United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs

The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) is a UN Secretariat office that supports disarmament and arms control processes and helps enable multilateral negotiations and implementation across the UN’s disarmament architecture. It advises and assists UN Member States, relevant UN bodies, and partners on workstreams spanning nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, biological and chemical weapons conventions, conventional weapons (including small arms and light weapons), and transparency/confidence-building measures. UNODA also supports UN bodies and processes such as the UN Programme of Action on small arms and light weapons (and its associated review processes), and various disarmament-related transparency instruments (for example, the UN Register of Conventional Arms and the UN Report on Military Expenditures), and it publishes disarmament research products such as the UNODA Occasional Papers series.

Strategically, UNODA’s role is primarily “convening + enabling”: it provides substantive and organizational support to negotiations and implementation of international instruments, supports institutional and policy coordination across disarmament forums, and provides capacity-building and support mechanisms that translate agreed goals into practical work on the ground (notably through trust-facility and project-based models for conventional arms issues). In the near term, UNODA’s output continues to track major global treaty cycles and review processes—particularly around nuclear non-proliferation and related disarmament work—while also addressing cross-cutting challenges such as emerging technologies and expanding domains of security policy.