As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay connects the past of the United Nations to its future from the perspective of the Global South. When the UN was created, most developing countries were colonies that played no role in writing the rules and designing the architecture of the post-1945 UN-centric global multilateral order. Today, countries in the Global South command a majority of the UN membership, but still mostly function as norm takers and are severely underrepresented in the UN Security Council—which functions as the geopolitical cockpit—and also in the senior ranks of the UN system, in the key posts in the Secretariat, and in the UN's funds and agencies. Gradually, however, these countries are using their numerical strength to give voice to their distinctive preferences, priorities, and values. This essay provides a broad-brush sketch of the changing nature of the North-South partnership on the UN's four overarching normative mandates of security, development, environment, and human rights. It includes a brief comment on the coronavirus pandemic within the framework of its main narrative of the continuing need for a UN-centric North-South partnership.

Armed reprisals are the limited use of military force in response to unlawful actions perpetrated against states. Historically, reprisals provided a military remedy for states that had been wronged (often violently) by another state without having to resort to all-out war in order to counter or deter such wrongful actions. While reprisals are broadly believed to have been outlawed by the UN Charter, states continue to routinely undertake such self-help measures. As part of the roundtable, “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay examines the doctrine of armed reprisals in light of recent instances of states using force “short of war” in this manner. We argue that the ban on reprisals has been largely ignored by states, and that recent attempts to apply the laws of armed conflict to the cyber domain (such as the Tallinn Manual) are further weakening this prohibition. We conclude that this is a potentially dangerous development that lowers the bar for resorting to military force, risking escalation and thereby further destabilizing the international system.

For as long as humans have fought wars, we have been beguiled and frustrated by the prospect of world peace. Only a very few of us today believe that world peace is possible. Indeed, the very mention of the term “world peace” raises incredulity. In contrast, as part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” this essay makes the case for taking world peace more seriously. It argues that world peace is possible, though neither inevitable nor irreversible. World peace, I argue, is something that every generation must strive for, because the ideas, social structures, and practices that make war possible are likely to remain with us. The essay proceeds in three parts. First, I briefly set out what I mean by peace and world peace. Second, I explain why I think that world peace is possible. Third, I examine how the world might be nudged in a more peaceful direction.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay examines the role of institutional soft balancing in bringing forth peaceful change in international relations. Soft balancing is understood as attempts at restraining a threatening power through institutional delegitimization, as opposed to hard balancing, which relies on arms buildup and formal alignments. We argue that soft balancing through international institutions can be an effective means to peaceful change, spanning minimalist goals, which aim at incremental change without the use of military force and war, and maximalist goals, which seek more profound change and transformation in the form of continuous interstate cooperation aimed at a more peaceful and just world order. However, the success of soft-balancing strategies in fostering peaceful change varies widely, even in today's globalized and institutionalized international environment. We explore these variations and identify three conditions for success that can inform both academic analysis and political practice: inclusion, commitment, and status recognition. We draw lessons from two historical examples: the Concert of Europe in the early nineteenth century and the League of Nations in the early twentieth century, and discuss how current threats to the liberal international order challenge soft balancing for peaceful change.

UN peace operations have increasingly focused on the importance of “local ownership.” The logic is simple. For peace operations to succeed in helping war-torn states to create accountable, democratic institutions grounded in the rule of law, peace operations need to internalize democratic principles by making UN missions accountable to different domestic constituencies—crossing ethnic, religious, racial, social, and gender lines—within the war-torn country. As part of a special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that while there is widespread consensus among UN member states and UN bureaucrats that local ownership is necessary, UN peace operations have faced significant obstacles to creating true local ownership. These obstacles include the UN's focus on host-government ownership; the challenge of creating trust with different domestic constituencies that represent diverse perspectives; the supply-driven nature of UN intervention; and the mismatch between the UN's ideal post-conflict state and the preferences of post-conflict societies. To make UN peace operations more responsive to post-conflict societies, UN staff often have to bend or break rules established only to hold them accountable to their member states.

