OPINION | Continued relevance of the United Nations: Functional migration and institutional resilience

The Wrong Question

The same question inevitably follows every outbreak of war: Where is the United Nations?

Questioning the relevance of the United Nations (UN) due to its frequent inability to prevent or terminate wars is understandable, especially in an age when war is not something that occurs at a remote frontier but across people’s backyards, and disturbing warzone visuals are available to all.

However, the critique may be asking the wrong question. Judging an institution by its most visible failure may overlook its less visible, routine, but valuable functions. Largely successful functions (occasional lapses notwithstanding), such as Protection of Civilians (POC), which has been the focus over the last decades, are easy to miss, becoming visible only in their absence, just as electricity is appreciated during a power outage. Continued relevance of the United Nations may lie in such enduring functions that help sustain order—instead of asking if the United Nations has failed, it may be more pertinent to ask which of its functions have become irrelevant.

Institutional absence and functional migrations 

The International system is not as anarchical a constellation of sovereign states as posited by classical realists, but really a rich ecosystem of states, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), multinational corporations, financial institutions, humanitarian organisations, media networks, transnational advocacy groups, and increasingly autonomous technological systems, among others. In this complex adaptive system of continually interacting—cooperating or competing—components, behaviour that reduce uncertainty and facilitate cooperation get rewarded, creating new structures and patterns. Historically, most institutional processes emerged autonomously due to demands which bilateral arrangements could no longer manage and were rarely imposed from above. While the institutions were contingent upon history, the demands they met were not—complexity theory would call them institutional attractors. 

The UN can be said to be such an institutional attractor, a manifestation of these systemic tendencies of the postwar world. It was not the only such organisation, as reflecting the law of requisite variety proposed by the British cybernetic expert and systems theorist William Ashby, several other regional, issue-based multilateral organisations and structures, such as the African Union, NATO, the League of Arab States, or the International Monetary Fund, had evolved over time, which together ensured the resilience of the international system and provided redundancy.

To understand the continued relevance of the UNO, it would be valuable to see which of its essential functions can migrate to the other organisations in its absence.

Using the technique of temporarily suppressing certain system components to understand their importance, often used by biologists to infer the function of genes by disabling them, a series of thought experiments was conducted as matrix wargames. In these, participants, personnel with significant experience of the UNO in various capacities, represented states, regional organisations, humanitarian agencies, financial institutions and multinational corporations, were exposed to complementary scenarios, each with different wings of the UN suppressed; alternate international organisations remained available, while players were permitted to improvise ad hoc structures for coordination and information exchange and form coalitions for collective actions. 

In these tests using the institutional failure mode, certain behavioural consequences observed in the international system when familiar structures are no longer available are outlined below:

* In one game, the Security Council was suppressed; participants facing the requirement of peacekeeping intervention in Mesoamerica were hampered by the problem of legitimacy as each alternate that they could think of, such as the NATO, was accused of being partisan and having vested interests.

* In another game, the WHO was removed in the face of an Ebola outbreak; no actor could agree on who declares a pandemic and who implements the coordinating measures.

* In a third game where the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) was suppressed, participants facing a humanitarian crisis and enormous movement of displaced peoples and refugees could not easily agree on how to assist affected people, and who would pay for it. The Danish Refugee Council was called upon to substitute the UNHCR, but it did not have international legitimacy or a well-defined mandate.

* In a micro-level game, humanitarian agencies such as the Red Cross and Save the Children were to run a humanitarian aid camp for a beleaguered population in the depths of the Congolese forests. Without the UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) or World Food Programme, players appointed one of themselves to coordinate movement and escort with two peacekeeping battalions of different nationalities in whose areas camps were to be held. Substitution of UN-OCHA functions by the players themselves was comparatively easy in a wargame (though there was much bickering), and the extreme functional difficulty of such ad hoc measures in reality, marked by endless human and organisational frictions, was realised.

* In the final game, there were no Blue Helmets, i.e., UN Peacekeepers, but a multi-national African Union (AU) force of nations with commercial and ethnic interests in the mission area. An upsurge of violence spun out of control in a path-dependent manner as AU peacekeepers got embroiled in the fight or remained noncommittal. Also, the lack of a universal mandate led to all AU actions being repeatedly challenged.  

Continuing relevance of the United Nations

Returning to the original question of continued relevance of the United Nations, the games did not recreate the UN itself but adapted to meet persisting functional demands—facilitation, legitimacy, coordination, information sharing, monitoring ceasefires, or coordinating peace building—through alternate/ new organisations. At the same time, the negative-space experiments also suggest that though the UN is not irreplaceable, migration of its functions to alternate means, while conceptually possible, can be highly imperfect and ambivalent. Technical functions like coordination could be portable to specialised or regional bodies, but humanitarian relief, monitoring of ceasefire, and civilian protection could be highly volatile and partisan; the function of legitimacy and credibility was found to be the “stickiest”. 

Rather than stopping wars, which is difficult unless there is an immense technological differential between peacekeepers and belligerents, the relevance of the UN has lain in its mitigating effects. The problem is that the very functions that grant the UN its effectiveness—universal legitimacy, impartiality and political credibility—, are the ones most vulnerable to erosion in the increasingly fragmented international order.

This is partly because the high technological differential and liberal international order, which had given the Euro–Atlantic world a perceived moral authority and perceived position as exporters of security, are themselves under threat. Information and technology are increasingly democratised through the internet, leading to the rise of intense regional self-awareness. Regional players such as the AU increasingly flout the UN and seek solutions, something that is also done by permanent members—the Troika in South Sudan or the Normandy Format in Ukraine, for instance. Erosion of a perceived moral authority of the UN also comes from allegations of economic interests (DRC) and partisan practices (as seen during the Covid or the Gaza crises)—in one of the games, a United Nations agency itself undertook unfair, partisan practices.

This really is a lose–lose situation: alternate structures do not enjoy the same degree of legitimacy as the UN, but the UN is itself losing credibility. To ensure that the ecology of international organisations retains sufficient variety, resilience and legitimacy, as required by Ashby's Law, the UN must derive means of restoring its credibility, which is fundamentally founded on its near-universal membership, as also coopt regional organisations, coalitions, NGOs, and even private structures to ensure variety, redundancy, and resilience in the international system.

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)