Category World News

People have been asking “What if …” forever. Over the next few months, Al Jazeera will explore some of the biggest challenges of our time and ask leading experts: “What if …”

Established 80 years ago in October, the United Nations has become a fixture in the lives of people across the globe.

Over the last eight decades, as well as playing a vital role in steering the world through global health crises, the organisation has played a central role in shaping international law, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, and, rightly or wrongly, preserving what most people understand to be the world order.

However, while many still regard its role as vital, the UN has come under increasing criticism for prioritising the agendas of the Western world over the needs of the Global South. It has also faced scrutiny for failing to prevent mass atrocities, including the genocides in the 1990s in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the brutal violence in Sudan’s Darfur region, despite the presence of UN troops.

Many would argue that the organisation has been entirely sidelined during Israel’s war on Gaza, with its legitimacy contested by Israel and its traditional role in brokering a ceasefire reflective of international law usurped by the United States.

So, why bother with the UN at all? Could individual states not just deal with their own problems? After all, the UN is not even the first attempt at some form of global governance. Its predecessor, the League of Nations, founded in 1920, barely survived the second world war. Why should we expect the UN to continue forever?

Al Jazeera spoke to several experts and asked them to break down what they thought would happen if the UN were disbanded next Friday.

What would happen to migration?

If you disbanded the UN on a Friday, you would be looking for a way to reinvent it by Monday.

So many of the challenges the world faces today are transnational. Take refugees, for example: there are at least 100 million refugees, displaced people and irregular migrants globally. That is not a problem any one state can solve; it needs a transnational response.

We are already seeing aid cuts, particularly from the US, reducing food security in UN-supported camps and driving up malnutrition and social tensions.

As assistance dries up, more refugees are moving from camps to urban areas. There, they can sometimes survive through the informal economy, but their arrival — through no fault of their own — can place new pressures on the resources and services available within those urban areas.

If the UN were to disappear entirely, some refugees would undoubtedly move [from camps] towards the Global North; a process that would probably have an impact on Europe within a year. But others would find themselves trapped in increasingly precarious situations. The poorer the refugees, the less able they are to travel.

Without the UN, states would no longer be held to account for how they treat refugees, and standards would quickly fall. You would see the US model of unilateral action spreading — and groups like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (the Israeli-US private aid model that has resulted in more than 600 people being killed trying to access food) stepping into the vacuum.

And of course, there are thousands of jobs — both within the UN and among its partner organisations and suppliers — that would also vanish overnight.

Jeff Crisp, a research associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, formerly with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees

What would happen to international law?

For the larger states, especially the US, international law has always come second to sovereignty. The influence of bodies like the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which enforce international law under separate statutes, has been shrinking for some time.

So when we talk about the legal implications of disbanding the UN, we are really discussing a process that is already under way. Great institutions have withered before – the League of Nations being the obvious example. The UN has been losing political clout for a while and could disappear altogether, especially since much of its funding comes from the US. If it did, we would likely return to a world of sealed borders and pure Westphalian politics (a system where each state has absolute sovereignty over its own territory) – not exactly ideal.

Even without the UN, international law would not vanish. NGOs and non-state actors can still use national courts to hold actors accountable. For example, (independently of the UN), the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq is pursuing British companies for providing parts to the Israeli military. Following China’s forced organ harvesting case, trade bodies took action against the Chinese medical industry, affecting research publications. Lawyers at the ICC have also pioneered cross-border initiatives, notably investigations into alleged crimes against the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Myanmar, showing how prosecutors can coordinate across jurisdictions to hold perpetrators accountable.

The (international courts) would probably survive, and laws against genocide remain. But enforcement would increasingly fall on states, corporations, and civil society – an unexpected burden, but one someone has to bear.

Geoffrey Nice, UK barrister and former lead prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic

Could individual states take over peacekeeping?

Unilateral peacekeeping is not really peacekeeping – it is occupation. This is why countries tend to avoid it or seek a multilateral mandate, such as from the African Union. But even then, they go back to be ratified by the UN.

That is the UN’s role in peacekeeping: it gives legitimacy, and it will likely retain that until the UN itself loses all legitimacy. Compare it to, say, the G20. The powers there and their hangers-on have the financial and military capacity to do much of the UN’s work, but it would always be seen – correctly – as the big economic powers imposing their will upon poorer ones. The only way to get around that is to have the UN, or something similar.

But that legitimacy is under threat. It cannot, or won’t, enforce any measures against the Security Council’s permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the US). This really makes a joke of international law. Any law that cannot be enforced is really a legal fiction, and that erodes everything. Look at where we are: the ICJ, the ICC – we have (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu flying all over the world without any apparent threat.

