Elina Noor

Opinion | Southeast Asia is starting the work of fixing a broken world order

As UN reform remains elusive and ongoing crises escalate, several trends in Southeast Asia offer a picture of multilateralism done right

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Why you can trust SCMP

Elina Noor

Published: 8:30pm, 8 Sep 2024

As world leaders once again converge on New York this month for the annual slate of United Nations General Assembly meetings, it will be hard to ignore the irony of the world’s largest multilateral gathering taking place against the backdrop of a multilateral order in crisis.

It is not just because the Middle East is teetering on the brink of a region-wide conflict, or that humanitarian relief in Gaza is being held hostage by a few countries or that shifting dynamics in the Ukraine-Russia war risk miring Europe and the United States in a protracted war. After all, UN member-states have debated similar situations over the decades.

For many in the Global South, it is precisely because the international community has had to repeatedly confront these challenges – often, at the cost of too many lives – that the failures of multilateralism evince a crisis of confidence in an antiquated, inequitable global order. The UN Security Council’s permanent membership and veto power are glaring examples.

This month, alongside the roll-call of leaders’ statements at the General Assembly, the UN will also convene a Summit of the Future. The summit is supposed to be a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to repair trust in international cooperation. It will produce a Pact for the Future. The current version of the draft pact lists 60 action items to address challenges related to sustainable development, global governance and peace and security.

Much of the list carries over unmet aspirations from past decades – a world free of nuclear weapons, hunger and poverty. With hardening geopolitical tensions, self-serving interpretations of international law and superficial commitments to world peace, there is good reason to be sceptical that the summit will produce any meaningful change on the ground.

And yet, for relatively smaller Southeast Asian nations, multilateralism is simply too important to fail. Done right, it provides a perch of equality and effective cooperation for complex challenges that no one country – even a small group of powerful countries – can handle alone. The Covid-19 pandemic was a painful lesson. The unfolding climate emergency is another. In both situations and in many conflicts, it is the world’s most vulnerable populations that pay the highest price.