International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace, 24 April, 2026
Beyond Multilateralism
Why peace now depends on the human conscience.
Eight years ago, the United Nations General Assembly set aside this day, 24 April, to reaffirm the simple proposition that cooperation among states, anchored in the UN Charter, remains the indispensable method of preventing war and advancing human dignity.
Today, each word of that proposition is openly contested.
A proposition openly contested
The United States–Israel war on Iran is in its eighth week. Russia’s war against Ukraine is in its fourth year. Gaza endures. Lebanon smoulders. Sudan, Myanmar and the Sahel burn quietly beneath the noise. The Security Council has produced no substantive response to any of the defining wars of our age. The United Nations confronts the gravest liquidity crisis in its eighty-year history. The European Union, arguably the world’s most explicit bet on peace through cooperation, has watched this year’s pivotal geopolitical event from the sidelines.
The international order has entered an era of naked realism. The language of human rights and human security has been replaced by the language of might, leverage and return on investment. Great powers speak openly of spheres of influence. Ceasefires are announced on social platforms. Peace talks are hosted in Doha, Islamabad, Ankara and Muscat without the UN’s participation. Leaders, however vile they may be, are wiped out in the middle of peace talks. Blockades are maintained during truces. Sanctions snap back. Humanitarian intervention has been hollowed out into a tool of populist posturing, and the people it purports to save are reduced to props.
Into this comes the familiar refrain: we need a new multilateralism. Reformed institutions. Updated pacts. Novel frameworks. The Pact for the Future, adopted at the 2024 Summit of the Future, is only the latest in a long line of noble intentions soon to be archived. On paper, everything one could hope for. In practice, far less so.
Not more multilateralism — something different
The crisis we are living through is not a crisis of architecture. It will not be solved by a redistributed Security Council seat or a better-drafted framework. A new multilateral instrument built on the same foundations will produce the same results, because the foundations are not institutional. They are moral.
After thousands of years of sharing a planet, humanity has still not discovered a sustainable model for peaceful coexistence. We have conquered diseases that once decimated populations. We have built machines that think, networks that connect any two points on Earth in milliseconds, and systems of finance of dizzying sophistication. We have travelled to the far side of the moon. Yet we have not found the key to living together without war. Our multilateral institutions remain as dysfunctional as the racial and imperial systems that created and sustained them. The realist turn in international affairs has merely stripped away the pretence, revealing what was always underneath: a world organised around power rather than moral principle, profit rather than people.
This is the truth this day demands we acknowledge. Our hope does not lie in the United Nations alone, even a reformed version of it. Its core mission has demonstrably failed. Kofi Annan’s warning, when he addressed the 54th session of the General Assembly more than two decades ago, rings truer now than when he first gave it:
This has sadly become our reality.
What is actually required
What is required at this moment is not another framework. It is a moral awakening.
History has shown us what this looks like. The abolition of the slave trade was not an economic decision; had it been, it would never have happened. The civil rights movement in the United States was not primarily a political transformation. The unravelling of colonial empires across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean was not, at root, a strategic recalibration. These were spiritual reckonings — moments when humanity collectively recognised a deeper truth about human dignity and acted upon that truth even when power and profit counselled otherwise.
The transactional logic that now governs international affairs cannot be countered with better deals or more elegant frameworks. It can only be countered with a different kind of logic altogether. This must be one rooted in moral conviction rather than strategic calculation. One that refuses to accept that the suffering of a child in Gaza, a mother in Khartoum, a teenager in Kharkiv is somehow not our concern because of the passport they carry or the part of the world they happened to be born into.
When Dag Hammarskjöld famously said that “unless there is a spiritual renaissance, the world will know no peace,” he was not making a call for religious fervour. He was making a call for the recovery of a moral grammar that international affairs needs but has systematically lost — an inclusive awakening that transcends creed while recognising the intrinsic value and interconnectedness of every human life; a governance of the human heart and soul as much as of the state. For Hammarskjöld, as Inge Johan Lønning, the Norwegian theologian and politician, observed in his Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture at Voksenåsen in October 2009, the contemplative life and the life of political action are not opposites but complements.
The foundations are not institutional. They are moral.— from the essay
A people’s moral compass
A rallying insight at the GCRD is that citizens do not trust institutions. They trust people. And the multilateral system, for all its technical brilliance, has ceased in too many places to be peopled by faces, voices and moral presences the publics it serves can recognise as their own. We have built an architecture of cooperation that the people in whose name it was built no longer feel themselves to be inside.
This is what we mean when we speak of rehumanising democracy and multilateralism. Not softening them or making them performative. It means returning them to the human foundations from which any durable system of cooperation must be built and rebuilt. It means forming the kind of leaders whose presence and moral integrity the publics they serve can still recognise. To survive the next decade, the UN must shift its bearing from a state-centric organisation to a more people-centred posture. The existential preoccupation of the next Secretary-General of the United Nations must be to cultivate a supranational public opinion, or what I have called a cognitive third force.
The League of Nations moment
It is existential because the UN is at a similar crossroads to its predecessor — the League of Nations on the eve of the Second World War. Although the League was built on the foundations of a favourable world public opinion, formed after the destructive effects of the First World War had become all too apparent, it lacked the critical tools and means for influencing and mobilising a supranational public opinion that could sustain a movement for internationalism and morality. Like its successor, the League depended to a large degree on the very states and empires it sought to tame to cultivate a pro-global public opinion in their domains. With the rise of nationalism within those states and empires, this was mission impossible.
Before its eventual collapse, the League fatally weakened its moral and political authority by doing little or nothing to prevent the blows to the fragile post-war structure of peace. First, it swept the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 under the carpet, as if it had never happened. Next, it failed to muster a response to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935. The League was losing its influence with great speed. Consequently, nation-states — large and small alike — saw security pacts outside the League as an expedient path to their national security. Secret pacts such as the infamous Hoare–Laval Pact, by which the British and the French sought to offer Abyssinia to Mussolini in exchange for a rapprochement deal, were all part of the sleazy underside of a global system bereft of morality or leadership. The impotence of the League of Nations was visible even to the staunchest idealists, and its eventual collapse was inevitable.
With the weakening of the UN, it should be unsurprising if similar secret pacts and military alliances become the new norm. If there is any lesson from the First and Second World Wars, it is that security alliances without a guiding moral arc are fraught with danger. Both wars showed that neither realist nor idealist notions of security — whether grounded in the self-interest of nations or in the ideals of collective security — are on their own enough to guarantee peace when faced with demagogues, whipped-up nationalism and a weakened global moral leadership.
What this day asks of us
This year, the International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace is not a celebration. It is a question put to those of us who still believe that cooperation among nations is worth defending.
The policy wonks will continue debating institutional reform. The diplomats will negotiate new pacts. They must. But those who understand what is truly at stake must begin the harder, deeper work of moral reconstruction.
The world’s problems will not be solved in conference rooms in Geneva or New York. Nor in Brussels, nor on Wall Street. They will be solved, if they are solved at all, in the human heart — and in the slow, unglamorous formation of leaders with the courage to govern from there.
This has practical ramifications. It requires investing as much in the moral formation of leadership as in institutional design. It means building a genuinely supranational public conscience that can hold power to account across borders. And it means recognising that without moral legitimacy, even the most sophisticated systems of cooperation will continue to erode.
Multilateralism can still matter. But only if it is rebuilt on a shared commitment to human dignity that no institution, on its own, can manufacture.
