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The UN’s Summit of the Future: Advancing Multilateralism in an Age of Hypercompetitive Geopolitics

Commentary
By Richard Ponzio Co-Author, Joris Larik Co-Author

Contributed by Global Governance Innovation Network, Leiden University, Stimson Center

Posted 22 September 2022

World leaders are gathering once again next week in New York for the seventy-seventh annual session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). This unique gathering is an opportunity to mark important milestones in international cooperation—such as the endorsement by heads of state, in September 2015, of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development or, though largely online due to COVID-19, the commemoration of the UN’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2020 (UN75).

On this year’s agenda is nothing less than deciding on convening a Summit of the Future to overhaul and strengthen multilateral cooperation in an age of deepening rifts and increasing competition between the great powers. Secretary-General António Guterres had called for such a Summit in his seminal Our Common Agenda report of 2021, which Member States in the wake of UN75 had mandated him to produce. As further proposed by the Secretary-General, the Summit would culminate in a Pact for the Future, enshrining the most pressing reforms for the coming years. Many of these goals Our Common Agenda already outlines.

Even long before President Zelenskyy lambasted the UN’s dysfunctionality in an address last April to the Security Council, it was plain to see that the UN in its present set-up is incapable of delivering on its far-reaching mandate. However, in the current political climate, the level of ambition—in terms of the Summit of the Future’s preparatory process and outcomes—hangs in the balance. To grasp the importance of the Summit and its success, we need to first put it in the current context of hypercompetitive geopolitics and analyze the present debates about its organization through that lens. As we argue, a failure to convene a meaningful and ambitious Summit would be a lost opportunity, dealing a severe blow to the future of multilateralism.

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Geography
topics
Accountable Governance, Global Partnerships, Global Systems and Institutional Reform
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