Your report outlines several priorities for the next Secretary-General’s first 1,000 days. Can you tell us about your recommendations?

We see a once-in-a-generation opportunity, because for the first time in decades, fundamental governance questions are on the negotiating table. We have multiple reform processes converging, and there is political will in some quarters for transformation. But we also have seen that reform can become synonymous with austerity and cuts, which would miss the opportunity to address the real crises of power and legitimacy within the system.

That is why we are proposing a 1,000-day framework in which the next Administration takes a sequencing strategy, building political capital and deploying it thoughtfully over time.

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The first priority — the first 100 days — is to establish credibility through transparency. It is extremely important that the next Secretary-General understands the mandate and the power they have, makes credible decisions, and develops a strong narrative for both the inside — meaning the UN system at large — and the outside, meaning Member States.

The second recommendation is to build coalitions. This means fostering a “friends of UN reform” dialogue, bringing together and bridging Member States beyond the traditional negotiating blocs.

The third recommendation is to institutionalize changes — completing a mandate review pilot and launching the first UN Development Charter [a proposed compact linking agency coordination to donor funding], which would give stakeholders within the system authority to clarify and test reforms in pilot countries. The main message here is to experiment, take risks, and test what can work and what cannot. That is a liberty the next Secretary-General should embrace in order to adjust a system that is very difficult and very slow to change.

The fourth recommendation, in year three, is to demonstrate results. This means enabling Member States to begin proposing the next wave of reforms based on the framework that has been established.

You describe the UN development system as “ungovernable by design.” What makes it ungovernable?

Underlying all of this is what we call a triple disconnect that the next Secretary-General will inherit: Authority without resources, because over 80% of funding is earmarked with no governance control or accountability. Resources without oversight, as just 10 donors provide nearly 70% of funding. And States without a voice, because the countries that most need technical cooperation and policy advice have the least power over priorities.

The bottom line here is that formal governance structures do not match power dynamics. Boards do not actually control the direction of institutions — they are quite passive — and this is where I see an imbalance of power within the UN system itself. And the Secretary-General does not have direct oversight over the agencies, funds, and programs that execute on the ground. It is a mismatch by design. It makes reform difficult and makes it hard to have a holistic view of development within the UN system.

People have been talking about UN reform for years. What hope do you have that now is the time for change?

There is an expression that every crisis holds an opportunity, and this is an existential crisis, which is why I believe people will take it seriously. I do not think we will see fundamental changes immediately, but none of the major players — including the P5 [the five permanent members of the Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States] — want to leave the UN. Smaller Member States will fight dearly for the UN because it is the only space at a global level where they can be heard, can negotiate, and can have a voice, and sometimes they have influence over outcomes. We have reform agendas on the table and people actively working on them. Even though a growing number of countries would like to see a weakened UN, they don’t want to abolish it because they know that the UN helps bring the world together in one place.

The report claims that power increasingly operates outside formal governance structures. Why have informal mechanisms become dominant?

Funding is the primary driver of parallel systems and of Member States pursuing bilateral agendas rather than what was negotiated multilaterally.

Boards approve strategic plans but control only a small fraction of spending. Donors shape priorities bilaterally through earmarking, and multilateral entities have effectively become executors of bilateral agendas. What is even more worrying is that transaction costs have multiplied. Currently, more than 60% of UN grants are below $1 million. Anyone who has worked with the UN knows it is not an inexpensive institution to work with because it has a very large bureaucracy. Sometimes, transaction costs can exceed the benefit delivered on the ground.

Core funding has not grown; in fact, it has actually declined. The goal was that Member States would commit at least 30% [of their contributions] to core funding by 2023. That did not happen. COVID-19 and other crises served as cover, but for whatever reason the target was not met. Now, the goal is for that to happen by 2027.

In the report, you discuss four forms of power — symbolic, managerial, network, and Charter — and note that network and Charter power are underutilized at the UN. Can you give concrete examples of how a Secretary-General could use those forms of power more effectively?

There has long been a debate about whether we need a Secretary or a General — or these days, a CEO — and I think the answer is that we need all of the above.

The Secretary-General has a limited mandate but has significant power to work the aisles of the UN and conduct quiet diplomacy. This leader has the power to set agendas, as we saw with the Sustainable Development Goals, and will probably do it with the post-2030 agenda [the framework that will replace the SDGs], migration, AI, and other issues. And this person will have the power to mediate and facilitate dialogue among Member States, nudging them toward convergence.

We have seen very successful Secretaries-General who may not have been the most visible on television, but they do their work quietly, through direct engagement with Member States and careful stewardship of the system itself. It requires a lot of diplomatic skill. Many incoming Secretaries-General have come from ministerial or even prime ministerial backgrounds. They are accustomed to giving orders that are executed. In the UN, an order is debated, questioned, filtered through layers of power, and what you write in the morning rarely looks the same by afternoon. So you really need to know how to navigate the system in order to influence it.

Do you think the next Secretary-General will have the political space to deliver on the recommendations in the report?

The next Secretary-General will have to earn it. It’s about how much you can make out of the system. This is why we believe the next Secretary-General must be someone who understands the system and knows how to navigate it. The frustrations will come early because the desire to reform faces a world of bureaucracy, competing interests, and States that like the status quo because it works just fine for them.

From day one, what matters is narrative, clear messaging, and keeping up the morale within the system itself.

They will be on the defensive immediately and will need to find ways to gear up to be on the offensive as much as possible.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This week on “World’s Toughest Job,” a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we ask: Can the next UN Secretary-General deliver for young people and young countries?

The world’s demographic center of gravity has shifted. While the Global North ages, a massive next generation is rising across Africa and parts of Asia. Our third episode tells the story behind the demographic data, as young people look for economic opportunities in a volatile world and young countries demand structural change and greater political representation.

Host Jasmin Bauomy and co-host are joined by Saru Duckworth, a development researcher studying programs for marginalized populations; Ambassador , President and CEO of the Africa Center and former Kenyan permanent representative to the UN; and Joe Studwell, author of How Asia Works and How Africa Works.

The episode starts in 1960 with the Year of Africa, when 17 African nations reached independence and Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld rallied the UN to respond to the structural needs of these new nations.

Our panel asks whether a new Secretary-General can follow this example, helping today’s young countries navigate a world of unchecked geoeconomic competition, while responding to the aspirations of a generation that fears that the future is no longer something to build toward but something to brace for.

1. The world’s last great baby boom is reshaping development.

In 1960, the global population stood at roughly 3 billion. At the time, developing countries had as many children as adults. That creates huge challenges: picture a country where the dominant unit is the young family and where there are relatively few adults to feed, teach, and care for very large numbers of kids (and not many taxpayers, either) There are many reasons that countries struggled to grow in the 20th century, and demographic headwinds are a big part of the story.

But even then, countries were changing. Those families were becoming smaller, as health improved and mothers were more educated and empowered. At first the population kept growing fast — with more young parents than ever — but as the population slowed, the last big demographic wave began to roll across society. Today, the same countries are still young, but only 30% of citizens are under 18 and 20% are aged between 18 and 30.

When Hammarskjöld rebooted the UN’s development system, his focus was on helping new states function after independence. And the main job? Looking after the very young, which explains why child survival and development had become an overriding priority for the UN by the 1980s. Today, though, the challenge is to harness the potential of the last great baby boom. And that drags the UN’s development mission in a very different direction.

The most profound development question of our era is whether economic opportunities will flow to where young people live, or whether those young people will move toward the opportunities. As Joe Studwell argued on World’s Toughest Job, the UN must recognize Africa as the “last developmental frontier of great consequence,” noting that the continent’s population will likely hit 4 billion by the end of the century (from 1.5 billion today). And as Mark Malloch-Brown reminded the panel, this isn’t just an African story — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and other young countries in Asia have exactly the same need for economic opportunities.

2. The old risk suffocating the young.

The global population will likely peak in roughly 50 years, but in many parts of the world the peak is long past. Already, 63 countries have shrinking populations. The wealthy world (with the partial exception of the United States) and many major middle-income economies (barring India) are growing old fast. Over the rest of this century, more children will be born in Nigeria than in China, more in Pakistan than in all of Europe (Russia and the United Kingdom included), and more in Tanzania than in Brazil.

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Yet global power structures are frozen in the past. Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania do not have seats at the G20, while Europe holds seven (if Russia, the European Union bloc, and permanent guest Spain are included). The roundtable highlighted this growing disconnect: Are rich, old countries going to cede political power, or will young countries have to kick down the door to get it?

This tension isn’t just geopolitical; it’s economic. Ambassador Martin Kimani pushed back against viewing Africa’s youth boom as an inherent threat, framing it instead as an opportunity for economic takeoff. If young countries can get the policy environment right, they are entering territory when all that work caring for and educating children pays off. This “demographic dividend” is the same engine that fueled the East Asian financial tigers.

But capturing that dividend brings a new set of problems. Right now, Africa adds more than 10 million young people to the workforce every year but generates only 3 million formal jobs. If this “absorption crisis” isn’t solved, the world faces political volatility as an educated, connected, and increasingly activist generation finds itself locked out. As Saru Duckworth argued, there is no point educating children to grow up “facing economies that cannot absorb them structurally.”

3. A hyperconnected generation is demanding ‘the promise of participation.’

In 2010, I helped create a task force to explore Nigeria’s demographic future. It concluded that youth, not oil, was the country’s greatest asset. What struck me then was how fast young Nigerians were turning their country into a cultural superpower. After the 1992 release of the legendary thriller Living in Bondage, filmmaking exploded in Lagos, with movies shot on cheap VHS cassettes and sold in the streets. Punk filmmaking, in other words. By the mid-2000s, Nollywood was the world’s third-largest film industry after its more famous counterparts in America and India.

The cultural ingenuity of the next generation has now collided with the smartphone era. Back then, pessimists thought that much of the Global South would remain stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide, but today a digitally native generation has real-time visibility into global living standards. As Duckworth observed, young people in Nepal can now watch protests in Indonesia unfold on TikTok. Because of this expectation gap, delivering basic survival is no longer enough. Institutions must fulfill “the second half of the promise of development, which is the promise of participation,” she said.

Right now, the international system is failing that test. Marginalized youth, Duckworth warned, are united by a massive trust deficit: “It’s not just that the system doesn’t work for us, it doesn’t see us ... but also that we don’t trust it.” That drives young people onto the streets. Kimani pointed to recent youth protests in Kenya against austerity measures driven by the International Monetary Fund. Tens of thousands of young Kenyans tuned into a marathon six-hour session on X to audit the national budget line by line, ultimately forcing the government to reverse course. Leaders “cannot credibly embrace austerity ... while being able to manage the street,” Kimani noted. For any leader, the lesson is clear: Young people will no longer accept being shut out of the rooms where decisions are made.

