What the Draft UN “Pact for the Future” Tells Us About International Insecurity

In a period of mounting international tensions and worsening conflicts, the role of the United Nations in maintaining international peace and security seems to be waning. The UN Security Council and General Assembly have debated Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war extensively, but their debates have had little effect in either case. Recent Security Council calls for ceasefires in Gaza and Sudan have gone unheeded. The International Court of Justice has been busy with Gaza, Ukraine, and Myanmar but with equally limited impact.

Lurking behind these individual setbacks for UN diplomacy –  which are hardly unprecedented – is a broader question about the world organization and whether it can adapt to an era of geopolitical competition. UN member states have had a chance to chew over this problem as they gear up for a special Summit of the Future that will take place in New York in September, on the eve of the yearly gathering of heads of state and government at the General Assembly. Secretary-General António Guterres initiated this summit in 2021 as an opportunity for leaders to consider wide-ranging reforms to the multilateral system. In preparation for the summit, New York-based diplomats have been negotiating a Pact for the Future (“Pact”) that is intended to offer a consensus vision for cooperation.

On July 17, Germany and Namibia, the co-facilitators of the Pact negotiations, released the latest version of this agreement, which UN members will kick to-and-fro in the coming weeks. It is a capacious piece of work, outlining 58 areas for action ranging from the complex (such as cooperation around artificial intelligence – AI) to the mildly diverting (promoting sport as a contribution to sustainable development). The chapter on international peace and security – and a separate section on reforms to bodies including the Security Council – will receive extra scrutiny.

The draft Pact is very much a work in progress. Member states – and especially the major powers – are likely to demand serious revisions and cuts before it is presented at the Summit. This is UN business as usual. In the run-up to the 2005 World Summit, the last major intergovernmental conference on UN reform, U.S. Permanent Representative John Bolton famously enforced a huge range of cuts to the outcome document, including the deletion of all references to disarmament.

Nonetheless, the Pact’s latest text is worth reading because it represents a good-faith effort by Germany and Namibia to summarize what they have heard from other UN members about the organization’s current and future role in international peace and security. It offers a broadly coherent summary of what worries the bulk of UN members, where they believe the organization could do more, and where they see the main limits of UN diplomacy.

Readers who do not follow the UN closely might reasonably expect this analysis to pivot on options for reforming the Security Council – which has faced widespread criticisms for its inability to affect events in Ukraine and Gaza – and the UN’s best-known conflict management tools, including Blue Helmet peace operations, mediation, sanctions and the implementation of international law.

The draft’s coverage of these issues is distinctly patchy. It does not yet contain a substantive paragraph on Security Council reform. Instead, the co-facilitators include a commitment in square brackets to achieve an “ambitious outcome” on the topic, adding that they “will present language on this issue as soon as possible in light of ongoing deliberations.” UN members isolated these negotiations on Council reform from discussions on the main Pact, recognizing that the topic could complicate agreements on other files. While Austria and Kuwait led the negotiations on Council reform with some vigor, holding a series of televised debates on the topic, there is no sign of consensus among UN members on changes to the size of the Council, the number of permanent members or the use of the veto. The most that leaders may agree to in September is the creation of a small new office at the UN to facilitate future reform discussions, or something similarly technical.

The draft’s language on peace operations is more encouraging. UN members have been seriously concerned in recent years that Blue Helmet missions are losing credibility after a series of crises, including Mali’s decision to expel UN forces from its territory last year. African member states have pushed for the African Union to take a greater role in leading operations. Nonetheless, many diplomats also argue that peace operations remain the UN’s unique selling point and the organization should not downgrade them lightly. The draft Pact includes a call for the Secretary-General “to undertake a review on the future of all forms of United Nations’ peace operations,” which could be a hook for a broader reform process in the years ahead.

Intriguingly, the draft Pact also suggests that member states should invest more in new instruments for dealing with maritime security and safety, a growing topic of interest after the recent Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Although the UN has deployed ships off Lebanon in an attempt to stem arms smuggling since 2006, most multilateral maritime operations involve ad hoc coalitions. Nonetheless, peacekeeping, whether on land or on water, may still be a space where the UN has value as a coordinator of international actions.

By contrast, the document is notably thin on some other established UN tools. It does not contain the word “sanctions” at all, an omission that reflects growing fissures in the Security Council about sanctioneering. After Russia vetoed the mandate for UN experts to monitor the implementation of sanctions against North Korea in May, many diplomats expect more battles over this and other regimes in the future. The draft does, however, include a brief reference to the need for states to refrain from imposing “unilateral economic measures” on others, although the U.S. and its European allies will likely want this dropped, given their regular use of these measures against Russia and other foes.

 With respect to preventive diplomacy and mediation, the draft Pact basically says that these are good things and should be used more widely. It nods to the chapters of the UN Charter that focus on the pacific settlements of disputes, encouraging the Secretary-General – a generally cautious diplomat – to use his good offices more often. But as UN officials working on preparations for the Summit of the Future have noted, opportunities for preventive diplomacy and mediation are irregular and case-specific, and the Pact cannot do much to shape this reality.

