Nations (the Blue Book) — UN document (public domain, ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2) · source