Intent and inclusion: The case for reform in UNSC

The Council must discard entrenched privilege and engage meaningfully with the new, multipolar order.

The United Nations (UN) is generally considered the guardian of democracy around the world. Among the six organs, the most important one, the Security Council, is the least democratic and continues the colonial legacy of five permanent states holding veto powers and threatening international peace.

On May 29, as UN representatives walked into the Trusteeship Council Chamber to take part in the most recent session of Intergovernmental Negotiations (IGN) on Security Council reform, they were well aware of the clock on the podium. The composition of the body under modernisation remains in a semblance to its composition after the expansion from 11 to 15 seats in 1965, with five permanent members and 10 elected members rotating every two years. As per the Security Council Report, only 65% of resolutions in 2024 were adopted unanimously, far less than the levels required for the communication of global legitimacy. The cases in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan each saw draft resolutions blocked by vetoes or threatened vetoes.

The present paralysis of the Security Council has profound strategic and humanitarian consequences. Israel’s attack on Iran and the US bombing of the nuclear facilities in Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan escalated Gaza’s already calamitous war into an acute interstate conflict. In response to this escalation, the Iranian Majlis and Guardian Council legislated measures suspending real-time IAEA monitoring and prohibiting inspectors from entry, de facto dismantling the JCPOA’s verification regime.

As a result, insurance rates on tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz have increased by 40%, refugee flows are overwhelming Jordan and Lebanon, and Gulf monarchies are hurriedly adopting heightened hedging strategies. This incident powerfully illustrates how veto-driven politics enable unilateral nuclear brinkmanship.

Last year’s Pact for the Future – adopted at the 2024 Summit of the Future – pledged to deliver a Council that is “representative, effective, democratic and accountable” for the UN’s 80th anniversary summit this year. That promise has set an unofficial deadline and put pressure on negotiations that, since 2009, had been ridiculed as a slow-motion process without product.

Three groups compete for the centre stage. The G4 grouping – India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan – joined by the 50-state L.69 cluster calls for six new permanent seats (two African, two Asia-Pacific, one Latin America–Caribbean and one Western European) and four or five more elected seats, expanding the Council to 25 or 26 members.

The African Group, invoking the 2005 Ezulwini Consensus, seeks at least two permanent seats with full veto equality or veto abolition. The Uniting for Consensus (UfC) group of Italy, Pakistan, and Mexico opposes any new permanent seats and suggests longer, renewable elected terms – the so-called “3+3 model” – and denounces the veto as an anachronism. The three blueprints agree on one point: each side now agrees that the Council can expand up to 21 and 27 members, a new arena of tentative consensus which diplomats hope to leverage.

In September 2024, the United States officially supported two permanent seats for African countries, India, Japan, and Germany – a declaration seen by some African nations as a bargaining chip and by others as a negotiating strategy. Yet, Washington would hold back on granting any additional veto powers, emphasising that veto power is a contentious issue in every proposed draft. France and the United Kingdom urge voluntary veto restraint; Russia and China defend this privilege; numerous small states would welcome its abolition. Without a consensus proposal, the enlargement prospect threatens to institutionalise a permanent member hierarchy, expanding the legitimacy gap that reform seeks to narrow.

Important voices are unheard

India’s interest is not just a matter of prestige; we are the G20’s largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping, a vocal voice on Global South debt relief, and a would-be agenda-setter on digital governance. Yet, when the Council is stuck over Myanmar’s coup, Gaza’s humanitarian ceasefire, or Red Sea maritime security, India has to speak from the General Assembly’s back benches or in its occasional two-year elected membership. A permanent seat would turn an occasional, transactional presence into an institutional voice, enabling India to push terrorism, climate-security, cyber norms, and development finance into the Council’s regular agenda.

If the UN is unable to reform its principal peace and security body, sceptics ask, why should governments rely on it to mediate new sectors such as artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, or global pandemic management?

A Council that systematically excludes Africa, Latin America, and the world’s largest democracy from the decision-making process fails this test. The 80th anniversary is a remarkable coming together of symbolism and pragmatism. Delivering a zero-draft resolution to the assembly ahead of the September summit would compel governments either to haggle line by line or to justify to their citizens their preference for stalemate over compromise.

Diplomacy, at its essence, is the art of being on time. If the General Assembly can deliver a framework that honours Africa’s insistence upon dignity, addresses the UfC’s grievances about the entrenchment of privilege, and finds a place for emerging powers like India that recognises their attained status, the UN will not merely be changing its seating arrangements but demonstrating its usefulness in a growingly fractured multilateral world. The only thing left to be decided is whether the 80-year-old UN will be venerated as a dynamic institution ready to wriggle out of the colonial legacy with the ability to develop itself, or seen as an anachronism that is too feeble to adapt.

(Neil is head of the Department of Political Science, St Joseph’s
University; Paul is a professor at the university and Principal, St Joseph’s Evening College)