The 81st UN General Assembly: my views

 DN Opinion

UN: Restoring trust and driving transformation

Victor Ângelo

International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General

Published on: 18 Sep 2026, 02:10

The 81st United Nations General Assembly officially opened on 8 September. Its high-level segment, which gathers heads of state and government in New York between 22 and 28 September, takes place under the theme Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: a UN that delivers results for all. For an organization in crisis, albeit irreplaceable, the decisive test lies not in the vigour of its theme, but in the ability to translate current geopolitics into concrete decisions. At a time when the selection of António Guterres's successor is underway, the speeches should focus on three priorities, each measured by facts, not intentions: promoting peace, establishing multilateral governance of Artificial Intelligence, and placing human development back at the centre of international security.

The first priority is peace. The figures belie the narrative of normalization. In Gaza, the October 2025 ceasefire agreement provided for the entry of 600 aid lorries per day. We are very far from that figure. A substantial part of the little that does enter is commercial cargo rather than humanitarian aid channelled by the agencies. It is this gap between what was agreed and what is executed, not the existence of the ceasefire itself, that defines daily civilian suffering.

In South Sudan, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented, over a 17-day period in March, more than 160 civilians killed and approximately 99 water wells destroyed or poisoned. In Sudan—a distinct conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—the number of civilians killed since 2023 exceeds 59,000, with 14 million displaced and 33.7 million people in need of urgent assistance.

In the Russian aggression against Ukraine, in the Eastern Congo, in the Sahel, and in Myanmar, the patterns repeat themselves: high civilian mortality, mass displacement, and the denial of humanitarian access as an instrument of war.

The UN will not stop these wars from New York. But it can emerge from the high-level segment with a measurable commitment: to allocate a fixed percentage of the budget for special political missions and peacekeeping to the protection of civilians and the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. A peace process that fails to protect women and children from sexual violence, forced displacement, and starvation is not peace; it is hypocrisy.

The second priority stems from a remarkable convergence: within a few days in September, five voices that rarely agree expressed the same concern regarding Artificial Intelligence. On 12 September, Dario Amodei of Anthropic published the essay We Must Pace the Frontier—roughly 3,800 words—advocating a deliberate slowing of the pace of development in AI capabilities; Sam Altman of OpenAI endorsed the core of the appeal hours later, and Elon Musk did the same.

Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders—opposite extremes of the American political spectrum—joined former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon in a Declaration for Pro-Human AI. King Charles III gathered executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic yesterday, 17 September, to ask them to adhere to common principles. And Pope Leo XIV, in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, released on 25 May, criticized the logic of the ongoing military, economic, and cognitive competition.

China has already responded institutionally: in July, it created WAICO (World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization), an intergovernmental AI cooperation organization that, as I have argued elsewhere, targets the Global South, but simultaneously functions as a Chinese instrument for defining technical standards and technological decoupling from the United States.

It is precisely because WAICO already exists, with its own architecture and interests, that the General Assembly cannot limit itself to "taking note": it must work to bring together the scattered forums—WAICO included—into a common multilateral framework, converting voluntary principles into verifiable commitments, with an independent review mechanism similar to what the American laboratories have just proposed among themselves.

The third priority should have dominated the headlines when the figures were revealed, but it was ignored: the UNDP Human Development Report, published in 2025, recorded the smallest increase in the Human Development Index (HDI) since 1990. The gap between low-HDI and very high-HDI countries widened for the fourth consecutive year, reversing a decades-long trend. The contrast is revealing: between 1990 and 2023, the Asia-Pacific region increased its HDI by more than 50%; the majority of low-HDI countries saw no equivalent growth. According to the then-UNDP Administrator, if the stagnation of recent years becomes "the new normal", the world could fall decades short of the development projected for 2030.

This is not abstract statistics. It is one of the fuels for the other crises. Persistent poverty feeds migration routes; territories without a functional state or economic prospects are where armed groups recruit most easily, leading to the expansion of banditry and terrorism.

Treating development, migration, and security as separate agendas is the mistake that produced this regression. The General Assembly must recognize that financing development means financing international security.

These three priorities share the same logic: peace without the effective protection of people is a precarious truce; Artificial Intelligence without binding multilateral governance is a race with neither rules nor a referee; and development is not a parallel agenda, but the foundation of common security. Trust is not restored with speeches at the New York podium. It is recovered when States show that solidarity exists.