4. The UN must champion the places where the future lives.

So, what does this demographic, economic, political, and cultural shift mean for the next Secretary-General, for the UN’s development system, and for its ambition to create shared prosperity? Our panel had three answers to this question.

First, it is time to embrace the end of the traditional, top-down, donor-driven model. Studwell criticized the old system, noting that aid agencies evolved into institutions that “want to predetermine where the money should go.” While the current drop in global development aid is causing undeniable damage, it could be the catalyst needed for structural change. Kimani argued that the withdrawal of aid provides “powerful incentives” for states to strengthen their own governance, simply because “there will no longer be a foreign taxpayer to subsidize the gaps.” For Malloch-Brown, this is a much-needed “second decolonization.”

Second, the UN needs to break its addiction to bloated agendas. Malloch-Brown noted that the institution’s “campaigning, donor-driven, goal-setting approach to development ... may have run out of road.” The panel pushed the UN to tackle the “hard stuff” of development from two directions: the macroeconomy and the last mile. Both Kimani and Studwell argued for a short list focused on macroeconomic transformation. For young countries to thrive, they argued that the UN must prioritize the foundational drivers of industrial and economic growth over sprawling, fragmented agendas. Duckworth focused on people, noting that extreme poverty stopped falling and global hunger is higher than when the Sustainable Development Goals were set in 2015, and that persistent pockets of deep poverty remain even in richer countries. A new Secretary-General, she suggested, must avoid the temptation of looking for easy wins and find ways to tackle the “stickier, hard-to-reach issues” that will reach marginalized young people left behind by current development patterns.

Finally, the panel agreed that development solutions need to be driven by the Global South. If the UN wants to help young countries build their own institutional capacity, it cannot do so from New York. As Studwell argued: “I’m not interested in seeing planning capacity for Africa built up in New York or London or D.C. ... I want to see planning capacity for Africa in Nairobi, in Addis, in Lagos, in Abuja.” Malloch-Brown agreed that the UN’s goal isn’t “digging shallow wells,” but helping countries build the institutions required to be the “effective agents of their own development.” As Dag Hammarskjöld did in 1960, that means repositioning the UN as a champion for the development choices and strategies that young countries set for themselves. That also means empowering young citizens on international platforms, Duckworth added, to ensure that they are no longer shut out of the places where decisions are taken.

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

All demographic data is based on World Population Prospects 2024.

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With the President of the UN General Assembly’s first set of interactive dialogues in April, candidates for Secretary-General cleared the first formal hurdle of the 2026 race.

But the official track is only part of the story. Candidates are also expected to engage in public events hosted by think tanks and civil society while, beneath the surface, they maneuver to convince governments, funders, and the media of the strength of their candidacy.

Ahead of the Security Council’s straw polls — expected in July — candidates are hitting the road and debate season will soon be in full swing. While public visibility does not always equal success, it shapes global perceptions and can reveal unexpected strengths or vulnerabilities in a candidate’s platform.

Here is your guide to three major debates that are worth watching. Remember that we already have one new candidate in the race: María Fernanda Espinosa. As she is yet to face the General Assembly, it is assumed that the PGA will organize further interactive dialogues for her and other late entrants, maybe in late June. New York insiders expect that the PGA will also host a public exchange that will put candidates on the same stage sometime in the coming months.

Read our cheat sheet for everything you need to know about the process of electing a new Secretary-General. And we’ll update this article as we get more details on each debate.

London Calling

🌐 Website: The leader the world needs (updates via the UNA-UK newsletter)

📋 Host: The United Nations Association - UK (UNA-UK), with support from RELX.

🗓️ Logistics: Thursday, May 28, 2026, from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. The event is taking place at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster in London.

🎟️ How to join: You can book a pay-what-you-can ticket to join in person. You also have the opportunity to submit questions online ahead of time, as the event will feature pre-selected questions from the audience. At the moment, we don’t have details on whether virtual participation is possible. The debate is being filmed, but — as far as we know — will not be broadcast live.

💬 Format: Four confirmed candidates — Michelle Bachelet, María Fernanda Espinosa, Rafael Grossi, and Rebeca Grynspan — will provide opening statements and sit for a moderated conversation. Macky Sall will not participate in this debate. The evening will kick off with a high-level panel discussion on UN leadership featuring Mark Malloch-Brown (former UN Deputy Secretary-General), Thant Myint-U (writer and historian, and a UN Foundation Senior Fellow), and Margarita Gómez (Executive Director of Southern Voice).

✨ Vibe: UNA-UK ran the first-ever public hustings in 2016, drawing nearly 2,000 people to what was described as “the people’s opportunity to grill candidates.” As part of the 1 for 8 Billion campaign, UNA-UK uses these debates to shine a spotlight on the selection process, demand transparency, and expose any attempts to undermine accountability. Expect a highly engaged crowd focused on finding the right leader for the “world’s toughest job.”

#NextUNSG Geneva

🌐 Website: The Candidates Debate 2026 – #NextUNSG

📋 Host: GWL Voices, in collaboration with the United Nations Foundation.

🗓️ Logistics: Tuesday, June 9, 2026. The debate will take place at the Ivan Pictet Auditorium at the Maison de la Paix in Geneva.

🎟️ How to join: Unlike London, this event is by invitation only. However, the debate will be broadcast via Eurovision’s network.

💬 Format: The debate will be moderated by journalist Zeinab Badawi. It is designed to bring together the official candidates to present their vision, leadership approach, and priorities, followed by a substantive exchange on the most pressing global challenges. Michelle Bachelet, María Fernanda Espinosa, and Rebeca Grynspan are confirmed as participating. Rafael Grossi and Macky Sall are yet to confirm.

✨ Vibe: Positioned as a high-level convening that aims to foster a neutral, informed conversation on the future of multilateral leadership. This event will be a big draw for the “International Geneva” ecosystem, attracting a knowledgeable crowd of ambassadors, UN insiders, NGOs, media, and local students.

Reimagining Multilateralism in Korea

🌐 Website: The 21st Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity

📋 Host: Co-hosted by the Jeju Peace Institute, Ban Ki-moon Foundation for a Better Future, United Nations Foundation, and GWL Voices, as part of the annual Jeju Forum.

🗓️ Logistics: The forum runs from June 24 to 26, 2026, across the Haevichi Hotel & Resort and Jeju Stone Park in Seogwipo, Jeju Island. The candidate debate — officially titled “Reimagining Multilateralism - A Dialogue with UN Secretary General Candidates“ — will take place on Thursday, June 25, from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.

🎟️ How to join: The summit brings together thousands of government officials, experts, and international press in person. You can register here. For those not making the trip to South Korea, major plenary sessions from the Jeju Forum are livestreamed on the official platform.

💬 Format: Billed a chance for candidates to “present their visions for how they plan to lead the international community and the UN,” news reports claim a full house with all candidates committed to attending. So far, the official program lists Rafael Grossi, Rebeca Grynspan, and Macky Sall as speakers. They will lay out their blueprints for leading the UN through unprecedented geopolitical uncertainty.

✨ Vibe: The debate is likely to link to the Jeju Forum’s theme: “reinventing cooperation in a fragmented world,” while shifting the race’s center of gravity to the Asia-Pacific. Expect the candidates’ positions on global security, climate transitions, and AI governance to be tested. Sitting right at the end of June, it is likely to bookend the candidates’ global tour before they return to New York as the Security Council’s closed-door voting begins in July.

February 16, 1960, and a hall at Wellesley College — a liberal arts college for “women who will make a difference in the world” — is packed to overflowing, with hundreds watching on closed-circuit television in another building. The subject: the “well-nigh explosive rapidity with which the peoples of Africa in all sectors are emerging from colonialism.”

Those are the words of Ralph Bunche, UN Under-Secretary for Special Political Affairs under Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN’s second Secretary-General. Bunche, the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, was a keynote speaker at the symposium, alongside representatives of emerging African nations, diplomats, and scholars.

You can read about this event in a New York Times article by Paul Hofmann. Hofmann, an Austrian and ardent antifascist, had served as interpreter for the Nazi commanders of Rome while informing on them to the Italian resistance and the Allies. Now he was reporting on the death throes of colonialism from the Congo, as the Belgian imperial authorities tried — and failed — to slow momentum to independence.

The prevailing sentiment at the Wellesley symposium, Hofmann reported, was that “hostility to colonial powers and to what they stood for was bridging many of the existing differences among Africans.” Debate centered on “whether there were several ‘Africas’ or the continent was an entity, politically and economically.” Whatever the answer to this question, African independence was an increasingly resonant popular movement.

Belgian tactics were to divide and delay, but the Congolese delegates had formed a common front and were wearing down Belgian resistance. The Congolese had invited their musical icon, Joseph Kabasele — Le Grand Kallé — to form a supergroup and bring it to Brussels. The band premiered its wildfire hit, “Indépendance Cha Cha,” on Feb. 1 at a gala in the Hotel Plaza, just as the Belgians capitulated to Congolese demands. Kabasele’s chorus translates to “Independence, cha-cha, we’ve won it. Oh! The round table cha-cha, we’ve pulled it off.” It swept across borders to become Africa’s independence anthem.

Bunche told the Wellesley crowd that he believed Africa’s revolution would be largely peaceful. And that it would bring an influx of new members to the UN that would exert growing influence over international politics and the global economy. He made a prediction: 1960 would be the Year of Africa, and it would provide the UN with as many as eight new Member States.

The name — the Year of Africa — was catchy, and it caught on. But Bunche’s prediction was wide of the mark. In 1945, just four African countries signed the UN Charter. In 1960, 17 nations gained independence and all but one of them was admitted to the UN General Assembly (Mauritania’s membership was delayed until 1961 because of a Soviet veto).

This is the story that introduces the third episode of World’s Toughest Job. We start with it for three reasons. First, for what the UN did to support the independence of these new countries. Second, for how a surge of new Member States gave the UN renewed purpose despite the gridlock of the Cold War. And, for why this episode resonates as the UN is forced once again to reassess its role as a development actor.