Could we do without the UN in its current form? Yes. If we were to design it today, the odds are it would be in a radically different form from the one we have, whose structures were agreed upon in 1945. The world is a very different place now than it was then.

Ramesh Thakur, former assistant UN secretary-general

What would happen to the World Health Organization?

If we disbanded the WHO on Friday, the world would scramble to recreate it almost immediately. Its strength lies in its structure — every member state has one equal vote, making it a truly global body.

Its absence would be felt most acutely in low-income countries. Many lack the infrastructure to approve medicines or vaccines and rely on the WHO to do that. Without it, people would either go without essential treatments or receive unsafe, unvetted ones – and people would die.

We would also lose vital pandemic preparedness. The WHO’s Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System has operated for 50 years and built deep trust with governments. It does not just track influenza but all major viruses, giving countries early warning for outbreaks. For example, it is currently monitoring the H5N1 virus spreading among animals in North America. Humans have caught it from animals, but human-to-human transmission is only a mutation away – something the WHO is closely watching, even as other agencies face funding cuts.

Vaccine equity is another crucial area. During the COVID-19 pandemic, smaller nations struggled to access vaccines until the WHO intervened. It also helps protect low-income populations from exploitation by commercial interests by setting global health standards and highlighting risk factors.

The WHO is far from perfect – governance and efficiency can certainly improve – but the world cannot function safely without it. Its absence would leave a vacuum that no single government or organisation could fill.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan, paediatrician and former chief scientist at the WHO

Who would manage aid?

If we disbanded the UN, we would be forced to confront how deeply we have come to see such institutions as inevitable.

The UN, WHO, and USAID do enormous good – these are the organisations with the reach, funding, and infrastructure to change millions of lives. Smaller NGOs also make a real difference, but they rarely have the scale or stability to sustain global programmes.

When I managed a USAID health data initiative with a budget of about $1m a week, it seemed like straightforward development work – helping countries collect and use health data to guide policy. But over time, I saw how tightly political priorities in Washington shaped what we could and could not do.

The UN and similar bodies do not just deliver aid; they often reinforce the Global North’s narrative: we are developed, you are not; to progress, you must become like us.

That framing still carries a colonial legacy. Efforts to decolonise aid are under way, but they are uneven and incomplete.

If the UN were suddenly gone, we would scramble to fill the void with smaller, more local organisations. That could make aid more diverse and grounded – but also more fragmented, fragile, and uncertain. The real challenge would be imagining – and building – something genuinely different.

Professor James Thomas, author, But I Meant Well: Unlearning Colonial Ways of Doing Good; professor emeritus, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

How would international diplomacy work?

If the UN were abolished, many of the illusions of shared international norms would collapse.

Diplomacy would shift decisively towards bilateral and regional arrangements, making global engagement openly transactional.

In truth, much of, if not all, diplomacy already operates that way – (US President Donald) Trump’s transactional approach merely stripped away the pretence of a rules-based order.

Still, the UN’s framework, however flawed, provides a reference point for international law and moral pressure in crises and conflicts. Without it, even that limited leverage would vanish, and vulnerable populations would bear the brunt.

Many UN-backed treaties that attempt to uphold international norms would lose force or relevance. In fact, we are already seeing this erosion – the UN’s existence no longer guarantees the protection of those norms. Abolishing it would simply accelerate the breakdown, with regional blocs like the European Union or the African Union trying to fill the void, though none could replicate the UN’s global scope or legitimacy.

HA Hellyer, Royal United Services Institute and Center for American Progress

What would happen to climate goals?

Whatever its faults, the UN remains the only forum where the world can speak with a unified voice on climate change and concrete decisions, such as the Green Climate Fund, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, can be made.

The UN embodies the principles of justice and equity in managing the climate crises. That goes some way to explaining how, despite its faults, the UN has done a good job of providing the smaller, developing countries with the resources they need to help make the transition they need.

Without it, I cannot see any chance of the developed countries stepping up. I think we would quickly see the climate crisis be overtaken by market and neoliberal forces, with talk of “mitigation” prominent among richer countries and no help on offer to the poorer, developing countries.

Chukwumerije Okereke, professor of global climate and environmental governance, Bristol University

What else would the world miss?

The UN system is a fantastically complicated set of institutions.

It is much more than the Security Council and the General Assembly. There are a host of technical agencies covering things like telecommunications, intellectual property and so on.

These basically manage the wiring of an interconnected world. If you closed them, you would find that a whole bunch of routine international interactions would grind to a halt.

