Farrukh Khan: Reforming for Relevance – The UN at 80

November 26 , 2025

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As the United Nations approaches its 80th anniversary, its ongoing reform efforts are falling short of meeting twenty-first-century challenges. Despite multiple reform attempts by past secretaries-general, the UN remains misaligned with today’s geopolitical, technological and societal challenges. This article proposes five transformational shifts: repositioning the UN as a convener of diverse actors; recentring its mission around peace and security; retreating from duplicative development roles; addressing structural dysfunction in the Security Council and General Assembly; and modernising its workforce by replacing an outdated career ladder with a modular, mission-driven UN ‘talent cloud’. In an age of fading globalisation and multilateralism, this article calls upon the secretary-general to seize the moment for a generational recalibration, one that emphasises strategic purpose over managerial fixes. The UN must evolve from a bloated implementor to a lean architect of pluralistic cooperation or risk irrelevance in a fragmented, fast-moving and digitally disrupted world.

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The United Nations was established 80 years ago. The anniversary calls for celebration, but also introspection. The UN was created to maintain international peace and security, foster cooperation and uphold the fundamental human rights underpinning the post-war global order.1 Over the past eight decades, the scope of its activities and mandate has expanded dramatically. Its role as a guarantor of collective security – a system in which countries agree to protect each other against threats2 – has morphed into peacekeeping, and its role of fostering international cooperation on economic, humanitarian and human-rights issues has ballooned into a labyrinth of overlapping agencies, funds, programmes and secretariats.

The UN presides over a landscape marked not only by ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, Syria and Ukraine, but also by diminishing faith in its core missions. Its most powerful body, the Security Council, finds itself paralysed by geopolitical rivalries, much as it has before. The veto wielded by Security Council members is being used to shield national or allied interests rather than uphold collective security. In addition, from peacekeeping to development, humanitarian protection to climate action, the gap between the UN’s mandate and its impact is widening, casting doubt not only on its capacity to uphold international law and implement its resolutions, but also on its continued relevance.

At the same time, nationalist and populist currents sweeping across the globe – from the United States and Brazil to India and parts of Europe – are eroding faith in multilateralism. To be fair, these movements are not anomalies; they are an expression of widespread disillusionment. For many, globalisation delivered dislocation rather than opportunity, and although the doctrine of comparative advantage continues to hold up as an economic theory, vast segments of society have been left to absorb the shocks involved in pursuing it.3 The result is a backlash against the international system represented by the UN and a deepening scepticism about the very architecture of global governance, now seen by many as outdated, out of touch and unnecessarily costly.

As the UN marks its 80th anniversary it is no longer the anchor of global stability it aspires to be. Instead, it is struggling to find its place in a rapidly shifting global order beset with fast-moving global crises, from climate change to pandemics to geopolitical fragmentation. With the election of a new UN secretary-general set to take place in 2026, it is time for a bolder conversation about a systemic overhaul that could restore the UN’s relevance in a fractured, contested and digitally disrupted world. Current Secretary-General António Guterres still has the opportunity to move beyond administrative streamlining to deliver not just a more efficient institution, but a reimagined one.

A history of reform

Morale at the UN is low. This is a product not merely of internal restructuring and potential lay-offs, but also a sense that the organisation no longer knows what it’s trying to achieve. Reform is in the air, and not for the first time. Nearly every secretary-general since the early 1970s has pursued institutional improvements.