Much ink has been spilled on the pros and cons of U.S. president Barack Obama's decision not to strike the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad after that regime launched a deadly chemical weapons attack in 2013. Often missing from those debates, however, are the perspectives of Syrians themselves. While not all Syrians oppose Assad, and not all opponents endorsed intervention, many Syrian oppositionists resolutely called for Obama to uphold his “red line” militarily. As part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay analyzes diverse expressions of such opinion and finds that they highlight three dimensions of the ethical case for limited strikes against Assad. First, they remind us that the ethical context of the red line question was many Syrians’ sense of abandonment by the international community. Second, they emphasize the ethical stakes of the limited strikes; namely an opportunity to hold the Syrian regime accountable, weaken it from within, and thus change the equation of the war. Third, they make sense of the ethical consequences of the nonintervention outcome, and especially its effect in deepening civilians’ despair, accelerating extremism, and convincing Assad and his allies that they could kill with impunity. These views controvert both legalistic arguments precluding military intervention and assumptions that U.S. intervention is always imperialist and warmongering. In this case, consideration of the case for military intervention from the viewpoint of those on whose behalf the intervention would have taken place challenges us to think deeply about circumstances in which limited strikes might be not only ethically justified but also imperative.

Today we live in a world where the majority of wars are no longer interstate, a development that over the last few decades has often left the international community, in particular the United Nations as it was originally conceived, ill equipped to respond. The nimble action required for contemporary conflict resolution and peacebuilding now primarily lies in the hands of local actors and states, sometimes supported by international actors. But it is not always clear who these local actors are or what they need in order to achieve sustainable peace. As part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” this essay looks in more detail at what we mean by “local” in conflict-affected contexts and asks how local is local enough when resolving conflicts and building peace. It identifies tensions and concerns such as the need for the international community to have a well-defined and easily identified “local agenda” when, in reality, there are often several competing local agendas. The essay presents the Everyday Peace Indicators project as a vehicle that can be used to help communicate these local needs to international actors, and argues for the importance of understanding people's perceived realities in addition to, if not more than, their actual realities when trying to understand peace and conflict trends. In order to do this, we need to more effectively problematize peacebuilding for positive conflict disruption.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay focuses on the “Kindleberger trap,” a term coined by Joseph Nye Jr. referring to the situation in which no country takes the lead to maintain international institutions in the international system. President Trump's destructive policies toward many international institutions seem to push the current international order to the brink of the Kindleberger trap. Ironically, China has pledged, at least rhetorically, to support and even save these existing international institutions. Based on an institutional-balancing perspective, we suggest that the worry about the Kindleberger trap is unwarranted because the international institutional order will not easily collapse after the decline of U.S. hegemony. Institutional competition among great powers and institutional changes within the institutional order have become two remedies to maintain international institutions and to avoid the Kindleberger trap during the international order transition. What states, including the United States and China, should do is to reembrace and reinvigorate the role of multilateralism in world politics so that the dynamics of institutional balancing and consequential institutional changes in the context of U.S.-China competition do not deprive international society of the public goods and normative values of international institutions. The future international order should not be led by a single country, but by dynamic and balanced international institutions.

One type of change that has lurked at the edges of scholarly discussions of international politics—often assumed, invoked, and alluded to, but rarely interrogated—is learning. Learning entails a very particular type of change. It is deliberate, internal, transformative, and peaceful (in the sense of being uncoerced). In this contribution to the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” I ask whether intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) can learn in a way that is comparable to the paradigmatic learning of individual human beings. In addressing this question, I take three steps. First, I explore references to corporate entities “learning” within the discipline of international relations (IR) and ask whether what is being proposed is, in fact, genuine learning by the organizations themselves. Second, I attempt to construct a robust account of institutional learning that departs from these conceptions and acknowledges instead the self-reflection and structural transformation that I argue learning at the corporate level requires. Third, for the purpose of illustration, I turn briefly to the UN following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the slaughter of more than eight thousand men and boys outside Srebrenica in 1995 to identify examples of each stage of institutional learning. Finally, I offer three provisional claims about my proposed conception of institutional learning that warrant attention in future work. Namely, I suggest that institutional learning: (1) cannot be equated with moral progress; (2) is possible despite formal organizations being incapable of emotional responses such as shame or regret; and, perhaps most controversially, (3) can occur at the level of the IGO without prior or parallel learning taking place at the level of the state or individual human actor.

As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay looks at the UN's human rights efforts through the lens of the ethics of survival, normative ethics, the ethics of protection, institutional ethics, and the ethics of the human predicament in the face of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The essay finds that while the consecration of the right to life has made a contribution to the ethics of human survival, the overall impact of the human rights program has been marginal. Normative ethics shows the UN performing magisterially in drafting and adopting a body of international norms for the universal protection of human rights. However, when it comes to the ethics of protection, the UN performs poorly because of the numerous oppressive governments that control the world body. On the ethics of the human predicament, this essay finds that SDG 16, which is devoted to development, peace, justice, and strong institutions, has so far had little practical impact. Gross violations of human rights continue to take place in numerous parts of the world.