The UN is often criticized as a talk shop, but Bunche was a doer. As Kal Raustiala, author of The Absolutely Indispensable Man, explains in the podcast, the collapse of empires was Bunche’s life work. “The process of decolonization was something that he had studied as a graduate student and as a professor at Howard,” Raustiala argues. “When he [Bunche] joins the UN, Africa continues to be something he’s very interested in, especially as a Black man, that’s a particular kind of personal interest, but it was his real academic expertise.”

Long before the Year of Africa made headlines, Bunche was maneuvering behind the scenes, leveraging the UN’s heft to advise emerging African leaders. To get the system fully behind independence, he needed the support of his boss, who spent his days consumed by Cold War crises and knew very little about Africa. But that had now changed. As he sat on the Wellesley platform, Bunche had just returned from a grueling six-week, 21-country tour of the continent, with Hammarskjöld leading the delegation.

The Secretary-General and his entourage traveled in a specially outfitted aircraft that served as a diplomatic command center. On World’s Toughest Job, Raustiala talks about the monkey, Greenback, that Hammarskjöld brought back from the trip, but the detail that sticks with me is the Swedish Christmas tree he strapped inside the plane’s cabin to remind him of home. The Secretary-General had designed the itinerary to bypass colonial intermediaries and communicate directly with African leaders and UN personnel on the ground. His message: How can we help?

It was the right question. The UN team saw firsthand the damage caused by departing colonial powers, as they stripped away the administrative, economic, and institutional scaffolding necessary to run a modern state. When Guinea voted for independence in 1958, France withdrew all colonial administrators, doctors, and as much capital as it could. Two years later in the Congo, fleeing Belgian administrators took the architectural blueprints and legal codes with them. According to Raustiala, “there were only 17 college graduates in the entire country,” whose population at the time was around 15 million.

Bunche had long believed that “peace must be paced by human progress” and that to have meaning “it must be translated into bread or rice, shelter, health, and education, as well as freedom and human dignity — a steadily better life.” Hammarskjöld returned from Africa in full agreement. The UN needed to become an active institutional ally to newly independent states, he concluded, channeling economic support multilaterally rather than bilaterally (as he believed the superpowers were using their money primarily to secure proxy states). “The billions put up would be better billions in terms of peace and world progress if they were put up in a form which was more adjusted to the real political needs of the receiving countries,” Hammarskjöld said.

That also meant providing more than money. Against the opposition of European colonial powers, Hammarskjöld and Bunche had fought to create the UN Economic Commission for Africa, as a center for economic sovereignty and a platform for developing the statistical machinery required for planning. The UN also created a program known as OPEX that deployed central bankers, economic planners, infrastructure coordinators, and other international experts to states that wanted them. These were not aid workers but seconded public servants who took orders from their host governments. The UN sent an executive economist to the Government of Libya, an air traffic controller to manage the skies over Tunisia, and broadcasting directors to Sudan. This program went far beyond Africa. More than 60 countries eventually signed up for this kind of help.

But Africa shaped the UN even more than the UN changed Africa. The opening of the 15th session of the UN General Assembly in the autumn of 1960 was a shock to the old world order. The General Assembly Hall was designed for 70 delegations, but, as Raustiala reminds us in the podcast, membership was now breaking through the 100-country mark with Africa the largest regional bloc. Western powers, which were suddenly losing votes in the General Assembly, felt threatened, and every country sent its heavyweights to New York to jostle for influence. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz (Tito), India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser were all in the same building. Castro attended in military fatigues and delivered what remains the longest speech (269 minutes) in UN General Assembly history.

Khrushchev was at the heart of the backlash from the UN’s traditional powers, repeatedly interrupting speakers and pounding his fists on his desk. When a delegate from the Philippines accused the Soviet Union of imperialism, Khrushchev exploded, calling the delegate a “jerk, a stooge, and a lackey of imperialism.” According to legend, when his microphone was cut, Khrushchev took off a shoe and banged it furiously on the desk to drown out the speaker.

Africa’s leaders, who had come with a message of non-alignment and anti-colonialism, were appalled. Guinea’s young President, Ahmed Sékou Touré, canceled his flight home to return to the UN and demand the floor to scold both the communist bloc and the West. He reminded the room that the UN was located near a famous monument: “The Statue of Liberty ... represents not American liberty alone, but liberty for all peoples and all men.” The entire Assembly rose in ovation.

Amid the hubbub, the shift in the balance of power was palpable. According to Raustiala, African nations “didn’t have a lot of economic power, but they had political power, particularly in the General Assembly, where it was one nation, one vote.” By December, the regional bloc had successfully pushed through the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. The subjugation of peoples by colonial powers was formally declared a violation of fundamental human rights. The African bloc also supported the launch of the first UN Development Decade, the expansion of OPEX, and then, in 1965, its absorption into the newly created UN Development Programme (UNDP).

So what does this history lesson mean for today? In the podcast, panelists ask what the UN can do to support today’s great development challenge: creating opportunities for the largest generation of young people in history and helping young countries build power in the global economy.

While researching this history, a further question occurred to me. When Hammarskjöld and Bunche scrambled to build the development system in the 1960s, they put the international system in the service of governments that were fighting to keep their heads above water. But doesn’t that describe the predicament of almost every country today, as states are outthought and even outspent by private actors, and as a wave of shocks from across borders leaves citizens enraged by each new failure to exert national control?

If the global order of the 20th century was built by strong states, maybe the UN in the 21st century needs to act as a mutual defense pact for besieged states. And, if that is true, maybe a new form of intergovernmentalism is needed. And just as happened in 1960, perhaps a new Secretary-General will need to think very differently about the services governments want the UN — and the broader international system — to provide.

A year after the Wellesley College symposium, and after the conclusion of the Year of Africa, Dag Hammarskjöld returned to the Congo, with Paul Hofmann reporting on his hope that unity would prevail over factionalism. He was killed later in the year when his plane crashed in mysterious circumstances as he once again tried to fly into the country. He gave his life trying to prove that the international system could stand as the last line of defense for a besieged government. In a fractured world, and for a fractious UN, maybe that is again the only mandate that matters

In Africa alone, 12 million young people enter the workforce every year, but only 3 million formal jobs are created. Development assistance is no longer enough. African leaders want real structural power in the global economy.

On this episode of World’s Toughest Job, we ask: Can the next Secretary-General deliver for the world’s young people and young countries?

Host Jasmin Baoumy and co-host are joined by Ambassador , President and CEO of the Africa Center and Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2021 to 2024; Joe Studwell, senior visiting fellow at the UK’s Overseas Development Institute and Senior Fellow at the Africa Urban Lab; and Saru Duckworth, Ph.D. researcher at Oxford.

World’s Toughest Job is a co-production of Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation.

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This week on “World’s Toughest Job,” a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we tackle a fundamental question facing the UN today: Can it still keep the peace?

Hosted by Jasmin Bauomy and co-hosted by Mark Malloch-Brown, our second episode explores a world with violence at levels not seen since the 1940s. They are joined by Lynn Kuok, the Lee Kuan Yew Chair at the Brookings Institution; Ankit Panda, a nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, President of the International Peace Institute and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Starting with the historical precedent of the Secretary-General’s role in defusing the U.S.-Soviet Union standoff during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, our panel asks: When modern warfare moves faster than traditional diplomacy, can the UN still act as a firebreak?

1. The UN must embrace its dual legacy.

When we think of the UN’s founding, we usually focus on its postwar mission to prevent another global war. But the institution was actually built on two parallel imperatives: stopping conflict and managing the dismantling of imperialism.

The Cuban Missile Crisis stands as the benchmark for how the Secretary-General can act as an essential mediator between great powers. As the superpowers barreled toward nuclear war, the UN stepped in to provide essential breathing room, with the Secretary-General playing a critical role in “creating the space for national leaders to take the right decisions to prevent us from falling over the brink,” as Ankit Panda put it. This wasn’t achieved from behind a desk in New York; direct intervention was the deciding factor. As Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein pointed out: “Had U Thant not gone to Cuba, you would not have had a resolution, simple as that.”

Preventing existential conflicts is only half the job. Effective Secretaries-General have also played an essential role in creating space for the peaceful development of newly independent states. This ability to balance major power dynamics while empowering smaller nations is foundational to the UN’s identity and feeds directly into its approach to peacekeeping.

2. The geopolitical guardrails are collapsing.

The world is witnessing a rapid return to great-power conflict, coupled with a breakdown in the rules of international law. As a result, the UN is increasingly sidelined while major powers challenge or ignore multilateral norms.

Lynn Kuok highlighted how these foundational rules of engagement are eroding, noting: “We see U.S.-China tensions. And of course, even the rules by which powers should be playing are contested ... Even in recent months, great powers like the United States have said that international law is in fact irrelevant.” Panda agreed, arguing that the next UN chief will face the daunting task of managing “a United States that is deeply hostile to international law, multilateralism, and the United Nations system.”

Even when international bodies do intervene, such as the tribunal ruling against China regarding the South China Sea, enforcement is impossible without sustained global attention and political will. Ultimately, this breakdown is a reflection of domestic decay. Zeid argued that the erosion of global norms mirrors a broader domestic collapse: “International laws are not being respected,” he asserted. “National law is not being respected.”

3. The old peacekeeping playbook can’t solve today’s complex crises.

Traditional “blue helmet” peacekeeping is facing a political and financial reckoning. As Mark Malloch-Brown explained, today’s peacekeepers are increasingly losing international support and backing from host governments because they fail to deliver lasting solutions. Peacekeeping is expensive, he noted, and “is really only useful if it opens up a path to a longer-term peace.” If a mission merely maintains a dangerous status quo on a conflict, it becomes a low-return investment.

Part of the problem is that legacy missions are ill-equipped to address the underlying drivers of modern violence. In West Africa, for example, traditional UN operations have failed when violence is driven by disputes over land and where climate change is increasing competition between farmers and herders. Without imaginative approaches that get at deep-seated socioeconomic and environmental roots, sustainable peace is impossible.

To regain its footing, the UN must rethink where it spends its political capital. Kuok argued that the next Secretary-General needs the strategic vision to identify which interventions will “give the United Nations the greatest bang for its buck.” This may mean bypassing gridlocked major-power standoffs to focus instead on what are considered second-tier conflicts. By intervening early in crises “where the big powers aren’t so directly engaged,” the UN can exert greater influence and prevent localized disputes from metastasizing into global emergencies.

4. Today’s conflicts pit a $2,000 drone vs. a $2 million missile.

The economics of warfare has been upended by cheaper technologies and artificial intelligence. As Malloch-Brown pointed out, the financial realities of modern combat shift dramatically when a “drone that costs a few thousand dollars is the equal of a multimillion-dollar Patriot missile system.” This asymmetric dynamic can exhaust a well-equipped adversary that is forced to “blow away their ordinance defending themselves against all this cheap kit.”

