UNGA Decoded: A Plain-Language Guide to the UN's Biggest Diplomatic Week

The United Nations General Assembly has begun its annual gathering of world leaders, a week filled with diplomacy, dealmaking and speeches — along with a vocabulary all its own. Here is a breakdown of the terms that recur during the session.

UNGA is shorthand, often pronounced "UN'-gah," for the General Assembly's High-level Week, when presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and other top leaders from all 193 member states are invited to address the world and one another. New Yorkers sometimes use "General Assembly" with a groan to describe what many experience as a week of heavy traffic. The assembly itself, however, is more than this meeting: it is a body that takes up global issues and votes on resolutions throughout the year.

General Debate is the centerpiece of the week, giving each country's leader, or a designated representative, the microphone for a state-of-the-world address. This year's theme focuses on restoring trust, managing transformation and ensuring that the 81-year-old United Nations "delivers for all." Speakers frequently discuss major global issues and flashpoints, highlight domestic achievements and needs, air grievances and seek to project statesmanship. Although the "debate" is largely a series of speeches rather than an interactive discussion, rebuttals are permitted at the end of each long day, and some rival neighbors routinely go several rounds.

Bilateral, or "bilat," refers to private meetings between senior officials of two countries. Many UNGA veterans say the gathering's real value lies in these one-on-one encounters and other off-camera exchanges among decision-makers. Ministerial describes meetings of cabinet-level officials, such as foreign ministers, from different countries.

The Security Council is the UN's most powerful component, tasked with maintaining international peace and security. Its 15 members can adopt binding, though sometimes ignored, resolutions, impose sanctions and deploy peacekeeping troops. While the week belongs to the General Assembly, the council generally holds one or two high-profile meetings as well.

The P5 are the council's five permanent members with veto power: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, under a structure established in 1945. The E10 are the council's 10 elected, nonpermanent members, chosen by the General Assembly for two-year terms in seats allocated by region. Calls for council reform are a staple of UNGA, with a major complaint being the absence of permanent members from Africa and the Latin America-Caribbean region, though other nations have also long sought permanent seats.

The G77 stands for the "Group of 77 and China," a developing-countries interest group formed within the UN in 1964. Despite the name, it now has 134 members.

COP31 is a major UN climate conference scheduled for November in Antalya, Turkey. 1.5 degrees refers to a crucial climate threshold: under the 2015 Paris climate accord, countries agreed to work to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial times. The goal has long appeared elusive, and the UN acknowledged this month that the planet will surpass that threshold in the next few years.

The SDGs are the UN's sustainable development goals, spanning areas from combating climate change to eliminating hunger and poverty to achieving gender equality. Member countries unanimously adopted them in 2015 as a 15-year action plan, but progress is seriously lagging.

SIDS stands for some 39 "small island developing states." UNGA is an important platform for them to raise concerns such as climate change and the existential threat they face from projections of rising seas and intensifying storms — often a painfully timely subject at a meeting that falls in the thick of the Atlantic hurricane season.

BRICS is a developing-economies coalition that initially included Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and has grown to 11 countries. Many international groups are centered on regional, economic, defense or other ties, but BRICS nations account for about half the world's population and a large share of its resources and economic activity. The group has been a venue for China and Russia to project influence and work to counter the West, and it is also grappling with internal divisions.

An NGO is a nongovernmental organization, such as an advocacy group, charitable foundation or nonprofit relief organization. LDCs are very poor nations known at the UN as "least-developed countries." Forty-four nations currently meet the criteria, which include a gross national income of $1,088 or less per person per year.

IFIs are international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, established at a 1944 UN conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Critics view the Bretton Woods duo as sclerotic entities that have badly failed poor and developing countries. The institutions have defended their work while saying they are trying to evolve.

Multilateralism is global or near-global partnership that is united and collectively develops enduring rules and shared norms. The idea undergirds the UN itself, though many warn it is under threat. Multipolar describes a scenario with several different and sometimes competing centers of power, rather than a single superpower or two. Multistakeholder refers to an approach to big projects and problem-solving that incorporates not only governments but businesses, NGOs and possibly others. Supporters see the concept as key to the future of world cooperation, while some progressive groups view it as a sell-out to big corporations and other powerful interests.

The two-state solution is a concept for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing an independent Palestinian nation living in peace alongside Israel. The framework was set down in the 1993 Oslo Accords and embraced by the UN, but progress toward implementing it stalled long before the recent Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal.

South-South cooperation is collaboration among countries, organizations and people in what is known as the Global South. The term refers to developing nations largely, though not exclusively, in the Southern Hemisphere that generally want a bigger say in their own development and in international affairs. Unilateral coercive measures is a usually critical way of describing sanctions imposed by one country in hopes of spurring some action in another.