For decades, the United Nations has served the Global South less as an enforcer of peace than as a forum of procedural legitimacy. It offered voice, recognition, and delay, often without decisive outcomes. That tradeoff was flawed but stable. Today, it is eroding.
The emergence of initiatives such as the “Board of Peace” reflects a deeper transformation in global governance: a move away from universal, rules-based multilateralism toward selective, executive-driven arrangements that prioritize speed and control. This shift does not abolish the UN. But it does threaten to marginalize it in the very domains of peace enforcement, post-conflict governance, and security guarantees where its authority once mattered most.
The Limits of Universalism
The UN’s weakness is not institutional scarcity; it is structural design. The United Nations Security Council, anchored in the power distribution of 1945, increasingly functions as a mechanism of paralysis rather than protection. Veto power was intended to prevent a great-power war. In practice, it now routinely blocks collective action even amid mass violence.
For the Global South, this failure is not new. International law has long been applied selectively, enforced unevenly, and moral outrage inconsistently. Yet the UN endured because it embodied universality: all states formally equal, all conflicts theoretically internationalized, all norms at least rhetorically shared.
That universality is now under open challenge.
From Rules to Results
Major powers are recalibrating how they engage multilateral institutions. The United States, historically the UN’s principal architect and guarantor, has increasingly treated international bodies as optional instruments rather than binding frameworks. Public criticism, funding leverage, and episodic withdrawal threats toward agencies such as the World Health Organization signal a broader logic: legitimacy follows effectiveness, not the other way around.
The “Board of Peace” operationalizes this logic. Its appeal lies precisely in what the UN lacks: selective membership, centralized authority, and freedom from veto constraints. It promises execution where consensus has failed. Whether or not it succeeds is almost secondary. Its existence alone signals that powerful states are no longer willing to wait for universal agreement to act.
Who Gains, Who Loses
If this model spreads, its distributive consequences will be stark.
Winners will include great powers and regional hegemons, which gain speed, discretion, and agenda control. A subset of middle powers, those able to align strategically or contribute financially, will gain proximity to decision-making without bearing the full costs of global order. Private actors involved in security, reconstruction, and finance will also benefit from looser governance structures.
Losers will be smaller and more fragile states, particularly in the Global South. These states risk losing the procedural protections that universality provided: equal voice, delay as leverage, and the ability to frame local conflicts as matters of global concern. International law itself will not disappear, but it will increasingly function as justification after action rather than constraint before it.
The paradox is sobering. The UN often failed to protect weaker states, but what replaces its central role may be even less accountable.
Not Another League of Nations Moment
Historical analogies matter, and comparisons to the collapse of the League of Nations are tempting. But they mislead. The League’s failure produced the UN through institutional expansion: broader membership, stronger legal authority, and formalized great-power responsibility under the UN Charter.
This moment moves in the opposite direction. Instead of repairing universalism, powerful states are fragmenting it. Instead of embedding power within institutions, they are exercising it through parallel mechanisms.
As Mark Mazower has shown, the post-1945 order sought to reconcile dominance with legitimacy by universalizing institutions (Governing the World, 2012). Today’s shift suggests a partial abandonment of that project.
A Global South Reckoning
John Ikenberry has argued that the liberal international order endured because it bound power through rules, making dominance more acceptable and durable (After Victory, 2001). What is now emerging is a looser order, in which power is less consistently restrained by universal norms and more openly exercised through selective coalitions, an outcome Stephen Krasner long predicted when institutional rules diverge from dominant interests (Structural Conflict, 1985).
The UN will survive as a humanitarian coordinator, development platform, and normative archive. But its centrality is no longer assured.
For the Global South, the choice is not between a perfect past and a broken present. It is between defending a weakened universalism that offers voice without enforcement, and navigating an executive order that offers speed without safeguards. The danger is not merely exclusion, but irrelevance.
Institutions do not fade because they are unjust. They fade when they no longer deliver for the powerful. Whether the Global South shapes what comes next or merely adapts to it will determine whether this systemic shift produces a more stable world, or simply a faster, harsher one.