UN reform needed to meet global challenges
Genocides do not start with mass murder. They always start with words. They always start by ensuring a given group is seen to be “different” and to have fewer rights than the bulk of the population. According to the UN, genocide has a precise definition: “Intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In this definition, “intent” is important and the destruction can be via mass murder or preventing births; it does not include cultural destruction or simply dispersing a given group from where they currently live.
In some ways, this is unsatisfactory. China’s actions against the Uighurs are not genocide (even if they do seem to be aiming to destroy the Uighurs as a cultural and religious group). Equally, Myanmar expelling about 1 million of the 1.4 million Rohingya in the country since 2017 does not count as genocide (this is seen to be forcible removal). This is not to say that such actions do not constitute crimes against humanity or fall under other UN-sponsored definitions, but they are not genocide.
With its limited definition, the UN has been exposed again recently, as the organization has failed to take any effective measures in response to the crises in Syria and Myanmar. In both cases, a permanent member of the UN Security Council (UNSC) has used its veto to ensure that the entire international system is held hostage.
The fundamental problem is that, in the current geopolitical climate, where talk of a new “Cold War” is increasingly justified, just about any global crisis is taking on a geopolitical dimension, where at least some permanent members of the UNSC take every opportunity to play out their respective global rivalries.
At the very least, the system needs to be reformed so that measures on mass atrocities or genocide would require two permanent members to jointly issue a veto — though it is likely that even such modest reform would be opposed by all the major players.
As things stand, however, there is simply no way of getting around the fact that the UN has long since stopped being representative of the world we live in and its geopolitical realities. If international collective action is to become possible again so that we may try to address these ever more acute challenges, a new institutional order will be required. But that new institutional order will not happen, nor would it be effective if it did, so long as the powers that be insist on permanent memberships and vetoes.
Perhaps suggesting the rebuilding of the global institutional order in the age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin seems naive, even misguided. But China, the world’s fast-rising power, does recognize the value of an international rules-based system and it has positioned itself as a defender of the international order. This is promising. What is more, there are benefits for both Putin and Trump’s America to accepting international institutional constraints on their power plays.
There are reasons why the big players might consider moving in this direction and the need is very pressing indeed as the global situation becomes more and more acute. Whether the current crop of world leaders have the foresight to do so remains to be seen. But the direction in which we need to be going is quite clear: UNSC permanent memberships and vetoes must go.