What are the philosophical arguments justifying limited strikes? This essay, as part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” adopts a French perspective both because France is, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, one of the states that launched such limited strikes in recent years, and because it developed a limited warfare ethos. There is something specific about such an ethos that makes it particularly receptive to the jus ad vim framework and, therefore, to the issue of limited strikes. This essay also builds on the case of the use (or threat) of limited force in Syria as a response to the country's use of chemical weapons between 2013 and 2018. Presented as a way to “punish” the Syrian regime as much as to “deter” it from using chemical weapons again, these limited strikes are a good illustration of the traditional retributive/preventive dichotomy of penal philosophy. I argue that the moral justification of those strikes should be guided by a consequentialist ethic, preventive rather than retributive. From a consequentialist perspective, limited strikes are justified when they “work”—that is, when they have a deterrent/compellent effect. For that to happen, they need to be credible and imply the potential of an escalation; the challenge being to keep the escalation under control. Carrying the risk of inefficacy at one end of the spectrum and of escalation at the other, limited strikes are indeed a matter of balance.

The decline in organized violence in the period after World War II provides the promise of a more peaceful future. How can we move further in this direction? Democratic peace—the absence of armed violence between democracies and the domestic peace of mature democracies—may provide part of the answer. This phenomenon is a well-established empirical regularity, but its mechanisms and its limits remain a subject of continuing research. The key role of democracy in reducing violence has been challenged by alternative explanations, such as the liberal peace, the capitalist peace, the developed peace, the organized peace, the quality of government peace, the feminist peace, and the civil society peace—but also by realism. In this essay, part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” I argue that it is a social-democratic peace that provides the best basis for a lasting world peace. This formula includes democracy but incorporates additional elements, such as a market economy, an active and competent state, close international cooperation, and the reduction of discrimination and group-based inequality. Combining these elements would provide a solid basis for eliminating violence between, as well as within, states. The main limitation of such a program is its demanding nature. Few states and interstate relations as yet fulfill all these conditions, but the long-term trends are moving in the right direction.

As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay focuses on the role of institutions as agents of peaceful change from a perspective that emphasizes the importance of a wide spectrum of human emotions to better understand the less quantifiable but nevertheless important conditions for being able to sustain initiatives for peaceful change. It aims to throw light on the often overlooked psychological and emotional hurdles standing in the way of agents’ ability to undertake and sustain action designed to lead to peaceful change. To do so, the essay returns to the pioneering work of Ernst Haas and his important concept of “spillover.” The essay shows that the neofunctional understanding of spillover was a theoretically important innovation, but that it was missing three essential elements: an understanding of the need for positive emotions and ontological security; an understanding of the link between values and identity; and a realization of the importance of a shared vision for the “good life.” To illustrate the problems with Haas's version of spillover, but also to highlight the significant potential of the theory, the essay turns to the crisis of the liberal international order as an example of a forum where the agency to undertake peaceful change seems to be faltering. The essay concludes that the ability of the liberal order to effect peaceful change is currently hampered because the order is characterized by negative emotions, contested values, and a vision of the good life that is seen as mainly a benefit for the cosmopolitan elite.

Limited air strikes present an attractive “middle-ground approach” for policymakers, as they are less costly to coercers than deploying troops on the ground. Policymakers believe that threatening and employing limited air strikes signal their resolve to targets. In this essay, as part of the roundtable on “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” I debunk this fallacy and explain how the same factors that make limited air strikes attractive to coercers are also those that undermine their efficacy as a coercive tool of foreign policy. The limited nature of these air strikes undermines the ability of coercers to effectively signal their resolve. In turn, coercive threats of limited air strikes are less likely to be credible, creating a vicious cycle: policymakers threaten to employ air strikes because they are less costly but then often need to follow through on those threats as target states fail to acquiesce to their demands, precisely because limited air strikes are less costly for the coercer. Limited air strikes, therefore, can actually be a source of conflict escalation and lead policymakers to engage in military action that they would prefer to avoid. I further explain why failing to follow through on such coercive threats can undermine a leader's reputation for resolve and lead to future crisis escalation. Finally, I discuss what this quagmire means for the ethics of the threat and the use of air strikes, particularly for the principles of right intention, likelihood of success, and probability of escalation.

