It has long been recognised that the institutional structure of the United Nations—most centrally, the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council—is deeply problematic. The veto entrenches hierarchy and shields power from accountability. This was not an unintended by-product of the Charter but a constitutive feature of the post-1945 settlement. Students in introductory international law courses are often reassured that the privileges of permanent Security Council membership served to balance between the blocs.

This structure has long been contested. Decolonised and post-colonial states did not simply accept the UN as a neutral inheritance of empire. They treated it as a site of political struggle and constitutional imagination, seeking to transform formal sovereign equality into a material reality. Reform of the Security Council—particularly limits on the veto—figured prominently in these efforts, alongside broader projects of economic self-determination and collective security.

The tension between formal “sovereign equality” under Article 2.1 of the Charter and entrenched hierarchy in the UN’s design has long been recognised across different intellectual registers. With the end of the Cold War, Bardo Fassbender argued that the right of veto of the permanent members of the Security Council, is “the central, and most problematic, feature of the present constitution of the UN.”

More recently, commentators have revived TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) critiques of the UN structure. For example, Adom Getachew, in Worldmaking After Empire (2019), reconstructs how anti-imperial actors understood the United Nations as a site of struggle. Rather than merely participating in the UN, they sought to transform its legal architecture. These accounts do not only suggest that the problem posed by the veto is foundational but also reveal its historical permutations.

Permanent Members and the Use of Force

Despite numerous previous “crises”, what this long-standing debate could not anticipate is the moment we now confront: a situation in which permanent Security Council members are actively dismantling the Charter’s core constraints on the use of force.

Much of the focus has been on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, first in 2014 and more aggressively in 2022. These actions have widely condemned as a manifest violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. But the erosion of the Charter’s central bargain is no longer confined to a single Permanent Member. Following the United States’ military operation in Venezuela and the kidnapping of its leader—a highly unusual form of military intervention explicitly motivated by extractive interests—it may become difficult to treat these violations as aberrational.

At stake are the Charter’s most foundational provisions. Article 2(4) establishes the prohibition on the use of force; Article 51 delimits the exception of self-defence. Both articulate the legal conditions under which international peace and security are meant to be maintained as the overarching purpose of the Charter. Notwithstanding Keir Starmer’s prevarications on the illegality of the Venezuela attack, assertions of regime illegitimacy cannot justify unilateral military action.

Following the U.S.’s intervention in Venezuela, Oona Hathaway has emphasised that the danger lies not only in individual violations, but in their cumulative effect, leading to a “great unravelling”. As legal constraints have seemingly been discarded, it will be hard for states to walk back the precedent that has been set. For those teaching international law, it will be harder than ever to walk into classrooms and explain the binding nature of ad bellum rules. The prohibition on the use of force may be formally invoked, yet increasingly absent from the practice of the states.

The Charter’s Institutional Dead Ends

Nor does the Charter offer a real remedy. The United Nations General Assembly remains structurally constrained. In the most consequential domains—peace and security—its powers are largely limited to “recommendations”. This limitation reflects the same compromise that entrenched the veto.

This may bring renewed attention to Article 6 of the Charter, which provides for the expulsion of a Member State that has persistently violated the principles of the UN. In the present circumstances, it is tempting to ask whether this provision could be activated against Russia or the United States. Even in the previously outlandish scenario that Trump decides to invade Greenland, the answer is almost certainly negative. Expulsion requires a recommendation of the Security Council. Any permanent member can veto the procedure.

In practice, states have already begun to adjust. Faced with persistent paralysis in the Security Council, some states have increasingly treated its failure as a given rather than an endpoint. Emergency sessions of the General Assembly have become sites not merely of condemnation, but of coordinating institutional independence initiatives. Accountability mechanisms such as UN Special Rapporteurs have been created through the Assembly, even where the Council is unwilling to act. The Council remains formally central, but its role has been partially displaced, as states seek to prevent its paralysis from incapacitating the organisation as a whole.

Recent developments further sharpen this diagnosis. On 7 January 2026, the President of the United States issued a memorandum directing the withdrawal from and the termination of funding for a wide range of UN bodies and affiliated institutions, framing them as contrary to US interests. As Jean Galbraith has observed, “The most significant is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – to which all other countries in the world belong.” This escalation underscores a further asymmetry: the UN depends on major powers for resources, hosting, and political support, while apparently lacking the means to ensure its independence.

Beyond Reform

In this new environment, UN member states cannot reactively stutter, or even resort to merely rhetorical condemnations. If the Charter cannot discipline its guarantors, then it is not clear there’s any justification for business as usual at the UN.

Three immediate steps are possibly available. First, serious efforts should be renewed to reduce the UN’s dependence on hostile permanent members of the UN Security Council. This includes refusing politically conditioned funding and reviving initiatives to relocate significant UN functions away from New York. Multiple UN agencies have already decided on moving to Nairobi. Such moves will not resolve the deeper constitutional problem, but they can send the signal that withdrawal from the UN is not simply a unilateral measure.

Second, Article 6 should be formally re-engaged, even in the knowledge that expulsion will fail. Doing so would force a constitutional reckoning, and the old program of institutional reform back on the agenda, hopefully in a more powerful way than ever.

Third—and more speculatively—Members of the General Assembly may decide to disengage from the Security Council, temporarily or permanently. All three proposals require states that are not permanent members of the Security Council to work collectively, like unionized workers trying to influence management, or shareholders trying to redirect a firm. But this last option is the most ambitious and requires the General Assembly to continue its own work while somehow turning its back the existing structure of the organization.

Gradually, such an approach may lead the General Assembly to redesign its operations outside of the given mandate of the UN, perhaps as a blueprint for a fairer international organization. Such an organization, for example, could have its own “security council”, selected e.g. on a rotating basis, or voted in. (One could think of a dual voting process which reflects, first, a one state one vote principle, and then adds a formula to balance population sizes). One way or the other, it‘s time for some big institutional thinking.

This is of course an onerous task. It will take time and enormous political efforts. But it might not be futile. For one comparison, Hans Kelsen wrote his Peace Through Law (1944) during the worst moments of World War II. His proposal of a world court with compulsory jurisdiction was not adopted; but it is beyond argument that his views shaped the system that did emerge when the war was over.

Objections

One objection readers may have in mind is that all my proposals above rely vastly on the General Assembly and the various organs it established. Critics have often dismissed such organs, for example due to placing states with bad human rights records in strategic roles in human rights oversight bodies. This is of course factually true, but I do not think it is a serious objection. A non-democratic UN can perhaps be justified if the privileges of permanent membership in the Security Council come with fidelity to basic UN principles. Once that is over, as it seems to be, initiatives should move towards democratizing the international legal system.

Further objections are familiar: feasibility, political dependence, the long history of failed reform. But these objections misread the moment we are in. States will realize that the international legal order is not worth having if foundational rules are systematically abandoned without consequence. But this obvious decline will soon come with reconstructive energies. What is now at stake is not whether the United Nations can be improved, but whether it can continue to function when its most powerful members openly exempt themselves from its core commitments. We have reached the point when the Charter’s principles require rethinking the UN’s institutional form.