United Nations to Retire at 70 – Youthful United Actors to Take Over

This opinion piece is part of the the Global Governance Futures 2025 program which brings together young professionals to look ahead and recommend ways to address global challenges.

The United Nations (UN) is a picture of the world 70 years ago and is no longer suitable for or representative of current global realities. To deliver on the original vision of its founders and address urgent global challenges, such as climate change, reform of the UN is needed. Such UN reforms need to go deeper than those that have already been discussed, like the inclusion of more Member States in arguably the most powerful UN body – the Security Council. While most people recognize this reform as useful and appropriate, it has been indefinitely postponed because no agreement on it could be reached. In this age of unprecedented global challenges we need better global governance. The United Nations should be turned into the ​“United Actors,” which would include certain non-state actors alongside the current UN Member States. If reform continues to elude the UN, innovative actors of global diplomacy should move ahead and create parallel structures which can demonstrate their worth to the world in terms of enhanced global consultation and more coordinated action.

It has been over two decades since the Cold War ended, and yet we lack a consensual description of the current global order. There is no simple explanation to make sense of the current complex world. The roles and relative power of nation states have not only shifted between each other – the relative decline of Russia, the rise of China, India and Brazil – but also between state- and non-state actors. Notably, three groups of non-state actors play an important role in today’s globalized world and should be included in global governance in a way that befits their influence.

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