Why the United Nations Matters — and Why It Struggles

Next week I will give a talk tailored for students, 1st year bachelor, political science; at the Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali, University of Pavia

February 26, 2026

---

In this talk, I providesa critical analysis of the United Nations, framing it not as a failing technical machine but as a political arena reflecting the moral and structural misalignments of the modern world.

I outline three primary crises: a legitimacy gap where values are applied inconsistently, an outdated power structure rooted in 1945, and a systemic inability to handle complex, borderless challenges like climate change. Rather than focusing on procedural reform, tI argue that the institution’s struggles are a mirror of diminishing global trust and shifting political will among member states. Ultimately, I challenge future leaders to move beyond institutional optimization and instead cultivate the personal political commitment necessary to sustain collective responsibility.

My narrative emphasizes that the UN’s future depends less on its design and more on whether society is willing to prioritize shared stability over national interest.

---

Here is a podcast generated with NotebookLM based entirely on the text of my talk. Pretty impressive what the algorithm makes of it.

And at the very end of this post you will find a NotebookLM generated slides …

---

Talk: Why the United Nations Matters — and Why It Struggles

1. What I Want to Offer Today

I am not a UN technocrat.
I am someone who has lived inside systems, beside systems, and sometimes deliberately outside of them.

That distance is not a weakness. It is actually a form of clarity.

So I will not give you a technical “UN reform” talk.
I am not here to redesign voting procedures or propose structural reforms.

What I want to offer you instead is a question:

When institutions fail — do we blame their design,
or do we examine the values that sustain them?
And more importantly — whose values are we actually referring to?

Let me begin with a moment that unsettled my own moral certainty.

It was the day before Colin Powell delivered his speech at the United Nations — the speech intended to convince the world that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. It was in 2003.
Almost everyone in diplomatic circles knew the evidence was fragile.
He would present it as fact anyway.

I thought he was lying.

Later, I understood: the real question was not what Colin Powell believed —
but what the political system, in this case the US government, required him to present.

On that same day, the German Foreign Minister met him at the Waldorf Astoria.
After that meeting, Joschka Fischer stepped out and said quietly:
“We’ve lost our last non-hawk in the Bush administration.”

He wasn’t talking about the truth.
He was talking about leverage.
He was weighing the trade-off between preserving influence inside the U.S. government and publicly opposing Powell’s presentation.

That moment unsettled me.
Not because it revealed hypocrisy, but because it revealed something deeper:

Institutions are arenas of constrained choices.
And sometimes the most responsible decision is not the most righteous one.

If you want to understand the United Nations, you have to sit with that discomfort.
Because the UN is not a space of moral purity.
It is a political arena — shaped by states that balance principle against interest.

2. Where I Come from — and Why I See the UN This Way

My lens was shaped not only in boardrooms and policy environments, but in villages, classrooms, and communities around the world — among Afghan women fighting to secure education for their kids, Syrian shop owners rebuilding after displacement, Indian farmers navigating economic precarity, and young digital natives entering labor markets that were far less digital than promised — people with little formal voice in global decision-making.

That contrast made something clear to me:
institutions often evaluate success internally, while consequences unfold externally.

Let me give you two examples.

The first is 2003 — Colin Powell and Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
The UN debated, negotiated, and followed its procedures. 
From an institutional perspective, the process functioned: 
resolutions were drafted, inspections were discussed, diplomacy continued.
But the war happened anyway — and the credibility cost was paid globally.

The second example is the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.
The Paris Agreement was celebrated as a diplomatic milestone. 
From within the system, it was a success: near-universal consensus achieved.
Yet emissions continued to rise.
The atmospheric consequences did not wait for incremental implementation.

Those experiences influence how I look at the United Nations.

I do not primarily see procedural dysfunction.
I see a widening gap between declared values and political will.
And that gap is more dangerous than any design flaw.
Because institutions rarely crack structurally first.
They weaken morally and culturally before the architecture shows stress.

