List of Secretary Generals . Trygve Lie (Norway), - . Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden), - . U Thant (Burma, now Myanmar), - .
Kurt Waldheim (Austria), - . Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (Peru), - . Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt), - ; . Kofi Annan (Ghana), - .
Ban Ki-moon (Republic of Korea), - . Antonio Guterres (Portugal) – continuing Unlike diplomats who represent a particular country, these international civil servants work for all Member States and take orders from the Secretary General and not from governments. The Secretariat is headquartered at New York and has its offices at Geneva, Vienna, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Beirut, Santiago and Bangkok. Comprising of over , staff drawn from member states, the Secretariat administers to the day-to-day work of the Organisation.
These duties are varied and range from peacekeeping operations, mediating international disputes, surveying social and economic trends to laying the groundwork for international agreements and organizing international conferences. The role of the Secretariat which is multi-faceted is under constant pressure from the dyad of nation- state imperatives and universal goals. The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council matters that may in his opinion disturb international peace and security. He can also use his good offices to prevent conflicts or promote peaceful settlements of disputes between nations.
The Secretary General can also act upon his own discretion to deal with humanitarian or any other problem that might require special importance. The UN family though is much larger, is encompassed by fifteen agencies and several programs and bodies. Some of these Organisations were founded during the era of the League of Nations such as the International Labor Organisation (ILO). Many more were created since to address and solve specific issues and problems since for which the UN was established.
This has resulted in much complexity of the UN and in the following decades since the founding of the Organisation contribute to the escalation of tasks that the UN had been charged to undertake. As a result, new bodies were added