United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres may have been engaging in a bit of aspirational hyperbole when in August 2022 he labeled the Summit of the Future, as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvigorate global action, recommit to fundamental principles, and further develop the frameworks of multilateralism so they are fit for the future.” If the recently held Summit and the associated Pact for the Future were the world’s only shot this generation at reinvigorating multilateralism for global cooperation, it may not have been wise to spend precious political capital on this huge convening in such a precarious geopolitical moment.
Unsurprisingly, the Summit did not reinvigorate multilateralism. Multilateralism survived, yes, but did not exactly get a new lease on life. It is true that when Guterres announced intentions to host the Summit in his “Our Common Agenda” report in September 2021, the world was quite a different place. Since then, major conflicts have escalated across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, peace operations have been asked to leave in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, and Iraq, and the climate emergency has worsened. Despite more of a need for new solutions, he and his team knew their ambition would have to be muted. Yet the reality is that it fell well short of his original stated intent.
The Summit will not go down in history as a transformative event. It did not create a new body to help thaw the relationship between Russia and the West, neither did it set new principles for the wider U.N.’s peacemaking agenda, nor did it revolutionize the U.N.’s human rights work. But what can we take away from the Summit and the process leading up to it? My colleague and friend Richard Ponzio shared some optimistic views last week in these pages of what should be next for the U.N. and its supporters to follow through on the Summit. I offer a more somber take, exemplified by a success, a failure, a pause for reflection, and a lesson to learn.
Moving Forward on U.N. Security Council Reform
Firstly, credit where credit is due: Under the auspices of negotiations on the Pact for the Future, progress on U.N. Security Council reform was finally made. Of course, this one is not solely down to the Summit of the Future – U.S. President Joe Biden had made it a key part of his 2022 U.N. General Assembly address. But language was agreed in the Pact calling for a more “representative, inclusive, transparent, efficient, effective, democratic and accountable” U.N. Security Council – key issues that, for decades, many U.N. Member States have been pushing for.
That, together with the parallel commitments of the United States, the U.K., and France – the three allied permanent members of the Security Council known as the P3 – in and around this year’s opening of the U.N. General Assembly – represents progress. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s speech to the Council on Foreign Relations set a new path towards much-needed reform with the announcement that the United States supports three reform commitments 1) two permanent seats for African countries, 2) a new elected seat for Small Island Developing States, and 3) agreement to engage in text-based negotiations on Council reform. New U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer used his U.N. General Assembly address to call for new permanent seats for African States, as well as permanent seats for Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan. And French President Emmanuel Macron also argued that the composition of the Council needed to change but that reform should go beyond that to clearly limit the use of the veto in incidents of mass killings.
These positions are opening salvos, but they appear to be part of a movement towards serious engagement on an issue that many felt would never be a realistic prospect. If it was the Summit of the Future process that helped catalyze, encourage, or spur on some practicalities on U.N. Security Council reform, that’s certainly commendable.
Stalemate on Peace and Security
Nonetheless, the Summit of the Future ultimately failed to move the needle on peace and security in any significant way. Some incremental changes to language aside, this was not a success for the U.N. secretary-general. His New Agenda for Peace policy brief of July 2023 received lukewarm uptake — and will not assume a similar pedestal in the annals of U.N. history as he no doubt hoped and as the original did (which Richard Gowan rightly called “a foundational statement of the U.N.’s role in stabilizing the post-Cold War world”). In fact, for the large part, this Pact simply contains the standard U.N. language agreeing to “accelerate responses,” “adapt approaches,” and “address challenges,” and depends almost entirely on previously agreed language.
States did, thankfully, pour water on the further proposed shifts toward “peace enforcement” for U.N. peacekeeping, a term that generally is understood to involve coercive measures, including the use of military force to restore or enforce peace on conflict parties or defeat armed actors — a concept quite incompatible with the impartiality principle of U.N. peacekeeping. On nuclear weapons, they did not reach consensus on anything beyond recommitting to previously agreed language, and they used recycled, soft language for the majority of other action areas in the section on “International peace and security.” Of course, gradual steps are the name of the game in U.N. inter-governmental negotiations, but in comparison to professed aspirations, this did not feel like a victory for U.N. leadership. Although the writing was very much on the wall, perhaps the main solace is that the language did not regress, and that such a text can still be agreed on many forward-looking agendas.
A Pause for Reflection?
