EDITORIAL
The United Nations is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year in 2025. Born out of the ashes of the Second World War, the organisation was created to prevent future global wars and ensure an entirely new level of international cooperation grounded in international law. Yet in a deeply fractured world today, the question that looms large on everyone’s mind is whether the UN is still fit for purpose?
This question is increasingly being asked across different countries and quarters, primarily because the UN’s principal and most powerful organ, the UN Security Council (UNSC) has failed terribly in recent years to uphold its primary responsibility of maintaining international peace and security. The world is at war, with peoples and societies burning across Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan and other countries, with no end in sight.
The victors of World War 2, US, Russia, UK, France and China, the pantheon or P5, rule the UN through the veto at the UNSC and have paralysed it to the determinant of the multilateral system. At the time of its creation in 1945, the United Nations had 51 nations as its members, today it has 193. From the outside the UN looks and feels like an old established company, unable and unwilling to reform and update itself to the new realities of a 21st century emerging multipolar world order. But the story is so much more.
The need for structural reforms of the UNSC is not just a demand made by countries like India, Brazil, Japan and all of Africa and Latin America, it is perhaps most viscerally felt and wished for by an overwhelming majority of UN staff themselves, with successive UN Secretary-Generals calling for UNSC reforms in the most public manner for decades.
The inability to reform the UNSC is a disservice to the over 133,245 UN personnel, who as per UN’s own 2023 data, work tirelessly around the world to make our planet a better place. It dishonours not only their service but the larger UN System and its 80 years of tremendous achievements: from Agenda 2030 to peacekeeping to human rights and development.
In his address to the Security Council in February this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres passionately remarked, “Eight decades of the UN and one can draw a direct line between the creation of the United Nations and the prevention of a third world war.”
While multilateral cooperation is the beating heart of the United Nations, multilateralism is only as strong as each and every country’s commitment to it. With negotiations, discussions, deliberations and outcomes of UNSC reforms stuck under the Intergovernmental Negotiations framework or IGN since 2008, there seems to be no light and even less hope at the end of this tunnel.
Many like me had hoped that the UN’s 50th or 75th anniversary would be a turning point, but alas the organisation is stuck in a perpetual loop of member states disdain to reform it. The inbuilt permanence of the UN Charter, the UN’s founding document and the incredibly high standards required to alter it have ensured that the Charter has held its weight for 80 years and counting, promoting and building a multilateral system for all to benefit, but it has also created a duality.
The almost insurmountable conditions to change the UN Charter, and through its amendment, reform the Security Council have now become the principal reason for a creeping delegitimisation of the United Nations in the eyes of the world. For if the UN cannot fulfil its primary mandate of maintaining international peace and security, why should the people of the world continue to look to it for moral and responsible guidance? How is the world to reach sustainable peace?
The victors of World War Two made themselves permanent members of the Security Council in 1945. Today in 2025, the world has moved forward, forging ahead into a new strategic, economic and global societal reality but the Security Council remains stuck, morphing into an accusation chamber that is stubbornly bolted to the vagaries of the past.
21st century problems cannot be solved by 20th century structures. This is clear to the UN Secretary-General, clear to UN staff and clear to an overwhelming population of the planet, as witnessed by almost universal agreement on the need to reform the Security Council and in periodic votes at the UN General Assembly, the UN’s other principal and most equitable organ.
This year, as the UN celebrates its 80th anniversary, the clamour for UNSC reforms will only grow louder and shriller. Yet the short answer on whether reforms will take place or not remains simply, “not this year, and probably not the next.”
How much longer will this disservice to the institution of the United Nations continue?