Furthermore, these new weapons are compressing battlefield decision-making to what the panel called machine speed. Panda warned that this alters the timeline for diplomatic intervention, creating a reality where “decision-making and crises might take on logics that are just uncontrollable by diplomats, by national leaders.” If a crisis unfolds in 13 minutes rather than 13 days — the length of the Cuban Missile Crisis — the Secretary-General’s only hope is to establish preventative norms before conflict starts.

5. Tech billionaires are the new sovereign actors.

Because of this technological shift, nation-states are no longer the only geopolitical players in the room. The Secretary-General’s preventive diplomacy must shape guardrails that stretch beyond states — such as the emerging norm against AI controlling nuclear weapons.

The UN must also grapple with a world in which private companies hold the keys to critical global infrastructure. Kuok stressed that securing the undersea domain — the subsea cables that carry the world’s data and power — is a conversation that “must be had, not just with states, but also with the private sector.”

This new reality extends into orbit. Panda highlighted how tech billionaires have growing control over space. Because “the overwhelming operators of satellites today are private commercial companies” such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, there is a desperate need for new international laws to manage the 21st-century space environment. For the next Secretary-General, figuring out how to bring these tech titans to the diplomatic table will be a defining challenge — a theme we will explore deeply in our upcoming episodes on AI and critical global infrastructure.

6. A paralyzed Security Council is an opportunity, not an excuse.

As we discussed in episode 1, the next Secretary-General cannot wait for a divided Security Council to hand over a mandate. The next leader must be willing to take independent political risks. Zeid argued that institutional gridlock creates space for a “dynamic and active” leader. He pointed to Dag Hammarskjöld, the second UN Secretary-General, as the model: a leader who would “bring in, and suck up ideas, synthesize them, spit them out.”

According to Panda, the next UN chief will need to be “known as possible in key global capitals, at the scenes of major international crises,” thereby ensuring “their identity becomes fused with the identity of the United Nations itself.” But moral authority and visibility won’t be enough if they aren’t backed by rigorous technical expertise. “If the secretariat of the UN really does make an effort to understand these issues in depth,” Zeid emphasized, “then when you’re meeting bankers or tech experts or so forth, they deal with you seriously.”

Ultimately, this circles back to the lesson of our first episode: The next Secretary-General must embrace the Icarus arc and risk angering influential states. Zeid offered a warning about leaders who choose to play it safe, asking if anyone could name the Secretary-General of the League of Nations in 1936. “Nobody remembers,” he noted, because that leader kowtowed to the powerful. In the case of the next UN chief, choosing compliance over courage risks condemning the United Nations to the same fate.

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

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It is August 1962, and U Thant, acting Secretary-General of the United Nations, is sitting by the Black Sea. He is visiting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at his dacha in Yalta. The two men have finished a lunch spent discussing a divided Berlin and the UN’s fragile finances.

It is a sweltering day. Khrushchev suggests a swim and strips down to his bathing suit. U Thant politely declines. But as his grandson, the historian and author Thant Myint-U, recounts in the second episode of our podcast, World’s Toughest Job, Khrushchev is insistent.

The two end up bobbing in the water, U Thant in a borrowed swimming costume that doesn’t fit. What he doesn’t know is that Khrushchev is already secretly sending nuclear missiles to Cuba. But — that deception notwithstanding — this moment established the rapport U Thant would need just weeks later. When the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, U Thant was able to pick up the phone and act as a “firebreak” between Washington and Moscow.

After dedicating our first episode to the type of leader the world needs, the rest of the series focuses on the inbox the next Secretary-General will inherit. Each time, we draw lessons for the tenth Secretary-General from how their predecessors survived the crises of the 20th century. By exploring U Thant’s diplomacy during the Cold War, we can delve into the playbook the next Secretary-General will need to reclaim the UN’s role as a guarantor of international peace and security.

Everyone knows the Cuban Missile Crisis was dangerous. But we also seem to forget just how close we came to disaster. Consider the night of October 27, 1962. A Soviet submarine, depth-charged by U.S. destroyers and cut off from Moscow, prepared to launch a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo. Launch required consensus from three officers. Two said yes. One — Flotilla Chief of Staff Vasili Arkhipov — said no. At the same time, U.S. forces were preparing for a land invasion, unaware that Soviet troops on the island were already armed with tactical nuclear warheads and positioned to use them. Had the Marines landed, they would have been met with nuclear fire, forcing a full strategic response.

President Kennedy later estimated the probability of disaster at “between one in three and even.” Looking at the historical record, he did not overstate the risk. In our podcast, Thant Myint-U reflects on how Armageddon was actually avoided and wonders how to value the role played by his grandfather’s mediation. “What percentage? I don’t know,” he says. “5%, 10%, 20%? I don’t know. But without him, there might not have been a firebreak.” I had wondered the same thing after reading Thant’s book. And as part of the research for [Re]Group, I decided to try and work it out.

This is a simple calculation, looking only at the immediate economic costs of a nuclear war in 1962. It does not even attempt to account for the catastrophic loss of life, the physical destruction, or the sudden end of the post-World War II order. Instead, consider two baselines: What if a limited nuclear exchange caused an economic shock on par with the Great Depression (a 15% loss of global GDP)? And what if a wider war mirrored the devastation of the Black Death (a 33% loss)? Using Kennedy’s lower-bound estimate of a 33% risk of war, and modeling the conservative “Great Depression” shock, we only need to give U Thant a mere 1.7% of the credit for the peaceful outcome to pay for every single dollar spent on the UN from 1945 up to that point — including the construction of its New York headquarters and the massive peacekeeping mission in the Congo.

And if we give him a bigger role? If we assume a “Black Death” level shock, adjust the risk to a coin toss, and put his attribution at 10% — the middle of his grandson’s guess—the math scales dramatically. This single act of diplomacy generates enough expected value to fund the entire UN system, including all of its regular budgets and peacekeeping operations, straight through to the mid-1990s.

But, as Thant Myint-U argues, the United Nations was driven by two parallel imperatives in the 20th century. Beyond preventing nuclear war, an “equally important” mission was creating “a world without empire.” When we look back at the rapid dismantling of European empires, we are looking at the largest transfer of territory in human history. It was also arguably the UN’s most successful, and largely forgotten, peacekeeping operation. By offering a legal, orderly timeline for imperial handover—through both the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly—the UN’s diplomatic machinery acted as a massive shock absorber. It reduced the need for colonies to fight wars of national liberation, and ensured that those who did had an international mechanism to help resolve them.

We see this contrast when comparing catastrophic wars in Vietnam and Algeria, where imperial powers refused to use the UN’s “conveyor belt” to statehood, to the international system’s ability to shield independence in Botswana and protect it through peacekeeping in the Congo. The UN’s Blue Helmets have continued to reduce the risk of war, offering a further return on investment in peace and security. Consider the period between 2001 and 2013. The UN spent $59 billion globally on peacekeeping. Counterfactual modeling shows that without those missions, the world would have experienced three to four additional major civil wars. Given the average cost of a conflict of that type, the UN preserved up to $216 billion in economic value. The investment paid for itself nearly four times over.

Why look backward at these numbers? Because the evidence of the UN’s value isn’t actually that hard to find. When you add up the averted costs of nuclear exchanges and civil wars, finding the international system’s return on investment is like shooting fish in a barrel. It proves the most banal of truisms: war is ruinously expensive, while peace is absurdly cheap.

But there is a catch, which brings us back to the case study for this episode of World’s Toughest Job. The paradox of prevention is that when it works, nothing happens. Over the decades, the machinery of peace becomes invisible. And because we can no longer see the mechanisms keeping us alive, war once again becomes fashionable.

This is why roundtable guests focused so heavily on the type of leader the UN needs in 2027. With great power rivalries intensifying and the norms governing conflict rapidly decaying, the old bureaucratic playbook is no longer enough. As Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein argued, the times demand a risk-taker, not a cautious administrator. Otherwise, as Thant Myint-U warned, forgetting how wars were once prevented will lead only to our “sleepwalking back into the cataclysmic bloodshed of the early 20th century.”

Today, the risk from war is once again at a dangerous level. And on this episode of World’s Toughest Job, we ask what leverage the next Secretary-General will have when a threat simmers for months or years and then explodes—not in 13 days, but in 13 hours. Can they still act as a firebreak when the old safety nets are gone? Or is it truly an impossible job?

Jasmin Baoumy and are joined by Lynn Kuok, the Lee Kuan Yew chair at Brookings Institution; Ankit Panda, nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, president of the International Peace Institute.

World’s Toughest Job is a co-production of Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation.

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This article was first published in its original multimedia form on Our Future Agenda. To experience the full version with its original visual and interactive elements:

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As the selection process for the next UN Secretary-General accelerates, much of the focus has been on who is running and who can win.

The first 2026 edition of Our Future Agenda Quarterly asks something different: What kind of world awaits the next Secretary-General? And what kind of leadership will that world demand?

Across six essays, the issue explores the wider context in which the next Secretary-General will take office on Jan. 1, 2027. It dives into the growing strain on global cooperation, the shift from rules to raw power, the challenge of rebuilding trust in institutions, and the mounting pressure to deliver results.

The UN’s Next Era Will Be Built in Disorder sets aside the notion that the Secretary-General’s role is to re-create a vanished order and explores the real task at hand: maintaining cooperative governance through rupture, fragmentation, and pressure. The Secretary-General’s effectiveness in doing so, as examined in From Rules to Raw Power, may depend as much on people’s trust in the office as on the formal powers it holds.

Show Me It Works asks whether multilateralism can deliver tangible results — a protected school, a prevented escalation, a community kept afloat — while Who Pays for the Future? looks at the deeper architecture underneath it all: debt, aid, finance, and the unequal costs of building resilience.

The Secretary-General’s First Test Is Post-2030 argues that the first real challenge may not be a single crisis at all, but whether the UN can begin the transition beyond 2030 with enough urgency, transparency, and discipline to make the next phase more credible than the last one. Finally, The First Interview Round takes readers inside the first interactive dialogues to see what the candidates’ answers revealed about how they understand the job itself.

About Our Future Agenda

Our Future Agenda is a United Nations Foundation program dedicated to putting young people — especially from young countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — at the heart of global decision-making and solving the world’s biggest challenges.