The 1973 oil shock and associated economic woes defined Kurt Waldheim’s tenure (1972–81). He faced financial constraints, allegations of a bloated bureaucracy and calls for reforms to the assessed contributions (that is, the financial contributions) made by the UN membership.4 In response, he implemented measures to improve administrative efficiencies and fiscal responsibility, in addition to streamlining staff positions. Like Secretary-General Guterres today, he also froze hiring.5

Secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (1982–91) faced a financial crisis due to non-payment of assessed contributions by the member states, notably the US, which threatened to withhold 20% of its contribution until certain reform benchmarks were met, including progress toward some form of weighted voting on the UN budget.6 He undertook budgetary and administrative reforms, enhanced financial oversight and downsized parts of the organisation. He is known for the dismissal of several senior officials to streamline the top-heavy UN Secretariat.7

During secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s tenure (1992–96), the UN had a record $3.8 billion in outstanding assessments and faced demands from the US not only to aggressively downsize its ‘elephantine’ bureaucracy,8 but also to get out of the foreign-aid business. Boutros-Ghali’s ‘Agenda for Peace’ reforms sought to shift the UN’s focus from reactive conflict response to proactive global-peace stewardship, with an emphasis on preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding. Despite the end of the Cold War, American critics felt that the proposed reforms were converting the UN into a supranational governance body while failing to address US concerns about efficiency and bureaucracy reduction.

Boutros-Ghali’s departure after a single term led to the election of secretary-general Kofi Annan (1997–2006), who inherited the financial challenges of the Boutros-Ghali era.9 He attempted at least two rounds of far-reaching reforms. The first – the so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’ – focused on internal reforms.10 The second, outlined in the 2005 report ‘In Larger Freedom’, sought to overhaul the UN across its development, security and human-rights functions, as well as offering a bold attempt at Security Council reforms.11 Annan’s vision for a UN more attuned to the world it served led to several lasting changes, including the creation of the Peacebuilding Commission and Human Rights Council; the launch of the Global Compact, a UN-led voluntary initiative encouraging businesses to align with UN principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption; and the Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight global-development goals adopted in the year 2000.

Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s tenure (2007–16) overlapped with the 2008 global financial crisis and demands for better service delivery by the UN. He pursued internal reforms, such as an attempt to build a coherent UN leadership at the national level, as outlined in the report ‘Delivering as One’.12

Since the start of his own term in 2017, Guterres has often warned that there is no alternative to reform, recently stating that the UN faces a choice between ‘reform’ or ‘rupture’.13 His first attempt at reform, the UN 2.0 agenda, proposed to transform the UN into an adaptive institution by enhancing five core capabilities – innovation, digital transformation, strategic foresight, behavioural science and data literacy – across all UN operations, but this didn’t succeed as intended. Now faced with a serious financial crunch, Guterres has launched the UN80 Initiative, which aims at ‘rapidly identifying efficiencies and improvements in the way we work’; ‘thoroughly reviewing the implementation of all mandates given to us by Member States’; and undertaking a ‘strategic review of deeper, more structural changes and programme realignment in the UN System’.14

Reforming for renewal

Historically, reform efforts at the UN have not lacked ambition or continuity, and many have improved internal efficiency, departmental organisation, accountability and professional standards. While administrative reforms can be beneficial, such changes will not suffice to resuscitate the UN’s role as an anchor of peace and security or to reclaim its role as the leader of multilateral, rules-based global order. The real question is not whether the UN should reform – it must – but whether it can stop mistaking internal housekeeping for strategic renewal, with the attendant risk of perfecting the machinery of irrelevance.15

Organisational drift at the UN stems from the misalignment of ongoing and earlier reforms with the external environment in which the UN operates, and with the continuous transformation of the UN from a guarantor of collective security into a vast but loosely coordinated development apparatus.16 Today, that diffusion has widened the gap between the UN’s primary mandate and its newer roles, leaving the organisation overstretched, fragmented and struggling to respond coherently to the crises of a more complex, contested and digitally disrupted world.

Guterres’s proposed reforms are again framed around internal optimisation, cost-cutting and streamlining. More specifically, they represent a desire to placate powerful financial contributors, particularly the United States.17 While these measures may yield further operational improvements, they do not address the deeper institutional drift and legitimacy crisis facing the UN, nor do they adequately realign the institution with a radically shifting landscape of global challenges, including artificial intelligence (AI), disinformation, ecological collapse and multipolar instability.