When collective commitment shrinks,
no reform package can compensate.

That, in my view, is where the real crisis begins.

3. How I Frame the Crisis

I see three intertwined layers of crisis.

First: a moral legitimacy crisis.
Values are declared — but not consistently embodied.

Second: a power distribution crisis.
The institutional architecture reflects 1945 — not 2026.

Third: a complexity crisis.
A largely linear institution is trying to operate in a networked, interdependent world.

For me, the problem is not simply that the UN “fails.”
It is that it is increasingly misaligned with the reality it is meant to serve —
morally, structurally, and systemically.

Let me take you through each of these layers.

4. The moral legitimacy crisis

When I look at the UN today, I don’t see an institution without values.
I see an institution whose values are not consistently embodied.

Human rights are invoked — but selectively defended.
Peacekeeping missions continue — but wars multiply.
Climate conferences expand — but emissions rise.

The language remains strong.
The architecture remains intact.
But the coherence between declaration and action has weakened.

For me, this is a credibility crisis.
And credibility is relational.

In Janwaar, a small village in rural India, I learned something simple:
You cannot expect commitment to collective rules if they are applied unevenly.
When rules are applied selectively, trust dissolves.
And once trust erodes, cooperation shifts from shared commitment to calculated exchange.

The same dynamic exists globally.

When powerful states invoke international law selectively,
when geopolitical interests override declared principles,
when solidarity becomes conditional,
the sense of shared commitment begins to fracture.

One recent example is the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The UN General Assembly mobilized quickly.
Resolutions were passed condemning the violation of territorial integrity.
Sanctions were coordinated by many member states.
The principle of sovereignty was invoked forcefully — and rightly so.

Yet in other conflicts — in Yemen, in Gaza, in parts of Africa — comparable urgency and unity have often been harder to achieve.
The principle exists.
But its application appears uneven.
That unevenness does not erase the value.
But it weakens credibility.

Because international cooperation is not held together by documents.
It is held together by the belief that we mean what we say.

When values are articulated more often than they are embodied, trust erodes.
And legitimacy — especially moral legitimacy — depends on trust.

The UN does not lose legitimacy only when it fails to act.
It loses legitimacy when the gap between its language and its lived reality becomes too visible to ignore.

That is the first fracture.

5. The power distribution crisis

If the first fracture is moral, the second is architectural.

The United Nations Security Council was designed in 1945 to prevent another great power war.
Five permanent members — the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom — were granted veto power.

That structure made sense in its time.
It reflected the distribution of power after World War II.
It acknowledged geopolitical reality rather than pretending it did not exist.
It was a carefully engineered compromise:
collective security anchored in the consent of the most powerful states.

And for a while, that realism created stability.

But the world is no longer organized around that equilibrium of power.
Power today is diffuse.
Conflicts are internal, hybrid, digital, asymmetrical.
Economic influence no longer aligns neatly with military dominance.

We are living in a layered, interdependent, nonlinear world.
Yet the core architecture of global security governance still reflects a frozen moment in history.
When institutions remain anchored in past power balances, they eventually collide with present realities.

The veto, once designed as a stabilizer, can become a blocker.
Representation gaps become legitimacy gaps.
India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan have long advocated for permanent representation reflecting contemporary power realities.
African states — despite representing more than a quarter of UN membership — hold no permanent seat.

The debate has lasted for decades.

Reform requires the consent of those who benefit most from the existing arrangement.
Adaptation slows — not because the need is unclear, but because the incentives are misaligned.
A structure built for stability can become resistant to evolution.
And when evolution stalls, frustration accumulates — outside the institution and within it.

So the question is not simply whether the Security Council needs reform.
It is whether a model designed for hierarchical balance can function in a distributed world.
If power has become networked,
but authority remains centralized,
misalignment becomes structural.
And structural misalignment erodes trust just as surely as moral inconsistency.