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The UN and the UN Foundation are mourning the loss and honoring the life of Ted Turner, who passed away on May 6, 2026. In 1997, Turner pledged $1 billion and created the UN Foundation to support the United Nations and UN causes, at the time the largest individual philanthropic gift in history.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres reacted to Turner’s passing: “Ted Turner believed in the United Nations – and in its purpose – at a defining moment. And he invested in that mission.”

UN Foundation President and CEO Elizabeth Cousens noted: “Ted was a visionary with an impatience for change. Even in the face of headwinds, he believed that progress was always in reach and everyone had a role to play in bringing it about.”

He was a “tireless champion for our common humanity,” she said in a statement.

Turner worked with three Secretaries-General to the UN – Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon, and António Guterres. On the 20th anniversary of his historic gift to the UN, he wrote:

“I believe the UN is humanity’s greatest hope for a better planet for my grandchildren and for people everywhere.”

His support for the UN will long be remembered.

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2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for global AI governance. As the UN works to keep pace with a technology evolving in real time, the Global Digital Compact negotiations offer three lessons in translating technical complexity into political consensus.

“AI is moving at the speed of light,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres affirmed at a news conference in early February 2026. “No country can see the full picture alone. We need shared understandings to build effective guardrails, unlock innovation for the common good, and foster cooperation.”

Guterres has been signaling a new course for the UN on AI and a new phase of multilateral AI diplomacy. Building on the Global Digital Compact, two major mechanisms in the emerging global governance landscape are taking shape: the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Together, they bring fresh attention to the question: What does credible, inclusive global AI governance and cooperation look like?

The Global Digital Compact and AI Governance Today

The UN is no stranger to discussions on AI governance. The Secretary-General’s 2020 Roadmap for Digital Cooperation called for AI that is “trustworthy, human-rights based, safe and sustainable and promotes peace.” The following year, in Our Common Agenda, the Secretary-General floated the idea of a Global Digital Compact to promote the regulation of AI to align with global values.

The International Telecommunications Union has been organizing AI for Good Summits since 2017 — a full five years before ChatGPT was even launched.

But the Global Digital Compact negotiations in 2024 moved conversations on AI governance an essential step further, catapulting them into the center of Member State diplomacy.

Negotiation rooms buzzed as delegations tackled digital rights, data governance, and AI governance at UN scale — many for the first time. Diplomats weren’t just discussing text; they were negotiating what the uncharted work of multilateral AI governance could even mean.

The Global Digital Compact forced an essential question onto the agenda: What role should the UN play in governing AI?

The answer was never going to be simple. Some countries favored a light touch approach that preserves market dynamism and innovation. Others pushed for stronger safeguards grounded in human rights and democratic resilience. Many emphasized capacity building and ensuring AI doesn’t further widen digital inequality.

Ultimately, the Global Digital Compact laid the groundwork for two distinct but complementary initiatives: the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, designed to provide an independent, evidence-based foundation, and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which aims to translate that evidence into shared understanding and cooperation.

These mechanisms emerged for a practical reason: The negotiations made clear that Member States need both a trusted source of technical and scientific grounding and a standing political space to keep pace with fast-moving technology.

As the Panel and the Dialogue begin to take shape, the success of the Global Digital Compact offers three lessons for what is achievable.

Consensus on Multilateral AI Governance is Possible

One of the most important takeaways from the Global Digital Compact process is that consensus on AI is possible. Even in today’s geopolitical climate, Member States have shown they can agree on AI-related outcomes.

The Global Digital Compact revealed why. In UN negotiations, shared language depends on shared understanding. And shared understanding rarely appears fortuitously during formal negotiations. Instead, it is built in the ecosystem around it: informal dialogues, expert briefings, off-the-record conversations, and neutral convenings where diplomats can ask questions without political cost.

During the Global Digital Compact negotiations, these spaces played an essential role because many delegations were engaging substantively with AI governance for the first time. In that context, informal learning was not a side activity — it was a prerequisite for progress.

Just as importantly, informal convenings such as those led by the United Nations Foundation prior to the start of official negotiations brought together actors who do not normally sit in the same room: diplomats, technical experts, private sector practitioners, civil society, UN entities, and other actors who do not normally sit in the same room. That multistakeholder engagement grounded negotiations in real-world applications, risks, and trade-offs.

All of this shows that to gain true consensus on global AI governance, the UN will need to treat informal, multistakeholder engagement both as an integral part of the governance model and as crucial building blocks in building shared understanding.

Global Legitimacy: the UN’s Advantage in AI Governance

The second lesson from the Global Digital Compact is about the UN’s unique role.

When changes of this magnitude hit the global system, they must be discussed in the UN — the one place where every Member State has a seat at the table. That legitimacy matters in AI because the risks and benefits are global, while the capacity to shape rules, standards, and markets is not.

Without an inclusive platform, AI governance will be shaped primarily by a small number of countries and companies. Many Member States, particularly across the Global South, will become mere bystanders as entire societies and economies are transformed by this powerful technology.

The Global Digital Compact process helped push back on that trajectory by establishing the simple principle that global AI governance needs to be built in a forum where participation is universal.

But it also revealed a harder truth: that legitimacy alone is no longer enough. Multilateral AI governance is not about choosing between innovation or protection, development or human rights, risk or capacity building, or other false dichotomies. It is about establishing a coherent approach that advances all of these critical considerations at once and produces actionable outcomes.

No single actor can meet this moment alone. Governments, companies, civil society, and the UN all have essential and complementary roles. The UN’s job is not to replace other efforts; it is to provide an umbrella where different approaches can be made interoperable, standards can be practical across different market realities, and the benefits of digital transformation remain open to all.

In 2026, success hinges on whether the UN can build trust in both the Panel and the Dialogue as credible, inclusive mechanisms that deliver for everyone.

Interoperability and Standards Are Crucial

Finally, the Global Digital Compact negotiations underscored how quickly fragmentation can take hold. Member States came to the table with fundamentally different assumptions about how AI should be governed. These differences weren’t simply ideological. They were rooted in economic realities, technological capacity, and security calculations.

The risk is a world of incompatible AI rules, evaluation standards, safety approaches, and accountability regimes.

This world would have predictable consequences: widening inequality, weaker oversight, and greater market failures. It would also increase risks in military and security contexts and other domains where the stakes are highest and inconsistent norms can amplify instability.

Global AI governance is a concrete possibility not only through high-level principles, but also through interoperability: how different systems, standards, and regulatory approaches work together to create a coherent approach for global AI governance.

The Test Ahead

Multilateral AI governance is a test the UN must pass — and quickly. No other platform can bring all countries together. But convening alone won’t be enough in an AI era defined by speed, concentrated power, and geopolitical competition. The UN will need to persuade Member States that it can contribute meaningfully, not just by convening around a scientific basis, but by clarifying, connecting, and accelerating global cooperation.

The Scientific Panel and Global Dialogue will be key to help the UN navigate the complex yet essential work around AI. At stake is whether the multilateral system can adapt fast, and thoughtfully, enough to govern the defining technology of the era.

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For over 25 years, the UN Foundation has built novel innovations and partnerships to support the United Nations and help solve global problems at scale. As an independent charitable organization, the Foundation was created to work closely with the United Nations to address humanity’s greatest challenges and drive global progress.

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This week, we launched World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation. Hosted by audio storyteller Jasmin Bauomy and co-hosted by — the former UN Deputy Secretary-General — this eight-part series looks past the political horse race to explore the challenges facing the next UN Secretary-General.

In our first episode, we set the scene and ask what kind of leader the world needs right now. We explore the innovation required to bypass a deadlocked multilateral system, and how the next Secretary-General can use their moral and political voice to defend human dignity at a time of growing geopolitical tensions.

Here are four takeaways from their discussion:

1. The UN is facing an existential election.

When we think of the UN, we usually think of vetoes and deadlocked Security Council meetings. But if the next Secretary-General fails, the institution won’t suddenly close down. As Richard Gowan points out, the real danger is that the UN fades away to become “an interesting museum piece on the East River where school groups come and teenagers look a bit bored wandering around the halls.”

We can’t afford that because we rely on multilateralism to keep the world running. As Nudhara Yusuf explains, the UN does much more than prevent wars; it sets the baseline rules for international travel, telecommunications, and even space systems. “I think if we don’t get that right this year, we are going to reach a tipping point in history where we’ll look back and say, we made a mistake,” she adds.

2. The UN has always been about more than keeping the peace.

There is a lot of talk right now about taking the UN “back to basics.” Often, that is interpreted as a narrow focus on mediation and security. But Thant Myint-U reminds us that the UN was always fueled by two equal convictions.

The first was a world without war. In a future episode of World’s Toughest Job, he will tell the story of how Secretary-General U Thant stepped between a deadlocked U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis to help pull the world back from the nuclear brink.

The second conviction was a world without empire. Asserting state sovereignty and ensuring a fairer economic system for newly decolonized nations was core business for the UN for the first half of its existence. Today, the UN must constantly balance mitigating risk — managing peace, security, and a wave of global emergencies — with the demand to create and broaden opportunities for the Global South. No Secretary-General will succeed without balancing both sides of this coin.

3. Don’t wait for permission. Ask for forgiveness.

If a Secretary-General waits for a divided Security Council to give them a mandate, they will be paralyzed. Any Secretary-General needs to improvise, especially during periods of turbulence. As Susana Malcorra puts it: “What I learned in the United Nations is that unless something is specifically prohibited, you can do it and eventually ask for forgiveness.”

This becomes even more true when the geopolitical chessboard is changing and UN leaders need to build new coalitions to solve global problems. That requires the mindset of a chess grandmaster. Where others see gridlock, Mark Malloch-Brown argues a successful Secretary-General sees a geopolitical Venn diagram. He experienced this firsthand as Deputy Secretary-General under Kofi Annan, who combined public celebrity with behind-the-scenes leverage to discover shared interests where none seemed to exist.

How a leader finds that path to impact depends entirely on their temperament. Thant Myint-U notes that contemporaries found Dag Hammarskjöld literally “electrifying” in a room, while U Thant had the opposite effect, using his calming presence to convince adversaries a compromise could be found. Others, like Ban Ki-moon, pursued patient diplomacy to secure breakthroughs like the Paris Agreement. But whatever their personal style, the rule remains the same: act first, and use the moral authority of the office to pull the world along with you.