A genuinely transformative agenda would not start with cost constraints, but rather focus on a bold reimagining of the UN’s role, purpose and capabilities. The secretary-general and his team should ask what the UN is for, what kind of world it is operating within and what role the UN should play in shaping it. Five transformational shifts are needed to align the organisation’s internal political arrangements with a rapidly changing external environment. Firstly, the UN should redefine its posture by becoming a better convenor and architect of a pluralistic, rules-based global order. Secondly, it should frame reforms around its core purpose, prioritising peace and security. Thirdly, it should shed duplicative roles in development and focus more on norm-building than implementation. Fourthly, it should confront the paralysis affecting the Security Council and the General Assembly. Finally, it should reshape its workforce into a mission-based, modular ‘talent cloud’ aligned with the skill sets needed to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

A better convenor

While some past reforms did focus on using the UN’s convening power to engage actors other than its sovereign membership, states have remained the predominant actors in the UN’s decision-making. In a world where non-state actors play an outsized role in shaping people’s daily lives, the UN should become the table at which diverse problem-solvers come together. To this end, a primary step will be to redefine the UN’s posture from an over-stretched implementor to a connector and convener that mobilises actors beyond the state: cities, youth movements, tech firms, regional organisations and civil-society networks. This will require two crucial changes.18

Firstly, regional state groupings, such as the African Union, Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), European Union, Gulf Cooperation Council and Mercosur – and even subregional groupings like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Pacific Islands Forum – should be better integrated with the UN for real-time coordination and shared accountability. While these organisations did not exist when the UN was formed, they now play more decisive roles than the UN in both peace and development in their respective regions.19 The UN’s regional and even national-level architecture, which is rooted in twentieth-century geography and institutional silos – should be wound down and replaced with embedded liaison structures alongside or within regional intergovernmental bodies.

As the UN shifts from states to networks and from ministries to platforms, the organisation should, as a second step, establish structured, durable relationships with global centres of innovation, including technology hubs, digital-governance labs and AI developers. Past efforts – such as the appointment of a special envoy on technology or the creation of institutions such as the UN Global Compact, UN Global Pulse (an innovation lab that uses big data and AI for development and crisis response) and South–South Cooperation (a framework which seeks to foster the sharing of knowledge, technology and resources among developing countries for mutual growth) – barely scratched the surface and are better described as trends, not transformation. The UN has struggled to meaningfully expand or integrate these efforts into its core operating system.20 Without such a pivot, the UN risks competing with more important regional actors and possibly being consigned to strategic irrelevance in a world where, for example, the wireless-internet capability of private technology giants like Starlink increasingly command the power to shape battlefields and humanitarian operations.

Recentring on its core purpose

The UN was profoundly transformed by the post-colonial expansion of its membership, which increased from 51 founding states in 1945 to 193 by the end of the twentieth century. Decolonisation brought newly independent nations into the global arena, seeking to make their voices heard and to be represented in global economic and political decision-making bodies. Many of these states, marginalised in the powerful Bretton Woods institutions, turned to the more inclusive UN platform to advance their development aspirations and redress global imbalances. This shift raised a question that the UN continues to grapple with today: is its core purpose the promotion of peace and security, or the advancement of economic development, or both? While this question has at times been difficult to answer, the truth is that the organisation is struggling to deliver on either front.

