The race for the next UN Secretary-General

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.