4. Embrace the “Icarus Arc.”

Even the most successful Secretaries-General eventually fly too close to the sun. Mark Malloch-Brown points out a recurring historical pattern: a Secretary-General arrives with political momentum, but has to make increasingly tough choices. Whether it was Dag Hammarskjöld in the Congo, U Thant navigating the Cold War, or Kofi Annan dealing with the Iraq War, their political support from the permanent members of the Security Council inevitably frayed.

Forcing change comes at a cost. The more risks you take and the more you get done, the more political capital you burn. But the alternative — keeping your head down to survive — is worse. As Thant Myint-U pointed out, if a new Secretary-General is “seen taking risks for peace in Ukraine... in the Middle East, in Sudan,” they have a chance of leaving a legacy, even if that angers the powers that be.

What’s Next?

Episode 1 defines the leadership required for the job. The rest of the series looks at the impossible missions waiting in the new Secretary-General’s inbox. Over the next seven episodes, we are going to pair the challenges the UN’s next leader will face — from AI and climate change to economic turbulence — with how a past Secretary-General handled a similar challenge. Join us to learn what the leaders of tomorrow can learn from the stories of our multilateral past.

Listen to Episode 1

Host Jasmin Baoumy is joined by Thant Myint-U, a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation; Susana Malcorra, the President and Co-founder of GWL Voices; and Mark Malloch-Brown, a former UN Deputy Secretary-General and Administrator of the UN Development Programme. Nudhara Yusuf, Co-Chair of Coalition for the UN We Need and Richard Gowan, Director for Global Issues and Institutions at the International Crisis Group, offer insights.

World’s Toughest Job is a co-production of Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation.

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Daniele Bellasio: At Davos, former Canadian central bank governor [and now the country’s Prime Minister] Mark Carney declared, “Nostalgia is not a strategy.” He described a world experiencing a rupture of the liberal order and proposed a new activism of middle powers to manage the risk of a world divided into U.S., Chinese, and Russian spheres of influence. To understand if a world governed by middle powers is truly viable, we’re joined by Professor Francesco Mancini, who teaches global governance at the National University of Singapore.

Professor, to start: Is Carney’s strategy of middle powers banding together to manage geopolitical risk fundamentally sound? What works in his speech, and what falls short?

Francesco Mancini: You summarized Carney’s core premise well. We are not merely in a transition; we are facing a rupture of the rules-based international order. He quoted Thucydides’ classic maxim of realpolitik: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” It reflects the idea that, in the absence of rules, power is exercised purely for self-benefit.

However, Carney also used a metaphor from Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, likening today’s international situation to shopkeepers who, under Soviet communism, displayed regime slogans out of fear. He argued that many countries continue to invoke the rules-based international order as if it still functions, even though everyone knows it has stopped working, with those rules now applied asymmetrically or for self-serving ends.

I found this comparison less successful. Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet tanks; its participation in the Soviet empire was an armed imposition, which is far from the reality of the United Nations. But the underlying point is valid. Today, great powers — the U.S., China, and Russia — use tools of coercion, including trade, to force compliance. Carney’s warning to middle powers is stark: If you are not at the table, you are on the menu. He is issuing a call for medium-sized countries — like Canada, Japan, Australia, and many European nations, including Italy — to organize and cooperate to avoid falling prey to the great powers.

The idea of middle powers creating a new global governance balances idealism with pragmatism. From your perspective in Singapore, is the idea of a world driven by middle powers convincing to you, and what role can they actually play?

It is absolutely plausible. In fact, many multilateral collaborations started with middle powers and expanded from there. This “pragmatic idealism” is something many countries have already been applying. We heard the Prime Minister of Finland speak last year of “value-based realism,” for example.

The parallel between Finland and Canada is interesting. What do the two countries have in common? Geography. They are located on the borders of countries that offer them existential challenges (Russia for Finland, the U.S. for Canada). Countries on geopolitical fault lines typically feel the need to defend their values and stand up for their identity, but they must also be ready to defend themselves against threats to their borders. Risk — the threats they face — creates an incentive to cooperate with those that have shared interests.

There is a similar dynamic in Southeast Asia, where competition between China and the U.S. creates similar pressures. At Davos, Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam spoke about the need for a plan B. He argued that we cannot simply wait for the old order to return. This is not a rejection of the multilateralism of the United Nations, but a realistic approach that starts from where we are now.

These are countries that recognize the values of norms and formal international institutions but are also creating targeted, variable-geometry coalitions around specific global challenges, from AI security to the climate crisis to open trade. Look at the group of states that have been working for years on maritime security, for example, focusing on an issue that really matters to them.

We also see countries diversifying their trade partners and strengthening their domestic economies to reduce vulnerabilities. In other words, a range of approaches that we could describe as geopolitical risk management.

Critics point out two major risks. First, relying on new alliances seems risky when U.S. administrations can change every four years. Second, countries like Canada are deeply intertwined economically with the U.S. Is a middle-power alliance simply too difficult to sustain in practice?

Regarding the first criticism: Waiting around for Washington to change is not a strategy. The world is divided between those who think America’s current worldview is a temporary anomaly and those who recognize it as the new normal. Over 80 years after the Second World War, we have learned that you cannot depend on a single state for defense or economic stability. You must diversify.

As for the second criticism — that diversification is difficult — of course it is. Geography makes it much harder for Canada to trade than for nations in Southeast Asia, which are positioned to easily trade with one another. But difficulty is not an excuse for inaction.

I would add my own critique of Carney’s speech. He failed to explain that we’re talking about only one aspect of international relations when we focus on the laws, rules, and institutions that guide cooperation between countries. Force, economic power, and increasingly technological might are all tools also at the disposal of states.

But rules do not become useless just because states violate them. It is like saying we shouldn’t have laws against theft because thieves exist. The opposite is true: Thieves are exactly why you need the law, the police, and better burglar alarms. The fact that America, China, and Russia are today acting more coercively does not mean the global rules have vanished.

The majority of the world — represented by these medium and small states — continues to rely on them and is actively using them to cooperate.

Recently, this plan B seems to just look like a pivot to China. Carney went to Beijing; the UK and Australia have reopened dialogues with the Chinese. Are we simply swapping reliance on the U.S. for reliance on China?

We must not think in such a dualistic way. America and China are massive economic magnets, but corporate diversification extends far beyond them to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America. Assuming China is the only alternative to America is not an effective strategy.

In a world where the international order no longer automatically guarantees fairness and predictability, we can no longer choose between disengagement (“I won’t talk to you”) or total alignment (“you are my best friend ever”). Instead, we need an active risk management strategy. Even market access is no longer a passive benefit of globalization. It requires active risk management. We can no longer choose between total disengagement or total alignment; we must proactively manage diversified partnerships.

That requires a redesign of policy — both industrial and foreign policy — which in itself requires a substantial commitment.

How does the Chinese leadership view this movement of middle powers?

Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng spoke in Davos of the importance of multilateralism, free trade, and cooperation. Trump [the U.S. President] loves to break the rules, but Beijing needs stability to trade, grow, and project influence. Clearly, it also resists an order based on rules that constrain its power, but it has a very different approach from the American one.

In essence, China plays two games at once. Inside the system, it champions multilateralism and uses the United Nations and the World Trade Organization when it is convenient. Outside the system, it builds alternative institutions and uses bilateral economic leverage to increase other countries’ dependence on Beijing.

Because China lacks the vast network of alliances the U.S. has, it has to actively build them — often from a structural position of strength. In this context, Carney’s proposal for middle powers to cooperate is a challenge to China’s strategy. A united front of middle powers reduces the effectiveness of Beijing’s bilateral pressure, helping smaller states avoid succumbing to coercion without resorting to a frontal clash.

We recently heard Mario Draghi [the former Prime Minister of Italy and earlier president of the European Central Bank] urge Europe to unite and become a genuine power itself. What is Europe’s role in this new dynamic?

Europe must learn from Canada and be more proactive. Simply regretting the past or acting offended when a historical ally breaks the rules is not a strategy. We must accept that the world is changing.

Europe is essentially a coalition of middle powers, and many of these mechanisms are already in motion — the EU is actively pursuing free trade agreements with Southeast Asia, Australia, and India. The core problem is that Europe is unable to convert its aggregate economic weight into unified political power. European states still tend to act alone to sponsor their own domestic companies and interests. I see this often from my vantage point in Asia.

While that structural issue won’t be solved overnight, it shouldn’t stop Europe from pursuing a more active, strategic engagement with China and the rest of the world. We need leaders who understand that active risk management and diversification are the only ways forward.

As you and Mark Carney both rightly point out, nostalgia is not a strategy. Professor Mancini, thank you for joining us.

This conversation comes courtesy of Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy’s newspaper of record. We are grateful for their permission to republish this interview from Macro, their podcast dedicated to the geopolitical forces shaping our world.

As part of our broader effort to surface analysis and ideas circulating beyond English-language debates, we are looking to bring in perspectives from other languages about the future of multilateralism. We welcome suggestions and other ideas to share and spotlight.

We are in the grips of a geopolitical furor, and most eyes are trained on events in Tehran, politics in Washington, and the imminent summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping (if it is not postponed once again). But in New York, thoughts have turned to the election of the next Secretary-General of the United Nations.

This week, candidates participated in a sequence of webcast dialogues, primarily with Member States but also with some vetted questions from civil society organizations. The hearings come after considerable diplomatic wrangling by their official host, President of the General Assembly Annalena Baerbock (former foreign minister of the world’s fourth-largest economy, an unusually high stature holder of the role).

Seeking more engaging ways to go about the selection process, Baerbock encountered stiff resistance, primarily from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. That they should have put sand in the gears of an issue this limited in scope is instructive. It shows the political tensions surrounding the institution, but also that the major powers believe this is a job that still matters. The P5 never had any intention of losing control of the selection process.

The dialogues arrive at a fraught juncture for multilateralism. The UN has been roundly criticized over its perceived failures in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere. The analytical consensus is that the international order and the multilateral system that supports it are under significant stress, perhaps to the point of rupture.

That context does not relieve policymakers of the obligation to take seriously the question of who will lead the UN after António Guterres concludes his tenure on Dec. 31. A careful reading of the history of the institution, whatever its limitations, reveals something the current skepticism tends to obscure: The UN has at times been a crucial diplomatic off-ramp in great-power crises.

UN mediators and observers were deployed to help end the first Arab-Israeli war as early as 1948. The same year the UN Security Council was the venue for negotiations between the P3 (the United States, the UK, and France) and the Soviet Union to ease the Berlin Blockade. When North Korean troops, with Chinese and Soviet backing, invaded South Korea in 1950, it was a UN force that assembled to resist and reverse the aggression. The legacy of that action lives on today in the form of the UN Command that technically oversees the U.S. troop presence on the peninsula.