But even if representation were updated, a deeper challenge would remain.

6. The complexity crisis

The third layer is systemic.

The United Nations is built on sovereign states as its primary actors.
Its formal legitimacy flows through governments.
Its authority is exercised through intergovernmental negotiation.
Its decisions move through structured, clearly defined diplomatic channels.

That architecture reflects a world in which power was understood primarily as something organized between states.

But the defining challenges of our time do not remain contained within state-to-state dynamics.

Climate change.
Migration.
Inequality.
Digital transformation and artificial intelligence.
Pandemics.
Supply chain fragility.

These challenges are interconnected.
They unfold through complex feedback loops.
They traverse borders and policy domains simultaneously.
They accelerate faster than intergovernmental procedures can respond.
They do not pause for multilateral agreement.

Yet the institutional logic still reflects a state-centered, negotiated model of order.

The UN was constructed for a world in which stability meant preventing war between major powers.
Today, stability depends on coordinating responses across deeply interconnected systems.
What was once a model of negotiated balance now operates in an environment of uncertainty and rapid systemic interaction.

When a linear institutional design operates within a nonlinear environment, friction is inevitable.

The institution can appear slow — even when acting responsibly.
It can appear rigid — even when engaging in careful deliberation.
It can appear distant — even when intentions are serious.

This is not an accusation.
It is a structural tension.

The architecture reflects the strategic logic of its founding moment.
The surrounding environment now follows a different logic.
And it is this divergence that intensifies the strain.

7. Where Responsibility Lies

The United Nations is not separate from global politics.
It is one of its institutional expressions.
It reflects geopolitical realities, national interests, and varying degrees of political courage.
It embodies collective political will — and its limits.

“Member states” may sound abstract.
But states are political communities — shaped by governments, political cultures, and citizens.

Which means the UN is not a distant machine.
It is how those communities organize — or fail to organize — shared responsibility.

So when we say the UN is underperforming,
we are also confronting the limits of our readiness to prioritize collective responsibility over short-term national advantage.

The organization was founded after catastrophic nationalism had torn the world apart.
It was an attempt to bind sovereignty to shared restraint.
Today, that restraint is under pressure.
National sovereignty is being reasserted.
Geopolitical competition is intensifying.
Domestic politics increasingly shape foreign policy decisions.

When national interest overrides shared commitments,
the UN becomes the arena where that tension is visible.

If the institution feels outdated,
it may not be only a structural problem.
It may reflect a narrowing willingness to sustain collective responsibility.

And this is where I want to challenge you — especially if you plan to work in or with the UN.

Do not only ask how the institution should change.
Ask how your own assumptions about sovereignty, security, advantage, and responsibility shape the kind of international order you are actually willing to support.

Are you prepared to accept limits on national discretion in the name of collective stability?
Are you willing to defend principles even when they are inconvenient?
Are you willing to recognize that global governance requires political courage — not only technical competence?

If you enter the UN seeing it as a system to optimize, you will reproduce its current logic.
If you enter it understanding that it is a continuous negotiation of competing interests and shared commitments, you may begin to shift that logic.

For me, the crisis of the UN is not simply institutional.
It is a mirror.
It mirrors the tension between sovereignty and solidarity,
between autonomy and interdependence.
If our commitment to shared responsibility becomes conditional,
the UN will mirror that condition.
No structural reform can compensate for that.

And this is where YOUR generation enters the picture.

You are not observing global governance from a distance.
You are preparing to enter it.
Whether you reinforce its limits or expand its possibilities will depend on the political commitments you are willing to carry with you.

The question is not only whether the institution adapts.
The question is whether you are willing to sustain the kind of political commitments it requires.

Institutions do not mature on their own.
They mature — or regress — through the people who inhabit them.

And that responsibility does not begin when you enter a diplomatic career.
It begins with how you think about power, sovereignty, solidarity, and restraint — now.

That is why the commitments you choose to defend matter.

---