For many at the United Nations, Youssef Mahmoud needs no introduction. As former UN Under-Secretary-General, he headed peace operations in Burundi, the Central African Republic and Chad. He has served as a member or led various UN review processes, including in 2019, when he led the independent strategic review of the UN peace operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO). Youssef is currently a senior adviser at the International Peace Institute.

In this interview, Youssef talks about the UN’s upcoming Summit of the Future and its Pact as it relates to people and the planet; the role of civil society; and the question of transformative action versus reform to sustain peace. Youssef also speaks to the ways the global majority is asserting its agency in the multilateral system, and the need to decolonize our thinking so as to make it work for everyone.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

There is a lot to admire in the vision the UN is promoting in its Summit of the Future. Yet I struggled to get past the first sentence in the chapeau of the most recent version of the Pact:

We, the Heads of State and Government, representing the peoples of the world, have gathered at United Nations Headquarters to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations through the actions in this Pact for the Future.

This feels very disconnected from how the world is now, geopolitically, financially, environmentally. In your career at the UN and as a keen observer, how do you think about this chasm between what the UN says member states want and believe, and how member states act?

There are two huge assumptions in this first sentence of the Pact for the Future’s chapeau that create discomfort for me. The first is that governments represent people. In some contexts that may be true; in other contexts, governments have been captured by elites, well or ill-elected, that are usually more enamored by power rather than effective governance. Read more