The UN at 70: Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance

By Madeleine K. Albright and Ibrahim A. Gambari - 28 September 2015
The UN at 70: Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance

Madeleine K. Albright and Ibrahim A. Gambari, Co-Chairs, Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance, introduce the idea of 'just security' to forge a mutually supportive global system of accountable, fair, and effective governance and sustainable peace.

Humanity today faces a range of urgent problems—from wars and forced migration to the growing dangers of climate change, cyber insecurity, and global economic shocks—that cannot be dealt with effectively by any one state or group of states. Meeting these challenges, which threaten the security of states and peoples alike, also exceeds the operational and political capacities of global governance institutions created in the mid-twentieth century for critical but different purposes. Effective responses need to be collaborative, meet multiple sets of interests, and serve not only security but justice, as trying to have one without the other is simply unsustainable.

Against this backdrop, the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance set out one year ago to address the present crisis of global governance. Our effort complemented other reviews focused solely on climate, cyberspace, financial contagion, peacekeeping, or peacebuilding, touching instead on all of these, their relationships, and their implications for global institutions and governance. We concluded that the world needs a new global ethic and new tools and networks to build better global institutions to focus policymakers, opinion leaders, and international civil society on the need for more creative global solutions to looming global challenges.

Underpinning a new global ethic is a contemporary understanding of security that extends beyond the interests of and pressures on the state to include the needs of and pressures on people. It also includes a conception of justice that needs to be framed in terms of achieving a basic level of liberty and opportunity, while reducing social and economic inequalities in order to benefit, in particular, the least advantaged in the world at large.

To us, it is clear that justice is essential to safeguarding human security and that a just society is an illusion without security. The Commission’s report, “Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance”, therefore brings these two concepts together through the prism of “just security.” In short, the goal of just security is to forge a mutually supportive global system of accountable, fair, and effective governance and sustainable peace. It stems from a vision rooted in long-standing international commitments to human rights, international law, and the critical role of flexible and evolving multilateral institutions, states, and non-state actors in global governance.

In the accompanying article, we detail some of the chief challenges to advancing just security globally today. To overcome these obstacles, we recommend—for adoption and initial implementation between now and the UN’s 75th anniversary in 2020—several major global governance reform innovations, including:

  • Building next-generation capacity at the United Nations in conflict early warning, mediation, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, with a greater proportion of women in each of these roles and greater investment in transformational justice to prevent recurrence of civil wars and other conflicts that hurt civilian populations most of all.
  • Linking major interstate forums on climate change with newer networks of subnational authorities, civil society, and business groups; creating a Global Climate Action Clearinghouse and a Climate Engineering Advisory Board to review proposals for potentially dangerous atmospheric modification; and building a “green technology” licensing facility to channel the best adaptive technologies to populations most vulnerable to climate change.
  • Forging stronger links between the G20, global financial institutions, and the UN to help prevent cross-border economic shocks, and promoting a more cost-effective architecture for secure access to the Internet throughout the Global South.
  • Establishing a UN Global Partnership to tap better the expertise of civil society and the business community, as well as a UN Parliamentary Network to raise greater awareness and participation in UN governance.
  • Generating smart coalitions working on parallel tracks, including toward a World Conference on Global Institutions in 2020 to promote these and related ideas needed to meet 21st century challenges and to adapt critical UN and other global institutions—especially those tasked with conflict prevention, human rights promotion, climate governance, stable and broad-based economic growth, and peacebuilding.

The Commission, and its supporting institutions, The Hague Institute for Global Justice and the Stimson Center, invite partners from around the world—in governments, civil society, business, the media, and international organizations—to work together towards sustaining a coalition for progressive global change, in pursuit of a vision of justice and security for all.

To read a longer treatment of the issues and ideas laid out in this opinion piece, please click the image above or the PDF at the bottom of this piece.

 

Madeleine Albright served as U.S. Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations. Ibrahim Gambari served as Foreign Minister of Nigeria and UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs. They co-chair the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance, whose report Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance was launched in June from the Peace Palace in The Hague and subsequently at the United Nations in New York.

Photo credit: Patrick Gruban / Foter / CC BY-SA

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