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Home > Projects > Reinventing Multilateralism: The United Nations
Reinventing Multilateralism: The United Nations
Global Challenges to Democracy

Reinventing Multilateralism: The United Nations

Image: Bartus Daniel / shutterstock.com

The United Nations is operating under conditions for which it was not designed. The current crisis is not primarily managerial. It reflects deeper structural tensions.

Four interrelated deficits define the problem.

The first is the erosion of the system’s capacity to enforce the UN Charter’s prohibition against interstate aggression. Article 2(4) remains the normative foundation of the international order, yet the mechanisms intended to uphold it have proven unable to constrain major powers when they act in violation of it.

The second is a widening functional mismatch between the system’s architecture and the nature of contemporary risks. Climate change, pandemics, and advanced technologies are transnational, intergenerational, and intersystemic. They do not fit a state-centric, issue-siloed institutional design.

The third is political blockage within the system’s core decision-making structures. The Security Council’s collective security model depends on great-power consensus that does not presently exist. At the same time, authority across the system is distributed in ways that leave much of the world’s population without meaningful influence over decisions that affect them directly.

The fourth is structural financial dependence. The UN’s financing model leaves it vulnerable to political pressure from its largest contributors, constraining its autonomy across all domains.

These deficits are interconnected. Taken together, they raise a central question: how can a multilateral system built on consent among major powers function when that consent no longer holds? The question is no longer how to make the system work better within its existing design but whether elements of that design must now be reconsidered.

Policy Brief and Reports

From Reform to Reinvention: Reimagining the United Nations for the 21st Century

April 7, 2026

From Reform to Reinvention: Reimagining the United Nations for the 21st Century

Jordan Ryan

This report argues that, in the face of a crisis of financial fragility, political paralysis and declining institutional legitimacy, the UN requires not reform but reinvention: a political redesign of incentives, authority and financing, not…

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The Secretary-General This Moment Demands

April 20, 2026

The Secretary-General This Moment Demands

Jordan Ryan

This policy brief is written as the four candidates for the next Secretary-General of the United Nations are due to present this week. It suggests eight recommendations for the person who will take up the…

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Reinventing the United Nations:  Report on the Uppsala Workshop, 27–28 August 2026

September 26, 2026

Reinventing the United Nations:  Report on the Uppsala Workshop, 27–28 August 2026

Jordan Ryan

What would it take for the United Nations to act more effectively on today's conflicts and cross-border challenges? This report draws on a workshop convened by the Toda Peace Institute and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation…

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Jordan Ryan

Jordan Ryan
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