The Suez Crisis in 1956 led to mediation by Canadian diplomat Lester Pearson and the deployment of the UN’s first large-scale armed peacekeeping forces. And so on through the Katanga Crisis (1960–63) and the Yom Kippur War (1973). Famously, this includes U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s use of Secretary-General U Thant as a back channel during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, with strong backing from Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other nonaligned leaders.

The pattern did not end with the Cold War. U.S. President Bill Clinton and his French counterpart Jacques Chirac made use of UN authorization in the Balkans in 1999. The second Bush administration sought Security Council legitimation ahead of the 2003 Iraq War. In its first term and despite its institutional skepticism, even the Trump administration engaged with UN frameworks on specific issues, such as sanctions resolutions against North Korea. In his second term, even while acting unilaterally in Venezuela and Iran, President Trump has turned to the UN to authorize a gang suppression force for Haiti, alongside a new UN mission to provide that force with logistical support.

The lesson is not that the UN is invariably indispensable, but that it has been consistently available to states willing to use it. The quality of the UN’s leadership has real consequences for its availability and effectiveness.

Revisiting the structural critique

The prevailing critique of the UN holds that the institution is hidebound, insufficiently flexible, excessively bureaucratic, and structurally incapable of responding with the speed or creativity that contemporary crises demand. This critique, however compelling rhetorically, obscures more than it explains. When states have chosen to engage with the UN, they have found that it can often be deployed in ways that are more creative and consequential than a negative narrative would suggest.

We can see this flexibility across a range of diverse deployments. For instance, the UN established a commission to handle compensation claims following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and deployed observers in Georgia to monitor a pre-existing regional ‘peacekeeping’ force. From 1995 to 1999, it placed a preventive force along the Macedonia-Albania border to serve as a ‘blue trip-wire’. In 1999, it authorized the Australian-led multinational force that rapidly restored order in East Timor. More recently, that adaptability has extended to a naval task force patrolling the waters off Lebanon’s coast after 2006 and a unique dual-key judicial arrangement in Guatemala from 2007 to 2019.

The moribund critique also applies to Security Council membership, which has not been revised since 1965. There is a strong normative case for expanding the Council by adding permanent or long-term members to more accurately represent today’s distribution of power. Advocates of Security Council reform, however, routinely fail to explain how adding new members would lead to fewer wars. Those States most likely to trigger the kinds of war that the UN is meant to prevent are already on the Council and already wield vetoes. And even if vetoes were magically waved away, a UN resolution does not stop aggression; only collective defense can do that.

Disaggregating the cost critique

A second line of criticism concerns the trajectory of UN costs.

When it comes to the most expensive item in the UN’s budget, peacekeeping, we find little validity to the critique that budgets have run out of control. Many analysts skip over a basic variable: the number of people living in places where UN peacekeeping and political missions are deployed. When budgets are benchmarked against the population covered by the mission’s mandate, a correlation emerges (see figure 1). There has been some fluctuation — per capita costs grew in the mid 2000s as the UN was asked to undertake more complex multidimensional deployments — but have since fallen back to historical baselines. Overall, the more powerful trend is a simple one: The cost of peacekeeping broadly tracks population size.

In real per capita terms, protecting a civilian through UN peacekeeping today costs roughly the same as it did a quarter-century ago in 1999. Throughout this period, costs have tracked the scale of what the institution was mandated to do. That is not evidence of institutional inefficiency. It is evidence of institutional responsiveness.

A more persuasive criticism concerns the humanitarian side of the ledger, where the population data does not clearly account for cost growth. The Trump administration has drawn considerable criticism for its deep reductions in UN humanitarian funding. It would be an error, however, to treat this as an idiosyncratic American position. Across the membership, states are reassessing their humanitarian contributions. And as the underlying data suggests, humanitarian budgets have grown at a rate disproportionate to demonstrable demand in population need and operational scope (figure 2). (This data is a snapshot; the picture is made more complicated by the reality that budget requests often go partially unfilled. That nuance doesn’t alter the overall trendline though.)

While the number of people requiring assistance has grown significantly since the turn of the century, the overall budget has grown even faster. After adjusting for inflation, the real per capita cost of humanitarian aid has roughly doubled since the early 2000s and was even higher at its peak in 2015 (figure 3).

This does not suggest evidence of waste or even inefficiency, but rather reflects the widening scope of the UN’s humanitarian model. However, in the current environment, even after a recent reset that aims to “hyper-prioritize” life-saving operations, alongside deep cuts to headquarters staffing, the UN will still need to confront this structural rise in humanitarian costs.

Implications for selecting a new Secretary-General

The UN’s agenda encompasses an expansive range of issues: from climate governance to international development, from disarmament to digital regulation. But whether the UN can regain some of its lost relevance will depend less on its performance in these areas than on how it fares in its core post-war mission of mitigating conflicts.

To do so, the next leader must once again position the organization as an indispensable tool for de-escalation and crisis management. Whoever takes the helm will have a compelling story to tell on the myriad ways the UN can mitigate crises, and on the realistic costs of keeping the peace in increasingly complex settings. They will also have to get to grips with the structural rise in the cost of humanitarian operations, as funding drops but need continues to grow.

Ultimately, the candidates in New York must offer a narrative that connects the UN’s capabilities to the current geopolitical reality. Yes, they must chart a course for reform, but the real challenge is persuading a skeptical world to care about an 80-year-old institution — and to remind world powers of the ways the UN can help.

While cynics may dismiss the UN’s relevance amid major power aggression and a rapidly changing global order, history suggests a more complex picture. Limiting one of the few institutional tools we have for risk management is counterproductive. There is no advantage to a weak Secretary-General when the world desperately needs better options for crisis management. If we’re facing an all-hands-on-deck moment in world politics, let’s pick clever hands.

About the authors

Callie Sones is an International Affairs and Modern Languages Major at Georgia Institute of Technology; Diana Paz García is an International Security Analyst; Bruce Jones is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; Jeffrey Feltman is a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and the John C. Whitehead Visiting Fellow in International Diplomacy at Brookings.

What kind of leader does the world need right now?

In World’s Toughest Job, we’ll explore the future of global cooperation, the leadership required for today’s challenges, and the critical issues facing the next UN Secretary-General — from economic turbulence and superpower rivalries, to AI, inequality, and climate change.

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The new, eight-part podcast series from Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation premieres April 28, wherever you get your podcasts.

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AT A GLANCE • THE RACE • THE PROCESS • THE POLITICS • ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

AT A GLANCE

• Confirmed candidates: 5

• Stage: Late nominations / post-interactive dialogues

THE RACE

Who’s Running

• Michelle Bachelet Jeria (Chile) — nominated by Chile, Brazil, Mexico (February 2, 2026); Chile withdrew nomination March 25, 2026, but she remains nominated by Brazil and Mexico

• Rafael Grossi (Argentina) — nominated by Argentina (November 26, 2025)

• Rebeca Grynspan Mayufis (Costa Rica) — nominated by Costa Rica (March 3, 2026)

• Macky Sall (Senegal) — nominated by Burundi (March 2, 2026)

• María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés (Ecuador) — nominated by Antigua and Barbuda (May 11, 2026)

Withdrawals

• Virginia Gamba (Argentina) — nominated by Maldives (March 11, 2026); withdrawn March 25, 2026

THE PROCESS

1. Nomination

• Candidates can be nominated by any Member State, individually or jointly (no requirement to be nominated by their own country).

• Member States can withdraw nominations; only one candidate at a time.

• Requirements: CV, vision statement, campaign finance disclosure.

• Candidates holding UN roles must suspend them or consider doing so.

Legal Basis: UN Charter Article 97 — “Appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”

Modalities: GA Resolution 79/327 (pp. 6–8, 2025) sets timelines, eligibility, withdrawal rules, and ethics for campaigning.

See useful guides from NYU Center on International Cooperation and 1 for 8 Billion.

2. Public Campaign & Dialogues

• President of the General Assembly convenes interactive dialogues on April 21 and 22 (three hours per candidate): 10-minute presentation + questions from Member States and civil society.

• Themes: leadership abilities and the UN’s three pillars (peace and security, development, and human rights).

• Candidates are also expected to engage in public events run by think tanks and civil society.

  Catch Up on the Interactive Dialogues

  April 21

  • Michelle Bachelet Jeria

  • Rafael Mariano Grossi

  April 22

  • Rebeca Grynspan Mayufis

  • Macky Sall

Candidates’ visibility does not equal success but shapes perception, can reveal unexpected strengths and vulnerabilities, and can shift campaign momentum for Member States and civil society alike.

3. Straw Polls (Security Council Selection)

• Informal filtering mechanism to whittle down field.

• Expected to begin by July 31.

• Multiple rounds of secret ballots: Encourage / Discourage / No Opinion.

• Candidates with too many Discourage ballots are encouraged to drop out.

• In final rounds, ballots are color-coded: P5 red ballots; E10 white ballots.

• A candidate must ultimately secure support from nine of 15 members, including the P5.

• Results are confidential but often leak within minutes.

For news on results, follow UN watchers like Security Council Report and experts Gowan, Forti, Lynch.

4. Final Appointment

• UNSC recommendation, typically by acclamation.

• GA votes by secret ballot (Rule 141).

• Term: Five years, renewable (some countries have proposed a single seven-year term).

5. Transition

• Secretary-General–designate sworn in before GA.

• First senior hires (Deputy Secretary-General, Chef de Cabinet, key Under-Secretary-General posts) reflect priorities, regional balance, and political commitments.

• Transition window: Historically one to three months.

• Day 1 in office: January 1, 2027.

THE POLITICS

The Key Decision-makers

• P5: Permanent members of the UN Security Council — China (UNSC President in May), France (September), Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States — vote and can veto.

• E10: Ten elected members of the Security Council vote but cannot veto. Bahrain (UNSC President in April), Colombia (June), Democratic Republic of the Congo (July), Denmark (August), Greece (October), Latvia (November), Liberia (December), Pakistan, Panama, Somalia.

• Security Council President: Monthly rotating chair; manages timing of straw polls (see P5 and E10 presidencies above). Judging from previous races, August (Denmark), September (France), and October (Greece) are likely to be most influential.

• General Assembly (GA): 193 Member States can nominate and vote.

• President of the General Assembly (PGA): Annalena Baerbock (steers process until mid-September 2026); next PGA from Asia-Pacific Group oversees final phase.

