The UN at a Crossroads: The Summit of the Future and the Search for Sustainable Peace


Jordan Faulkner
Honours Student in Political Science and International Relations
Flinders University

Dr. Luis da Vinha
Lecturer in Politics and International Relations
De Montfort University, UK


POLICY PERSPECTIVES #16, September – October 2024 | DOI.ORG/10.25957/e3h3-2j23

From September 20 to 23, 2024, the United Nations hosted the Summit of the Future at its New York headquarters, marking a pivotal moment in the organisation’s efforts to address mounting global crises. This summit emerged from UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s 2021 report Our Common Agenda, in which he called on the international community to forge a new global consensus about what our future should look like – and how we can secure it. Guterres has repeatedly warned that the world is at a historic crossroads, facing its most significant challenges since the end of World War II. He argues that the fabric of global solidarity is unravelling, threatening everything from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and international human rights frameworks to trust in scientific knowledge and the foundations of postwar multilateralism.

At the heart of these challenges, Guterres emphasises the erosion of global cooperation and trust, which has stunted progress on many of the core principles underpinning the international system for decades. The postwar order, which saw multilateral institutions such as the UN emerge as arbiters of peace, prosperity, and development, is now under unprecedented strain. The failure to meet the SDGs by their 2030 target, for example, illustrates the widening gaps in global coordination. Climate change, human rights abuses, economic inequality, and geopolitical instability are compounding an already fragile international landscape.

In response, Guterres offered world leaders The Pact for the Future – a bold and ambitious initiative designed to reinvigorate efforts to meet the SDGs, advance the Paris Climate Agreement, and foster broader international cooperation. He framed the Pact as a necessary step to “secure a peaceful and liveable future for everyone on our planet.” Central to this proposal is the understanding that the global community must urgently move beyond rhetoric and take meaningful action to tackle shared challenges, from the climate crisis to economic development.

An important aspect of this plan is its commitment to the UN’s New Agenda for Peace. This agenda revisits and builds upon the foundational work done in 1992 by then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose Agenda for Peace sought to redefine the concept of peace in a post-Cold War world. Boutros-Ghali argued that peace could no longer be understood simply as the absence of war; instead, it required addressing the underlying structural causes of conflict – issues like economic despair, social injustice, and political oppression. His vision was that international peace and security could only be achieved through a comprehensive framework that promoted human rights, economic development, and social progress alongside more traditional peacekeeping efforts.

The Agenda for Peace was a direct response to the end of Cold War bipolarity, which created new opportunities for the UN to take on a more active role in maintaining international security. Boutros-Ghali’s conceptualization of peace was expansive, calling for a global commitment to peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. The latter, in particular, required an approach that went beyond merely deploying peace operations. Instead, it demanded that the international community take a proactive role in transforming political, economic, and social institutions that contributed to violence and instability. This framework continued to evolve in subsequent years, most notably with the 2000 Brahimi Report, which further strengthened the UN’s peace operations.

Ultimately, Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Peace implied a more interventionist role for the UN. As a result, in the post-Cold War era, the number of peace operations authorised by the UN increased significantly, as did the scope of their mandates. Peacebuilding efforts were intertwined with broader development initiatives, reflecting the growing recognition that sustainable peace could not exist without addressing root causes of conflict. This principle was embedded in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which explicitly stated, “there can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development.”

Therefore, the synergy between peacebuilding and development has become a central tenet of the UN’s approach to international security. The SDGs offer a shared framework that spans the development, governance, and peacebuilding nexus. This approach ensures that efforts to sustain peace are aligned with the broader, more comprehensive SDG agenda. By addressing the intersection of economic, political, and social challenges, the UN seeks to create the conditions for long-term peace and stability.

However, this vision of peace espoused by the UN adheres to a particular normative outlook. The UN advocates what is often referred to as liberal peace, which Oliver Richmond characterizes as “a massive, interventionary process of social, political, and economic engineering” that represents the hegemonic dominance of political norms in international relations by a core group of actors, primarily led by the US and its associated ideologies. The liberal peace model that underpins the UN’s post-Cold War policies on peace and development emerged not only from a desire to prevent great power conflicts but from a belief in the emancipative potential of liberalism and its benefits for the international community.

In recent years, many of the UN’s normative assumptions about peace and development have been increasingly contested. The fact that Guterres convened the Summit of the Future to address these challenges reflects the growing debate about the role of the UN and the need for a “common agenda.” Guterres has openly stated that one of the main purposes of The Pact for the Future is to rejuvenate the organisation and to “bring multilateralism back from the brink” at a time when the world seems to be “heading off the rails.” However, the principles underlying the Pact are largely consistent with those that have guided UN policies in recent decades. At the summit, Russia, supported by countries such as Belarus, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, sought to defer the adoption of the framework, with some describing this move as an “attempted derailment” of the Pact. Their resistance underscores the growing contestation of the liberal peace model and highlights the demand for the UN to adopt a more inclusive approach to global peace and security.

In a time of renewed multipolar rivalry, sustaining the “rules-based order” that Guterres calls for will require compromise and negotiation. A pact that ensures sustainable peace and development must be seen as legitimate by all international actors. This legitimacy can only be achieved when the norms and rules underpinning the international system are perceived as equitable and when the body that generates them is seen as representing the international community. Until the UN embraces a more inclusive and representative approach, there is no “common agenda” capable of successfully addressing the most pressing challenges of our time.


Jordan Faulkner is an honours student in Political Science & International Relations.

His primary research interests are Foreign Policy, International Order, Applied History & International Relations Theory. He has partaken in the South Australian Parliamentary Internship Program.

Dr Luis da Vinha is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK).

Luis is a researcher at the Institute of Humanities and Political Studies (Leicester, UK) and an affiliate researcher at the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies (Adelaide, Australia). His teaching and research interests are in International Security, International Order, Foreign Policy Analysis, and Geopolitics/Political Geography. His research has been published with Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Comparative Strategy, Journal of Policy History, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, and the Brown Journal of World Affairs, among others.

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