Recentring the UN around its core purpose of maintaining international peace and security will require restoring Article 1(1) of the UN Charter as its organising principle.21 This reset will demand both philosophical clarity and resource reallocation away from fragmented development roles. Reform efforts must seek to elevate the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs as the central political engine of the UN system, underpinned by secure assessed funding rather than voluntary contributions. To this end, three steps are needed. Firstly, the worrying retreat in the UN peacekeeping budget – this dropped from a peak of approximately $9.9bn in 2018 to $5.6bn for 2024–25, a reduction of more than 40% in less than a decade – should be arrested and reversed.22 Studies show that the UN’s performance in peace and security has declined more than any other function in the last ten years, a trend that is all the more alarming at a time when conflicts are raging across the globe.23 Secondly, the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs must become the strategic hub for conflict prevention, preventive diplomacy and early warning – not just through coordination, but through action. Reforms should lead to the allocation of more and sustainable resources to preventive diplomacy, and the transformation of the UN’s under-resourced early-warning systems from passive monitoring tools into real-time, predictive platforms that integrate data from its field missions, and its partnerships with regional political and economic organisations. Finally, as acknowledged by the secretary-general’s latest report on the UN80 Initiative, the way in which the UN’s political and peace functions are split across the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and the Department of Peace Operations has made the monitoring of peace and security a reactive endeavour, with conflicts outpacing current responses.24 These silos must be consolidated into a unified entity to enable strategic coherence.

Redefining the UN’s role

Retooling multilateralism demands more than managerial rationalisation. It requires a strategic redefinition of the UN’s role and a retreat from duplicative functions that others are better equipped to perform. Rather than serving as an underfunded implementor and competing with better-resourced alternatives, the UN should focus on its comparative advantage.25

This pivot would require a fundamental re-evaluation and, where appropriate, a deliberate winding down of the UN’s sprawling development apparatus. The organisation’s role in development has already become marginal when compared to that of regional development banks and political organisations, international financial institutions and even philanthropic networks. Increasingly, the UN lacks a seat at the national or regional development table, unless it brings financial resources to match. Too often it functions as a transactional service provider, executing externally funded projects rather than shaping long-term policy outcomes. Within the system, multiple entities – the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Office for Project Services, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN regional commissions and the Resident Coordinator system – are locked in a competition for shrinking resources and overlapping mandates, frequently duplicating functions without clear accountability for results. In this configuration, the UN risks becoming a constraint rather than a catalyst for development, diverting scarce funds that could otherwise support nationally driven growth.

Yet the link between peace, security and development remains pivotal to the UN Charter. The UN’s contribution to development would be best realised by focusing on its comparative strengths – its convening power, political legitimacy and tested neutrality. A leaner UN, anchored in its peace and security mandate, should serve as the pre-eminent platform for preventive diplomacy and mediation, underpinned by enhanced capacity for rapid humanitarian response. It should act as a collaborative partner promoting development consistent with UN-endorsed norms and goals, and champion equity, inclusion and sustainability through advocacy and standard-setting rather than direct project delivery.

As noted, embedding high-level representation within regional organisations – such as the African Union, the Arab League, ASEAN and the EU – would allow the UN to foster strategic coherence and shared early-warning capacities. The organisation’s country-level presence should be concentrated in the least-developed and most fragile states, where its integrated humanitarian and peace-development approach adds unique value. This recalibrated national and regional model would release resources from the underfunded Resident Coordinator system and reposition the UN as a strategic, political and moral centre of gravity for global cooperation.

Reforming the whole, not a part

The world in which the UN now operates has fundamentally changed. It is shaped not only by the rising economic and political influence of countries beyond the five permanent members of the Security Council, but also by the accelerating force of digital technologies. The UN’s political architecture is increasingly out of step with the immediacy, complexity and decentralisation of modern geopolitics. In this context, reform efforts narrowly focused on internal efficiencies, cost-cutting or mandate reduction fall far short.

The secretary-general must help the UN membership confront a key source of dysfunction: the structural inertia of the Security Council and the political drift of the General Assembly. Like Annan, Guterres should propose reforming both the Security Council and the General Assembly alongside any changes to the UN’s internal bureaucracy.

