The race for the next UN Secretary-General

Solly Rakgomo | Monday July 6, 2026 06:00

Eight decades after its founding, the UN faces a world in which geopolitical rivalry is inseparable from geoeconomic competition, in which economic coercion has become a standard instrument of statecraft, and in which multilateral institutions are under sustained pressure from both major powers and increasingly assertive middle powers.

The next Secretary-General will inherit an institution weighed down by recurrent crises, financial constraints, and a growing doubt about whether the UN can still deliver the collective action it was created to enable. The challenge is not only to administer the organisation. It is to renew it. The next Secretary-General should not merely be a guardian of multilateralism. He or she must be an architect of cooperation in an era defined by fragmentation.

That requires more than experience in diplomacy alone. It requires the ability to understand how economics, development, finance, and security now intersect in practical and politically consequential ways. This is not a call for technocratic leadership. Nor is it an argument that economics should displace diplomacy. It is a recognition that diplomacy itself has changed. The Secretary-General of tomorrow will be required to navigate sovereign debt crises, broker consensus on climate finance, engage with development banks, understand technological competition, and mediate disputes in which economics and security are inseparable. The office has traditionally rewarded political experience. The coming decade will require economic fluency alongside diplomatic skill.

The question facing member states is therefore not simply who should succeed António Guterres. It is what kind of leader the world now requires. That answer points toward a profile long underweighted in discussions of UN leadership: a figure equally comfortable in Cabinet rooms, development institutions, financial negotiations, and diplomatic forums. Someone who understands not only the language of peace and security, but also the mechanics of growth, development, and economic resilience.

In this regard, the discussion surrounding Rebecca Grynspan is instructive. Her significance lies not only in her personal qualifications, but in what her career represents. As a former Vice President of Costa Rica and current Secretary-General of UNCTAD, she embodies a model of leadership shaped by the evolving demands of global governance.

Her experience spans development economics, international finance, diplomacy, and multilateral negotiation areas now central to the effectiveness of the United Nations itself. Some may argue that the UN’s core mission remains peace and security, and that economic issues should be handled by specialised institutions. That view is increasingly outdated. In Ukraine, Gaza, the Sahel, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the drivers of conflict are no longer separable from economic pressures, debt, resource competition, sanctions, and food insecurity. The UN cannot be effective in its traditional areas if it ignores the economic dimensions of those crises.

The case for leaders of this kind extends beyond any individual candidacy. The United Nations was created in the aftermath of the Second World War to preserve peace, foster cooperation, and provide a framework for collective action. Eight decades later, it confronts a fundamentally different environment: one defined by geopolitical rivalry, geoeconomic competition, technological disruption, widening inequality between nations, and mounting pressure on global systems of stability. These pressures are reinforced by shifting patterns of major-power engagement with multilateral institutions, including periodic questioning of commitments by key member states and intensifying debates over burden-sharing, institutional efficiency, and reform.

At the same time, the United Nations faces an internal imperative of adaptation. An institution designed in the aftermath of 1945 cannot rely on inherited structures and assumptions if it is to remain effective in the 21st century. It must modernise its processes, improve cost-effectiveness, and strengthen responsiveness to a rapidly changing global environment, looking outward to a more fragmented order while also reforming inward to preserve legitimacy and performance.

Nowhere is this shift more visible than in the widening divide between the Global North and the Global South.

Trust has eroded. Developing countries increasingly question whether international institutions reflect their interests, priorities, and lived realities. At the same time, developed economies struggle to sustain consensus on climate finance, development assistance, trade, and security. The next Secretary-General will therefore need to be more than a diplomat. He or she must be a bridge-builder capable of restoring confidence between North and South, developed and developing economies, creditors and debtors, and established and emerging powers.

The North–South divide is no longer just a matter of development assistance. It is a structural fault line in the global order. For many countries in the Global South, the postwar multilateral system has come to feel like an arrangement designed by and for the developed world, one that offers them limited voice in the institutions that shape the rules of trade, finance, and security.

At the same time, many developed countries face domestic pressure to reduce spending on international institutions and to prioritise national security over global commitments. Climate finance has become a central test of this divide. Developing countries argue that the North has failed to deliver on its promises, while the North insists that new mechanisms and private capital must play a larger role. This mutual distrust weakens the foundation of cooperation the UN was meant to sustain.

The next Secretary-General will need to engage directly with these tensions, not as a peripheral issue but as a core challenge. That means recognising that the credibility of the UN depends largely on whether the Global South sees it as a platform that reflects their interests and priorities, and whether the Global North sees it as a realistic mechanism for managing shared risks and building long-term stability.