As Richard Ponzio noted, almost 10,000 civil society and other stakeholders were involved in the Action Days for the Summit of the Future that preceded the leaders’ meeting. Across the entire process, their engagement amounted to hours of time, energy, capacity, and in many cases, the use of very limited financial resources. Was it worth it? Many will conclude that incremental progress in some areas of the U.N.’s work will mean yes, but there are many who have whispered over the past few months, even leading up to the Summit, that perhaps it would turn out not to be an efficient use of resources.
Events like the Summit of the Future are a considerable drain on capacity, resources, and focus of U.N. Member States, the U.N. system and the huge diversity of stakeholders in and around the U.N. If there is space, possibility to engage, and meaningful opportunities for input, then such summits can be time well spent. Indeed, when Member States adopted the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals in 2016, the impact of civil society was clearly seen in the final agreement. Starting years before, organizations like my current one (Saferworld), began making the case for bringing peace into the development agenda to replace the Millennium Development Goals. The inclusion of SDG16 on peace, justice, and inclusion, together with the forward-looking progressive commitments made in targets related to gender equality and inequality throughout the rest of the agenda, show clearly what civil society can do and bring to a multilateral process. But the world of 2022-2024 is not the same as the world of 2012-2014 and, just as progress toward the SDG’s has faltered “alarmingly,” so too a decade later, similar accomplishments toward a new set of aspirations were quite unlikely, if nigh on impossible.
So it is hard not to be skeptical about whether the investment-to-outcome ratio was positive for civil society. Those of us who have supported inter-governmental negotiations at the U.N. during the past few years can tell you how much harder it is to hold the line these days, and how few positive steps forward are being taken in these spaces.
Does that mean civil society should stop trying? No, it does not. In many cases, civil society pressure has been vital in pushing States to protect language on human rights, gender, and peacebuilding in negotiations. But it should elicit some level of reflection from the wider community about where to prioritize engagement in the future, how to ensure those involved are focusing on inter-governmental processes that can deliver change, and how to involve a diverse cross-section of the world’s civil society without promising an opportunity to influence a process that, in practice, does not really exist. In the context of shrinking resources, overwork, and worsening restrictions on civic space — any investment of limited capacity is precious. Extracting the time of civil society around the world to work on a summit with limited scope for influence is something that all involved in such processes should reflect upon, rather than simply celebrate.
A Call for Future U.N. Leadership?
The next secretary-general will take the reins of the United Nations in January 2027 and will undoubtedly look back at the current leader’s tenure for lessons. Whoever she is — see the recent call from the “1 for 8 Billion” campaign — she should clearly evaluate what has been gained from summits these past few years and be careful not to focus only on the feel-good vibes that such convenings bring. The Climate Ambition Summit in September 2023 did not elicit the desired commitments. And despite an SDG Summit in September 2023, there is no evidence of a step-change in investment in implementing the SDGs, and recent data now indicates that 48 percent of SDG targets exhibit moderate to severe deviations from their needed trajectory. There may well be a role for summits in the future — they are, after all, still a way to focus the political attention and energy of world leaders and a mode of trying to galvanize some commitments. But it is worth considering whether summitry is a tool that is becoming increasingly ineffective.
The current moment may require different solutions. Those, like myself, who believe in the U.N. will always favor multilateralism as a tool for setting universal standards and finding ways to address crises of the commons. But, especially recently, the U.N. has not proven ideal for dealing with global governance issues, especially if one believes that governance should be based on some level of democratic consent. As the world becomes decidedly less democratic, this trend might only worsen.
As highlighted by Richard in his recent piece, some will see a call for a future U.N. Charter Review Conference as appealing. Yet many will be cautious about the potential for a disaster — even if this Conference does not take place until 2028 — given the activism of a “like-minded group” of autocratic states who are looking to attack any mention of human rights or progressive notions of peacebuilding in any inter-governmental agreement.
There is already a risk that the investment of political capital in the Summit of the Future could leave less bandwidth to engage with the big moments of multilateralism in 2025 that were already on the calendar, such as the U.N. Peacebuilding Architecture Review or the 25-year anniversary of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security. Convening is of course not a zero-sum game, but it is already hard enough to convince Member State representatives in national capitals that the U.N. matters. It becomes even harder when they’ve already spent time on splashy summits that fall short of expectations.
Perhaps this Summit of the Future was the only tool left for a secretary-general who is battered and bruised after eight incredibly trying years in the top job. But the next secretary-general would be wise to avoid dragging the U.N. world into all-encompassing summits in the future and keep the work of the U.N. — and multilateralism — moving along within the spaces and processes created during better circumstances (where Member States can still agree on positive changes). The concept of high-level summits will always be there and ready for the planning – in hopes of more productive results — when geopolitical tensions allow.