For only the tenth time in its 81-year history, the United Nations will choose its next leader before the end of the year. Whoever is appointed will face a slew of challenges in reforming the ailing and increasingly cash-strapped organization.
Chief among them is mounting pressure for the UN to take a more active role in resolving protracted wars in the Middle East, Sudan and Ukraine. As armed conflict between states surges to the highest level since the Second World War, can the next secretary-general return the UN to its primary peacemaking role?
Eight candidates are vying to take up that position, replacing António Guterres, whose 10-year term ends on 31 December. His successor will be appointed by the 193-member General Assembly on the Security Council’s recommendation, while the five permanent members (P5) – France, Britain, China, Russia and the United States – hold a veto on the final decision.
Sidelined from peace talks
For the hopefuls, this entails an uneasy balancing act; projecting enough ambition to win broad support while being cautious enough not to antagonize the states that can block them. Since the UN’s founding in 1945, the maintenance of international peace and security has been the organization’s raison d’être. Yet shifting geopolitical competition and growing distrust in multilateralism over the past decade have seen the UN sidelined from key peace negotiations, including talks to end the US war on Iran.
‘The next secretary-general will have no choice but to urgently put the UN back in the business of peace,’ said Robert A Wood, America’s former alternate representative at the UN. ‘Otherwise, the organization’s credibility and relevance will be further diminished and lead to the creation of other diplomatic mechanisms, like the [US-led] Board of Peace, that nations will turn to for solutions to conflicts.’
Others are less optimistic. ‘Bringing the United Nations back to the peace business is utopian,’ said Andrés Montalvo Sosa, Ecuador’s ambassador to the UN. ‘The UN has never resolved questions of peace when a major power’s interests are at stake.’
Over the course of his term, the departing UN chief was criticized for not doing enough to challenge veto-wielding states. According to some, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exposed the limits of Guterres’s influence, despite his success in brokering the Black Sea Grain Initiative which enabled Ukraine to continue exporting its grain.
Restrained approach
‘Guterres faced a lot of criticism for failing to go to Moscow before the war,’ said Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group. ‘He did seem very cautious about challenging Putin.’
Guterres’s restrained approach has disappointed many and fuelled debate about how the future secretary-general can bring the organization back to the centre of the world’s most intractable peace negotiations. Part of that means confronting the organization’s deeper structural problems, above all the gridlock of the Security Council where any of the five permanent members can veto action, including in Ukraine, where the aggressor Russia holds a veto over the council’s response to its own war.
‘There’s generally a feeling that the veto powers want a leader who isn’t too ambitious – to use a well-worn phrase, more secretary than general,’ said Gowan. Yet the candidates are also trying to appeal to the wider membership, he added, many of whom have bolder hopes for Security Council reform and advancing mediation and peacemaking than the P5.