As part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” this essay argues that an ideal state of peace might not be attainable, but a positive form of peace could be achieved on a global scale if states and peoples made a serious investment—comparable to their investment in military expenditure—in promoting the kind of mutual cultural understanding that reduces tensions and divisions and fosters cooperation. Peacemaking usually focuses on diplomatic and military détente; the argument in this essay is that these endeavors, though obviously important, are not by themselves enough for the best attainable kind of peace, for which the further and even more important aim of cultural entente is essential. This implies that peacemaking activities need to apply vastly more effort to intercultural and interpersonal exchange and education.

Environmental problems were not among the core issues for the United Nations at its creation in 1945. In the 1970s, however, they created a crescendo of public concern as the threats posed by toxic chemicals, large-scale destruction of natural ecosystems, and the loss of species became visible and were obviously linked to human activity. Pollution, it was clear, did not stop at national borders and solutions required common effort. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay explores how, as the only institution equipped to identify global problems and generate collective action toward their resolution, the UN became the platform for creating multilateral environmental agreements, convening global conferences, and mobilizing national and international effort through a progressively larger number of institutions at the national and international level to guide decisions and influence behavior. We have moved the environmental needle in terms of information, institutions, and awareness. Yet, many environmental problems persist, some are getting worse, and new challenges and, indeed, crises are emerging.

What will be the consequences of the criminalization of aggression? In 2010, the International Criminal Court made aggression a crime for which individuals can be prosecuted. But questions around what constitutes aggression, who decides, and, most important, how effective this legal change will be in reducing the incidence of war remain. This essay considers these questions in light of two recent books on the criminalization of aggression: Noah Weisbord's The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocrats and Tom Dannenbaum's The Crime of Aggression, Humanity, and the Soldier. While the authors argue in favor of the efficacy of the criminalization of aggression as a means to reduce future war, it is also likely that the criminalization of aggression will reshape war in potentially profound ways.

In its seventy-fifth year, the UN needs to reflect more seriously on its value in the current global scenario, the current flow of ideas, and the current flow of power that is prevalent in the world. It is important to recall that the UN was founded after World War II as a way of addressing conflict at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield. Negotiating peace, attempting to provide some form of justice, and affirmation of human rights seemed to be the aspiration. It is within this context that women engaged in affirming their own special location in society and economy. However, over the years the UN has revealed its inability to fulfill these goals. Perhaps in the midst of all these failures, the only category of people that has drawn strength from the UN, but now has to leave it behind, are women. Scattered as they were across a world of distances, women of different cultures and classes found strength in numbers and, through the UN system and the conferences they convened, became a power of their own. As part of the special issue on “The United Nations at Seventy-Five: Looking Back to Look Forward,” this essay argues that today, however, women do not need and cannot have their aspirations be facilitated by the UN, because in their engagement with one another they have also recognized their differences. Being of similar gender does not necessarily overcome other oppressive differences.

What does world peace mean? Peace is more than the absence and prevention of war, whether international or civil, yet most of our ways of conceptualizing and measuring peace amount to just that definition. In this essay, as part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” I argue that any vision of world peace must grapple not only with war but with the continuums of violence and peace emphasized by feminists: running from the home and community to the public spaces of international relations. Breaking free of the constraints of the last century's intellectual boundaries, I suggest that war and peace are not a dichotomy but rather are intimately related. Yet the dearth of feminist perspectives in global debates prevents us from seeing how violence and harm are exacerbated in households and through the global economy under conditions of both “war” and “peace.” To understand the possibilities for world peace, we must understand these varieties of violence and harm that threaten peace. And to sustain peace we must address the harmful gendered identities, ideologies, and social dynamics that support violence in every society. A narrow understanding of peace as merely the absence of organized violence does not engender the kind of nuanced and rich understanding of human history and human relations needed to bring an end to the structural and physical violence that remains pervasive worldwide.

One of the more striking, surprising, and optimism-inducing features of the contemporary international system has been the decline of interstate war. The key question for students of international relations and comparative politics is how this happy state of affairs came about. In short, was this a universal phenomenon or did some regions play a more important and pioneering role in bringing about peaceful change? As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay suggests that Western Europe generally and the European Union in particular played pivotal roles in transforming the international system and the behavior of policymakers. This helped to create the material and ideational conditions in which other parts of the world could replicate this experience, making war less likely and peaceful change more feasible. This argument is developed by comparing the experiences of the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their respective institutional offshoots. The essay uses this comparative historical analysis to assess both regions’ capacity to cope with new security challenges, particularly the declining confidence in institutionalized cooperation.