In September 2024 — 15 months from now — the United Nations’ 193 member states are expected to convene a Summit of the Future during the General Assembly’s annual high-level week in New York City. In addition to helping countries deliver on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the summit is meant to better equip the UN to address pressing global challenges. These include great-power tensions intensified by Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, runaway climate change, unconstrained artificial intelligence and a growing global trust deficit.

The 2024 summit will produce a Pact for the Future and introduce several new instruments for enhancing collective action, such as a New Agenda for Peace, to be tabled for initial discussion by member states this July by Secretary-General António Guterres. As an effort to “rebuild the consensus for a more effective collective security system,” this new agenda for multilateral action may fall short if its “forward-looking vision of international peace and security” is pitched only at the “strategic” — head of state and diplomatic — level and fails to consider the serious limits of current global problem-solving operational machinery too.

Our new “Global Governance Innovation Report 2023: Redefining Approaches to Peace, Security & Humanitarian Action” addresses these limitations, arguing that the UN’s operational tools and concepts require urgent updating to keep pace with the changing nature of violent conflict and other global dangers.

Read the full article here.