I think of these as the “wi-fi of multilateralism”: You don’t think about their existence most of the time, because they work OK, but if they went down, you would miss them a lot.

For Gaza resident Yassir Shaheen, nights were the hardest part of living through Israel’s devastating two-year war on the enclave.

“Many nights, we lay awake, our lips dry, our hearts pounding in fear, feeling as though the sky itself was collapsing on us,” he told Al Jazeera.

The Strip lies in tatters – its economy destroyed, infrastructure in ruins, and its people displaced, as a fragile US-brokered truce barely holds. More than 68,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, with some 10,000 still buried under the rubble, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

As world leaders in the Qatari capital Doha pledged this week to “leave no one behind” at the United Nations Second World Summit for Social Development (WSSD), the commitments stood in stark contrast to the reality in Gaza, where access to basic needs remains a luxury.

“Even bread can feel out of reach,” Shaheen, the team lead for the charity Humanity First UK in Gaza, revealed.

While prices have fallen compared with the worst periods of the war, they are still six to 10 times higher, Shaheen said.

On Thursday, Gaza’s Government Media Office said Israel has only allowed 4,453 trucks to enter, barely a quarter of what was supposed to enter daily according to the ceasefire agreement that came into effect on October 10.

Meanwhile, infrastructure in the enclave has been almost completely destroyed, Shaheen lamented, with only rubble remaining “where streets and buildings once stood”.

According to UN estimates, 92 percent of all residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed since Israel’s war on the enclave began on October 7, 2023, producing between 55-60 million tonnes of rubble.

“Schools, clinics, shops, homes … everything that allowed life to function has been reduced to dust,” he said

Development ‘impossible’ amid lack of rights

At the WSSD this week, which concluded on Thursday, member states repledged commitments made at the 1995 summit in Copenhagen, including the eradication of poverty, providing “decent” work, social integration, education and healthcare to the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The resulting Doha Political Declaration, adopted at the end of the summit, was a “booster shot for development”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.

Nevertheless, global declarations such as the WSSD do little in the face of the dire situation in Gaza, according to Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy at the UK-based Medical Aid for Palestinians.

“Despite the ceasefire, the situation in the health sector remains catastrophic, with severe shortages of medical equipment and medicines, and hundreds of healthcare workers killed or still detained,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Development is impossible while Palestinians are denied the most basic rights to safety, movement, and dignity.”

Echoing Talbot, the head of Humanity First UK, Aziz Hafiz, said “no declaration, however eloquent, can substitute for the fundamental right to freedom and security”.

“Development cannot flourish in isolation from justice and peace,” he told Al Jazeera. However, he asserted that does not mean “we wait for peace to act.”

“Every vocational programme, school rehabilitation, or psychosocial initiative becomes an act of resistance to despair,” he said. “While permanent peace remains the ultimate enabler of prosperity, maintaining human dignity in the present moment is equally critical.”

MAP’s Talbot asserted that for any “meaningful development”, the international community must ensure that humanitarian law is upheld.

“There must be genuine pressure on the Israeli government, as the occupying power, to enforce a permanent ceasefire, open the crossings, and allow the unrestricted entry of aid and medical supplies for thousands of injured Palestinians,” he said.

‘Rebuilding feels like a dream’

After two years of relentless Israeli attacks and destruction, Shaheen said what Palestinians most want in Gaza is to “rebuild [their homes] with their own hands, and to regain a piece of normal life again”.

“Living in the displacement camps is one of the hardest things people are going through now,” he pointed out.

“Most people have no real shelter, only thin, flimsy tents that barely stand against the wind. There’s no space, no privacy, no comfort. When it rains or when the sun burns, there is nowhere to escape.”

However, Shaheen says the scale of devastation raises painful questions about what rebuilding looks like.

“How long will it take just to remove the rubble? We hear that it could take years. And if clearing the debris takes that long, then how long will it take before rebuilding can even begin?” he said.

But more importantly, for Shaheen, rebuilding is not just about “concrete and walls”.

“It is about rebuilding their lives, their sense of safety, and their dignity. They do not just want buildings to rise again, but life to return.”

Israel has violated the ceasefire at least 80 times, according to the Gaza Government Media Office. More than 240 Palestinians, including dozens of children, have been killed by the Israeli army since the ceasefire began.

MAP’s director of advocacy Talbot said the only path to sustainable peace and development in the Strip were “justice and accountability” for the atrocities committed.

“Declarations and summits will remain hollow exercises unless they are matched with political will to end the root causes of Gaza’s suffering, including Israel’s ongoing military occupation and blockade,” he said.