Persistent demands for change from emerging powers and underrepresented regions have met with resistance: while most of the council’s five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) agree on the need for more members, they are not willing to relinquish or dilute their own veto power, nor do they wish to accord permanent status to new members. Several proposals have been made to expand the council: the G4 (Brazil, Germany, India and Japan) has asked for six additional permanent seats with veto power, and four additional non-permanent seats; the African Union’s Ezulwini Consensus, adopted in 2005, asks for no fewer than two permanent seats for the African continent, each with full prerogatives and veto privileges; and the 12-member Uniting for Consensus Group led by Italy and Pakistan has suggested only an expansion in the council’s non-permanent, long-term seats.26 To date, none of these have proven viable.

Despite the entrenched and politically sensitive challenges faced by the Security Council – expanding its membership and curbing the use of the veto – an intermediate, two-tiered approach could be a step toward long-term reform. Firstly, in a step that would build on Annan’s proposals, and as an alternative to expanding the number of permanent members from the current five, the secretary-general could put forward a pragmatic proposal for the creation of six long-term, non-permanent seats on the council.27 These seats, each with four-year renewable terms and no veto powers, would offer an intermediate model that enhances representation without triggering the political gridlock typically associated with the creation of new permanent members. This approach would be politically feasible while acknowledging the long-standing demands for a more inclusive and representative council.

Secondly, on the equally contentious issue of the veto, the secretary-general should confront the continual paralysis caused by its misuse or overuse. A forward-looking proposal could include the establishment of a Peace and Security Review Panel (PSRP), a General Assembly-mandated body composed of no more than ten elected representatives from the UN membership. The body would provide the UN with an additional mechanism for deliberation when the Security Council is unable to act due to the use of the veto by one or more of its permanent members. Without impinging on the Security Council’s mandate, the PSRP should issue non-binding recommendations to encourage diplomacy, mediation and regional engagement in situations of paralysis.

The legal basis to create such a mechanism is already in place. The 1950 ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution authorises the General Assembly to consider matters of international peace and security when the Security Council fails to act, while the 2022 Liechtenstein resolution requires assembly debate following any use of the veto.28 Moreover, the General Assembly has the authority to initiate institutional measures in support of collective security. Its past creation of major UN organs such as UNICEF in 1946 and the UNDP in 1965, both of which have since evolved into central components of the UN system, has demonstrated its capacity to found enduring institutions.

To ensure the PSRP’s credibility and effectiveness, the Security Council should ideally support its mandate and composition. For example, no sitting Security Council member, whether permanent or elected, should serve on the PSRP. Such a structure would preserve institutional balance while enabling the wider UN membership to contribute constructively to global peace and security when the Security Council is divided.

The General Assembly has lost much of its influence

The UN General Assembly, once the driving force behind decolonisation and Cold War diplomacy, has gradually lost much of its strategic influence. As its membership grew through successive waves of independence and the end of the Cold War, it became more cautious, preferring consensus to action. Its focus shifted from issues of global peace and security to wide-ranging development concerns. While this shift reflected the legitimate priorities of newly independent states seeking a voice in global economic affairs, over the years, the General Assembly’s ability to make timely and consequential decisions has been degraded. Its agenda has become crowded, its debates procedural and its resolutions largely symbolic.

To recover its relevance, the General Assembly can and must reclaim its role as the democratic and moral compass of the UN – a forum for political vision rather than bureaucratic negotiation. It should also be equipped with practical tools to act when crises arise. This could include maintaining a roster of experienced diplomats and mediators who can be deployed quickly to prevent or resolve conflicts; and establishing flexible coordination arrangements to organise political or humanitarian responses. Such measures would make the General Assembly more responsive and purposeful, while complementing initiatives like the proposed PSRP and efforts under the UN80 Initiative to retire redundant mandates.

A UN talent cloud

When the UN was founded in 1945, the architecture of global power was state-centric, the rules of conflict were defined by territorial warfare, and Westphalian diplomacy was conducted through formal treaties, alliance pacts and back-door channels. In that world, conflict was primarily land-based, the tools of statecraft included armies and ambassadors, and decisions were made in closed rooms by a narrow group of policymakers.

