Functional Reconstruction of the United Nations

This area hosts a developing body of academic work examining the conditions under which the United Nations can continue to function as a meaningful institutional actor in an era of sustained great-power rivalry.

The project begins from a sober premise: the contemporary international order is no longer characterised by episodic breakdown, but by structural dysfunction. Veto paralysis in the Security Council, selective compliance with international law, instrumentalisation of multilateral institutions, and the erosion of shared expectations have combined to undermine the UN’s capacity to perform its core functions. Yet the alternative to reform is not a return to a pre-UN world, but the risk of unmanaged fragmentation.

Rather than advancing a comprehensive constitutional redesign - an approach that is widely regarded as politically unattainable - the New World Order project focuses on the established domestic constitutional law principle of functional reconstruction, and examines how it might be adapted to the context of global governance. It asks how the UN’s essential roles - norm articulation, coordination, authorisation, information production, and legitimacy-generation - might be stabilised, re-sequenced, or partially insulated from geopolitical deadlock, even where formal amendment is not realistically available.

The emphasis is deliberately pragmatic. The project explores how institutional practice, legal interpretation, procedural design, and capacity-based differentiation can preserve meaningful multilateral action under conditions of contestation, without assuming either renewed consensus or hegemonic enforcement.

Current Academic Submission

The core arguments of the project are developed in a full-length scholarly article currently under submission to the European Journal of International Law (EJIL). The article analyses the structural sources of UN paralysis, critiques prevailing reform narratives, and proposes a framework for functional resilience that operates within - rather than against - existing legal and political constraints.

→ Read the article: Functional Reconstruction in a Fragmented Order: Rethinking the United Nations under Conditions of Persistent Veto and Power Rivalry

Ongoing Work

This site functions as an open research platform accompanying the EJIL submission. It will host working papers, analytical notes, historical reconstructions, and policy-adjacent reflections addressing UN reform, institutional legitimacy, and the future of multilateral governance in a non-consensual world.