Reforming the United Nations: Kofi Annan’s legacy gets a reality check
Release of Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) Strategic Insight No. 25/2006
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has today released a new ASPI Strategic Insight that examines the context within which recent efforts at UN reform should be understood while assessing the key institutional and normative achievements over the last few years.
As the dust settles from the 2005 UN reform jamboree and Kofi Annan enters the twilight months of his second term as Secretary-General, the United Nations has created two new institutions—a Peacebuilding Commission and a Human Rights Council—but has anything really changed?
Author and Executive Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at NYU School of Law Simon Chesterman considers those achievements to be underwhelming. But when contrasted with the divisions over Iraq that split the UN in 2003, the better evaluation might not be whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, but how it is that we continue to have a glass at all.
‘The discussion of reform has always begged the question of whether that reform must take place primarily in the structures, procedures, and personnel that make up the United Nations, or in the willingness of member states to use them. Past efforts at creating and changing the international institutions of peace and security have tended to be led by political will, which is most plentiful in a time of crisis,’ Dr Chesterman writes.
‘In the wake of the Iraq war, anxiety concerning the role and relevance of the United Nations was widespread. But leadership on the reform agenda came, unusually, from the Secretary-General. It was Kofi Annan who appointed the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, which attempted to grapple with legitimate US security concerns while broadening discussion of international threats beyond its counter-terrorism and non-proliferation agenda.’
As his term closes Secretary-General Annan’s efforts to drive reform and the response of member states provide a lens through which to view the promise, the prospects, and the limitations of the United Nations as an institution and as an idea.