15 December 2024
The theme for this year’s 79th UN General Assembly was “Leaving no one behind: Acting together for the advancement of peace, sustainable development and human dignity for present and future generations.” Charismatic leaders from around the world delivered speeches espousing their deepest opinions about this theme and listened to other world leaders give speeches about their points of view. However, as everyone reflects on the assembly, which took place in September, it is important to ask: how much do the ideas discussed at these events become concrete policy actions that have real-world results?
As a worldwide organization born out of war, the UN has been at the frontier of global conflict mitigation, but the ideas debated at 760 United Nations Plaza often get stuck at the implementation stage. This hinders the organization’s ability to galvanize support and resources from its member countries. Year after year, global conflicts evolve into deeper complexity and solutions seem out of reach for the UN.
As the UN is an organization that is based on liberal institutionalism, in which multilateral institutions are used to facilitate interstate cooperation, could it be that liberal institutionalism itself is incapable of providing solutions? Or could it be that world peace is such an ambitious goal that neither liberal institutionalism nor any world organization could solve it? On the other hand, does the discrepancy between expectations and results happen because we have set a higher purpose for the UN that the institution is not equipped to handle? Simply put: are we expecting too much from the UN?
We should not discredit the UN’s successes. When crisis broke out in Timor-Leste in 2006, 150,000 Timorese were displaced. Under UN Security Council Resolution 1704, the UN set up an integrated mission involving more than 20 countries to serve as interim law enforcement and public security. After six years of unrest in the Southeast Asian nation, peace was finally achieved in 2012 and the UN handed back control of operations to local authorities. The organization has been active throughout recent history in other conflict zones and is currently involved in 11 peacekeeping missions around the globe. These operations have managed to create better conditions, if not total harmony.
The current outlook for world peace, however, is bleak. The current phase of the war between Russia and Ukraine, which began in 2022, has escalated and carries with it the threat of nuclear weapons. The Middle East is also facing challenges, with recent developments demonstrating that the conflict between Israel and Hamas that started on Oct. 7 last year shows no signs of abating. As we are marching to the end of 2024, the fall of the Assad administration in Syria has created a power vacuum in the country. These trends suggest that global cooperation and stability are at a low point and divisions are rapidly emerging among state and nonstate actors. In 2025 and beyond, there will be a contest between the UN’s values of cooperation and the trends of division and isolationism that are prevalent worldwide.
Present and future generations might ask: who is responsible for achieving and protecting long-term peace? Logically, a person or an entity should be responsible, but the reality is that nobody seems to want that responsibility and, even if they did, how could we equip them to achieve such a large task? Perhaps, then, the right question to be answered by current and future generations is: do we want long-term peace?
At a time when pessimism rules over the desire for world peace, what we should do is go back to the basics. Citizens do not care as much about the structure of our institutions or our methods of governance as they do about wanting an honest assessment of what the UN’s role in world affairs is. This will paint us a picture of what the world will look like in the future.
Perhaps there will be no perpetual peace. Perhaps peace is simply unachievable. What can be done, however, is to make bad situations better. Policymakers need to begin to think on the need to reorientate discourses from securitization toward de-escalation, charting new courses for transformative peace-building strategies in the Middle East and beyond. Through interdisciplinary collaboration and informed dialogues, we can contribute to shaping policy recommendations and practical interventions aimed at achieving sustainable security and stability. The world community should work together with the UN under this pretext of conflict mitigation.