The twenty-first century is unrecognisable by those metrics. The boundaries of conflict are no longer geographic, they are digital, psychological, economic and climatic. States are no longer the only relevant actors – they have been joined by networks, platforms, non-state armed groups, AI-driven propaganda engines and online movements. The battlefield has expanded from trenches to timelines, and front lines often encompass data centres and smartphone screens. Escalation is now instant, driven by viral narratives, algorithmic triggers or cyber attacks that outpace traditional diplomacy. The result is a system that is faster, flatter and more fragmented – requiring agility and anticipation, not just protocols and process.

And yet, the UN’s workforce remains firmly anchored in the twentieth century, its many agencies and departments staffed for a world that no longer exists. The UN system was designed for a world of formal negotiations, predictable deployments and bureaucratic stability. Its structures, career trajectories and operating logic reflect a model built for tanks, treaties and telegrams, not for tweets, tipping points and trust deficits. The organisation continues to rotate generalists through rigid posts, while the problems it faces demand mission-based teams, digital fluency and hybrid skill sets that can move between policy, technology and diplomacy.

Today, peacekeeping, development and humanitarian responses are not shaped solely by the UN’s institutional machinery, but by digital platforms and predictive systems, among other technologies. From disinformation to climate modelling to cyber conflict, the drivers of global instability are evolving rapidly, too fast for a bureaucratic system. The key question for reform efforts should not be how the UN is structured or how many people it should employ, but what the UN workforce is for. In a world that is increasingly fast-moving, interconnected and complex, the UN could best serve its defining goals by cultivating an ecosystem of political, humanitarian and economic problem-solvers who could collaborate across borders and disciplines to prevent crises, manage transitions and build peace.

A reimagined UN workforce would function less as a fixed hierarchy and more as a mission-driven, modular ‘workforce cloud’. A small, permanent core of multilateral strategists would provide institutional continuity, supported by networks of regional and technical experts who could be mobilised rapidly in response to emerging needs. Routine functions, such as drafting reports or producing lengthy policy analyses, could be replaced by tools of predictive diplomacy – which would use data and early-warning systems to help anticipate instability – and by algorithmic decision supports that would enhance, rather than replace, human judgement.

Such a shift would allow UN personnel to focus on what they uniquely offer: negotiation, ethical reasoning, strategic foresight and partnership-building. Reform, in this sense, is not about digitising the bureaucracy, but about aligning human talent with purpose – creating a UN that is less about process and more about problem-solving, and that is capable of acting with speed, credibility and relevance in a world defined by constant disruption.

The world needs the UN, but no longer waits for it. The organisation’s latest attempt to reshape itself, the UN80 Initiative, appears more defensive in the face of a liquidity crisis, key donor pressures and, perhaps, internal fatigue than institutionally transformative. It speaks of ambition, but its content is mostly managerial.

In an age defined by the backlash against globalisation, reform plans for the UN should ideally help restore trust in multilateralism – not just as a process, but as a purpose. Reforms cannot be a question of simple cost-cutting by making UN officials move from high-cost locations in New York and Geneva to Nairobi. They should instead aim at strategic renewal, and retreat where necessary. They should be reframed around the question of strategic relevance: what is the UN for in a world that is fragmented, fast-moving and facing systemic threats to peace, trust and legitimacy? The answer lies not in doing more with less, but in doing what matters most. Managed wisely, this should not be a diminution of the UN’s role, but rather a renewal.

Author | Farrukh Khan is a senior Pakistan diplomat and former senior UN official. He is currently on a sabbatical. He prepared this article during his time as Visiting Scholar and Sergio Vieira de Mello Chair in the Practice of Post-Conflict Diplomacy at Seton Hall University. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not in any way represent the views or position of the government of Pakistan or Seton Hall University.

 

From Survival,  Volume 67, 2025