The UN Summit of the Future: Leadership, Layering, and the Limits of Liberal International Order

The United Nations (UN) Summit of the Future was a once-in-a-decade summit to work on UN reform. This article studies the Summit from the perspective of the broader crisis of liberal international order as well as the lifecycle of international organizations. It identifies the leadership by Secretary-General Guterres as critical in terms of agenda-setting but also preparing the road towards the summit. It furthermore stresses the embedding of the UN in a much broader external network of like-minded actors which have helped to increase the momentum of the Summit. It argues that the proposals by the Secretary-General should be considered an innovative attempt at institutional layering. Adding new governance layers, addressing common problems, to the UN clearly made sense, yet this approach was ultimately weakened in the interstate negotiations between the member states leading up to the Summit.