Next UN Chief Faces Daunting Reform Task as Organization Struggles for Relevance

The United Nations' next leader will inherit an institution that has become a relic of a world that no longer exists. On January 1, someone will walk into the secretary-general's office to lead an organization founded eighty-one years ago, still structured around the power arrangements that emerged from World War II, and increasingly sidelined from the very conflicts it was designed to prevent.

The financial picture is dire. Billions of dollars in unpaid American contributions have forced the organization to slash its humanitarian and development programs—the areas where the UN has remained genuinely consequential. Meanwhile, the institution has been largely absent from the wars reshaping the globe. When conflicts erupted in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, the UN was not at the table where decisions were made. The organization that once positioned itself as a central player in global crisis management has become peripheral to the crises that matter most.

Outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres, departing after a decade in the role, offered his successor a stark challenge in his farewell address to the General Assembly. The world does not need a weaker United Nations, he said. It needs one strong enough to confront reality as it exists and determined enough to build something better. He posed a series of questions to his successor and the 193 member nations: Will you uphold law before impunity becomes routine? Will you end wars before they consume entire generations? Will you address inequality before societies fracture? Will you act on climate before irreversible tipping points arrive? Will you govern artificial intelligence before it governs humanity?

The task ahead is monumental, according to Kizito Byenkya, advocacy director at the Open Society Institute. The incoming secretary-general will face a UN undergoing its most significant reform process in decades—consolidating programs, eliminating hundreds of outdated mandates, and restructuring an institution designed for a different era. Simultaneously, there is enormous pressure from all sides for the new leader to become an active mediator in global conflicts, to play the role that Kofi Annan once played, when the secretary-general was central to resolving major disputes. The contradiction is obvious: reform the institution while also making it more powerful and present. The new chief must do both at once.

The most intractable problem is the Security Council. Every nation agrees it needs to reflect the twenty-first century, not the post-1945 world. But agreement dissolves immediately when the conversation turns to how. The five permanent members—the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France—hold veto power and control the council's direction. Africa, home to 1.5 billion people, has no permanent seat. Neither does Latin America. Neither do the island nations whose survival is threatened by rising seas. Ghana's President John Mahama told world leaders last week that Security Council reform is not a favor to Africa; it is essential to the legitimacy and survival of the UN itself. Reform has been stalled for decades because the nations that benefit from the current arrangement have no incentive to change it.

Beyond the structural problems lies something deeper. Mahama identified what may be the next secretary-general's real challenge: the world is fragmenting. Trust in multilateral institutions is eroding. Nations are drifting toward unilateralism, toward the doctrine that might makes right. The UN was founded on the opposite principle—that the world had learned the cost of that doctrine in two world wars and would not repeat it. Whether the next leader can reverse that drift, or even slow it, remains unclear. The organization they inherit is weaker than it appears, and the world it must navigate is more fractured than at any point in recent memory.