When it comes to the role of international courts and tribunals in addressing conflicts, the draft contains a rather strangled paragraph over the need to comply with decisions of the International Court of Justice – a divisive topic given the Court’s recent interventions over the Israeli offensive in Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territory. Unsurprisingly, the draft document has nothing to say about the International Criminal Court, as only two-thirds of UN members are parties to the Rome Statute.  It does, however, include language on the need to “end impunity and ensure accountability for atrocity crimes and other gross violations.” It even appeals to the permanent members of the Security Council not to use their vetoes on resolutions addressing mass atrocities. That language may well be for the chopping block, as the U.S., Russia and China oppose any such pledges. But the fact that Germany and Namibia chose to include the plea in this draft speaks to other UN members’ frustration with the Council.

The draft also includes solid if not radical sections on the need to advance the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and Youth, Peace and Security (YPS) agendas through UN and national mechanisms. These cover the need to prevent violence against women and girls, and to give both women and youth a greater say in political decision-making. The language on some of these points is vague. There is much talk of the need for “concrete steps,” and “concrete measures” a sure sign in multilateral-speak that nobody has very concrete ideas. However, advocates of both agendas will be relieved that they are given due space in the Pact, as China and Russia have led efforts in the Security Council to roll back the advances on the WPS file in recent years.

While the draft touches on a range of other topics – including, inter alia, terrorism, organized crime and environmental security – readers will nonetheless note that two main themes receive particular attention.

The first is the need to tie the UN’s peace and security work more closely to its development efforts. In particular, the draft Pact calls for the UN to invest resources to help states develop domestic conflict prevention mechanisms rather than relying on external crisis management efforts. One of the longest sections of the peace and security chapter (as its stands) is an extended discussion of developing “national prevention strategies and approaches,” touching on the need for programs to tackle problems ranging from racism and sexual violence to disinformation. This was one of the main recommendations coming from the Secretary-General’s A New Agenda for Peace, a document published last July outlining his own views on the UN’s future in international peace and security.

Many officials and diplomats associated with developing the Pact for the Future say that this is one of the most potentially significant parts of the draft. They see this as an opportunity to rebalance the way the UN engages in peace and security issues, shifting away from the interventionist and hard security of Blue Helmet peace and stabilization missions, and toward more consensual, development-led forms of assistance. This has extra appeal for many states in the so-called Global South, which are keen to underline their sovereign right to block outside interference, but are also severely concerned about economic pressures on their societies.

A potential pivot toward nationally-led peace initiatives could also have an institutional corollary within the UN system. Even if the Summit of the Future cannot deliver Security Council reform, the draft Pact suggests that it could endorse steps to strengthen the UN Peacebuilding Commission, a sort of junior cousin to the Council – created at the 2005 World Summit – that works with countries in a consensual fashion to address their fragilities. The draft Pact also suggests that the Commission could play an increased role in assisting states pursue their domestic conflict prevention priorities, possibly by harnessing resources from international financial institutions. While the UN is already planning its quinquennial review of the Peacebuilding Commission in 2025, this could end up being one, limited institutional reform that the Summit endorses.

Despite emphasizing the domestic features of conflict management, the second major preoccupation of the draft Pact is the risk of major interstate war involving powerful new technologies – and in the worst case, nuclear weapons. The draft text for the peace and security chapter warns baldly of “the risks of nuclear war that could pose an existential threat to humanity.” But it does not suggest that the UN’s members think the organization can do very much to reduce this threat. It calls on the nuclear powers to honor their ultimate commitment of full disarmament (dating back to the Non-Proliferation Treaty) and urges them to take steps to reduce the risks of nuclear conflict. But other than a vague nod to the need to bolster the international disarmament and non-proliferation architecture, the drafters of the Pact seem to see no new pathways to address the nuclear threat. Russia – which has persistently argued that the Pact should avoid nuclear questions altogether – may try to kill off what language the draft already contains.

Beyond the nuclear menace, the draft Pact addresses chemical and biological weapons and – significantly – also includes a section on the security implications of technologies such as AI, which Secretary-General Guterres flagged as a potential priority for the Summit of the Future from an early stage. While the Pact may play an important if small step in elevating these topics on the multilateral agenda, the drafters do not seem confident that UN members will make much progress addressing these threats anytime soon. In the New Agenda for Peace, for example, Guterres proposed setting a deadline of 2026, his last year in office, for a treaty outlawing lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). The Secretary-General’s suggestion received a cold reception from diplomats dealing with arms control issues in Geneva, as they thought the timeline was unrealistic. The draft Pact now merely proposes that governments “[a]dvance with urgency discussions of lethal autonomous weapons systems through the existing intergovernmental process.” Although much of this section of the draft is equally mushy, it does at least suggest that the Secretary-General should have a standing mandate to update UN members on security risks from new and emerging technologies.

It remains to be seen which parts of this agenda survive the final stage of intergovernmental negotiations before world leaders finally meet for the Summit of the Future on Sept. 21. But the draft alone does tell us a little about the state of thinking around the UN concerning the organization’s role in peace and security in the years ahead, as well as the institution’s limitations. 

Member states have an enduring attachment to some of the UN’s established crisis management tools (such as peace operations) and are keeping an eye on rising challenges (such as maritime security). But they seem to be leaning toward focusing the organization more on development-led security strategies and showing respect for states’ sovereign prerogatives. Conversely, the negotiators of the Pact for the Future also appear to be seized with the risks associated with large-scale war, yet uncertain how to address them. That alone is a worrying sign about the status of the world organization. For all its good work dealing with poverty and intrastate wars over the decades, the UN was designed in 1945 to save succeeding generations from the scourge of interstate war. Looking beyond the Summit of the Future, Secretary-General Guterres and his successors will need to find more openings to do what they can to address that acute danger, which is rising once again.