What Shapes the Field

1. Geography: Traditionally it’s Latin America and Caribbean’s turn, but that is not set in stone. Eastern Europe has never had a Secretary-General and was displeased at being passed over in the last cycle. See list of UN regional groups here.

2. Gender: No woman has held the office; Member States are officially encouraged to strongly consider women candidates.

3. Politics: A P5 veto is decisive; broad support across the E10 and regional groups is critical.

External Events to Watch

• G7 Summit (June 15–17, France)

• NATO Summit (July 7–8, Türkiye)

• UNGA High-level Week (September 22–28, New York)

• U.S. Midterm Elections (November 3)

• COP 31 Climate Summit (November 9–20, Türkiye)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Reading & Resources

• UN Charter Articles 97-101 on the role of the Secretary-General and Secretariat

• GA Resolution 79/327 on the selection process, paragraphs 38–46

• Joint letter by the President of the General Assembly and President of the Security Council to PRs on the process, inviting nominations

• Official UN Site on Secretary-General Selection Process

• Security Council Report’s report on the history of the selection process, December 2025

• 1 for 8 Billion Ultimate Guide

• Guide from Center on International Cooperation at NYU

• Proposals for process improvements from the Accountability, Coherence, and Transparency (ACT) Group (informal group of 27 Member States)

• Tracker of UN Member State support for a woman to be Secretary-General by 1 for 8 Billion, Global Network of Women Peacebuilders, and NYU Center for Global Affairs.

Abbreviations

• UNSG — UN Secretary-General

• UNGA — UN General Assembly

• UNSC — UN Security Council

• PGA — President of the General Assembly

• PSC — President of the Security Council

• P5 — Permanent members

• E10 — Elected members

• MS — Member State

• PR — Permanent Representative

• GRULAC — Latin America & Caribbean (rotation turn)

• EEG — Eastern European Group (has never had a Secretary-General)

• APG — Asia-Pacific Group

• WEOG — Western European & Others Group

• G77 and China — Group of originally 77 and now 134 developing countries

In a moment of cascading crises, what should be required from the world’s top diplomat? For the first time, young people from around the world have had the chance to help answer that question, with more than 2,000 of them contributing to a new job description for the next United Nations Secretary-General.

Read here

The world the next Secretary-General inherits is more insecure, more unequal, and marked by deeper distrust. Global cooperation remains essential, even as confidence in it is suffering. Whoever takes on this role will be judged by whether they turn global commitments into visible action, stronger accountability, and better decisions about the future.

The Job Description is a practical tool to help Member States, policymakers, civil society, and young people shape what global leadership should demand at a critical moment for the future of the UN. It was built with the leadership of the Unlock the Future coalition and inputs gathered through a global survey, public dialogues, and consultations.

We hope you will take the time to read it, think about it, and use it.

As the Secretary-General selection process moves forward, this is a chance for young people to not just react to the process, but to help define the standard. This is a moment to raise expectations, and to make sure young people — who are living closest to the consequences of global decisions — are an integral part of shaping what comes next.

About Our Future Agenda

Our Future Agenda is a United Nations Foundation program dedicated to putting young people — especially from young countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America — at the heart of global decision-making and solving the world’s biggest challenges.

Learn more: www.ourfutureagenda.org.

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Decoding the Race

Seventy-three years ago, the first United Nations Secretary-General, the Norwegian Trygve Lie, welcomed his Swedish successor, Dag Hammarskjöld, to New York with a grim handshake and a single sentence: “You are about to take over the most impossible job on Earth.”

So far, nine men (ahem) have held a job that the UN Charter describes as “the chief administrative officer of the Organization,” but which many believe comes with the power to change the world.

The first challenge is to navigate the gauntlet of a selection process that is governed by a few rules, some unwritten customs, and the hard reality of geopolitical power. Historically, this is a race that favors stealth campaigns, diplomatic discretion, and the ability to avoid a veto from the five permanent members of the Security Council.

As candidates (at least those who have already announced) make their first public pitch for the job, our Ultimate Cheat Sheet offers you rolling updates on contenders, milestones, and the nuts and bolts of the process, while our multimedia Decoded series takes you deep inside what it takes to land — and survive — the role.

You cannot understand the United Nations without understanding the past, so we look back at the election of past Secretaries-General, from the man who thought his selection was an “April Fool’s joke” to the veto battles that have been fought in the Security Council.

World’s Toughest Job Podcast

On April 28, we will launch a podcast series with Foreign Policy. The “World’s Toughest Job” will explore the challenges facing the next UN leader through immersive storytelling and voices from around the globe.

Confronting the Multilateralist’s Paradox

A new Secretary-General will be chosen at a pivotal moment for the UN and the wider international system — as the world faces yet another global emergency.

Multilateralism is undoubtedly experiencing an existential crisis. The UN’s basic value proposition is up for grabs. Its capacity to act is often degraded. Gridlock is normal in the Security Council and elsewhere, and traditional champions of the global order can no longer be relied upon.

But as UN Foundation President and CEO Elizabeth Cousens argues in her opening essays (part 1, part 2), the crisis we face isn’t a lack of demand for global cooperation; it is a crisis of supply.

In a world of cascading shocks and uncontrolled competition, States are urgently seeking new ways to hedge against geopolitical and geoeconomic risk, but are often not getting what they need from traditional international institutions.

The paradox facing the next UN chief isn’t that they are taking over an irrelevant institution — it’s that they are taking over one that risks being “overwhelmed or sidelined by demand it cannot supply.”

From Dag Hammarskjöld’s invention of peacekeeping on the fly to U Thant’s quiet, world-saving diplomacy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a savvy Secretary-General has more space for political creativity than people assume. They just need to find a way to exploit it.

Just. A lot rests on that word. To investigate where the UN can create the most value for countries and for people, [Re]Group is exploring eight mission-critical areas that will be in the Secretary-General’s inbox.

From reviving the lost art of peacemaking and navigating the frontier of AI governance, to reclaiming moral leadership in a fractured world, this series explores what a “Minimal Viable Product” of global order could look like, while simultaneously searching for a path to higher ambition.

Building a Playbook

Having defined what needs to be done, the next question is how.

A new Secretary-General will find that money is tight, but focus can be their new currency. With more than $60 billion flowing through the UN system, a canny “chief administrative officer” can find new ways of undertaking missions that are truly critical.

That means making the UN the ultimate platform for problem-solving; bringing together high-ambition coalitions of governments, the private sector, and civil society; acting as a convener and conductor; and using shared goals to actually drive delivery.

Throughout the year, we will be building a rolling open-source playbook of models for renewed cooperation, outlining strategies and plans with the greatest potential to command sustained political and financial support, and to deliver both immediate results and a boost to our collective ability to think, plan, and act for the future at a global scale.

If nothing else, our current global disruptions should decisively liberate us from incremental thinking. We don’t have all the answers yet. But when no one really knows what to do, the best thing is not to stand down, but to try and find out.

The initiative, which launched with prime ministers, ministers, and central bank governors from 30 countries, aims to reshape how developing countries manage sovereign debt and engage with the international financial system.

Here are four takeaways from the high-level launch segment, which featured UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Godwin Friday, finance ministers from Egypt and Pakistan, and UN Foundation President and CEO Elizabeth Cousens.

1. A debt trap and steep borrowing costs are damaging development.

Developing countries are caught in a trap where unsustainable debt burdens are eroding their development prospects.

The crisis is worsening: External debt for developing nations reached $11.7 trillion in 2024, driving annual debt servicing costs to roughly $920 billion. These costs are severely constricting fiscal space. In 2023, more than 60 developing countries — nearly half of them in Africa — spent over 10% of their government revenue solely on interest payments.

This debt servicing burden has triggered capital flight. In 2023, developing countries recorded a negative net resource transfer of $25 billion, meaning they actively paid out more to external creditors than they received in fresh disbursements.

The human and developmental toll of this capital drain is dramatic. In 2024, 3.4 billion people lived in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education.

What Leaders Are Saying

2. Borrowing nations have created a counterpart to established creditor networks.

Both creditor nations and private lenders have highly organized and well-resourced coordination mechanisms. The Paris Club is an informal group of 22 wealthy countries, while the Institute of International Finance is a coordinating hub for private and commercial creditors.

Through these institutions, lenders can organize committees to present a united front during debt crises. They also pool research, risk analysis, and legal expertise. By establishing the principles and norms that govern sovereign defaults, these clubs have been able to write the informal rules that govern the global financial and debt architecture.

In contrast, developing countries typically enter complex sovereign debt restructurings in isolation. Without a centralized institution of their own, borrowers are often disadvantaged at the negotiating table, lacking the shared institutional memory, technical capacity, and data transparency to which creditors have long had access.

A new platform was formally proposed by the UN Secretary-General’s Expert Group on Debt in June 2025 and mandated by the Sevilla Commitment later that year, with the aim of correcting this imbalance in the architecture.

What Leaders Are Saying

3. The platform is designed for peer learning, not collective bargaining.

The Borrowers’ Platform is not a debtors’ cartel looking to negotiate as a single bloc. Instead, it is a voluntary forum led by Member States and designed to help borrowing nations share policy experiences, build technical capacity, and enter individual debt negotiations on more equal footing than in the past.

By improving data transparency and enhancing debt sustainability practices, the platform aims to “send a positive signal to markets by enhancing debt sustainability practices and reducing uncertainty for investors — helping ensure that rising debt burdens do not derail development prospects.”

Leaders emphasized that a one-size-fits-all approach to debt resolution will not work for the group. The coalition spans large emerging markets, as well as Small Island Developing States and other smaller economies. While larger economies may possess the domestic buffers to endure protracted negotiations spanning 12 to 18 months, prolonged delays for smaller economies can trigger rapid economic collapse.

What Leaders Are Saying

4. Members are working to operationalize the platform.

The platform’s founders are seeking to capitalize on political momentum, recruiting additional members with high levels of debt.

The Borrowers’ Platform will be anchored by an existing technical engine: UNCTAD’s Debt Management and Financial Analysis System. DMFAS, which will serve as the technical backbone for the platform’s secretariat, has supported over 75 governments with debt transparency and governance for more than 40 years.

Egypt has been elected interim Chair of the platform and will oversee its setup through a transitional committee. During the launch, Prime Minister Mottley urged the immediate appointment of an executive leader to scale the organization, noting that the platform is running against the clock amid mounting geopolitical and economic shocks.

What Leaders Are Saying