On June 30th, the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) launched a new publication, “UN Special Political Missions: An Overview,” the first comprehensive official account of every special political mission deployed since 1948. The publication was an initiative of DPPA and serves as a historical foundation for understanding how the UN has adapted its political toolkit across eight decades. Yet these missions are only the more visible tip of something larger: the good offices the secretary-general exercises under the Charter. This report presents an opportunity to draw wider lessons about this practice.

Without saying so explicitly, the document supports an important conclusion: when the Security Council is divided, the independent political role of the secretary-general becomes more central. According to the document, from the 1960s until the end of the Cold War, as divisions within the intergovernmental bodies deepened, the Security Council and the General Assembly mandated only a small number of large field missions. Successive secretaries-general compensated by expanding the use of fly-in and fly-out envoys and short-term deployments of headquarters capacities, including to help major powers deescalate. These mechanisms required intense support from the secretary-general to succeed.

The overview documents a similar contraction today. Since 2015, only two multidimensional special political missions have been established, BINUH in Haiti and UNITAMS in Sudan, the latter terminated in 2024. Others have been drawn down (most recently UNAMI in Iraq and UNMHA in Yemen) with an additional mission (UNTMIS in Somalia) scheduled for closure later this year. Some missions have also gone many months without a head of mission.

A tool that has continued to be deployed is envoys appointed by the secretary-general rather than missions mandated by the Security Council. While the tool could have arguably been used more widely, including in crises such as the war in Ukraine, the appointment of a personal envoy for Sudan in November 2023, welcomed by the Council ten days later in Resolution 2715, and the deployment of Jean Arnault as personal envoy for the Middle East conflict and its consequences in March 2026 show it remains available.

Lessons from the Overview for the Next Secretary-General

Under geopolitical contestation, Council paralysis relocates the space for UN diplomacy to the 38th floor. The question is how often and how effectively the secretary-general takes up that space. For the next secretary-general, who takes office in January 2027 amid divisions in the Council as deep as any since the Cold War, three lessons emerge from the DPPA document.

The first is that the secretary-general can move before the Council does. The overview notes that discreet good offices initiatives undertaken on the basis of the secretary-general’s authority under the Charter have on occasion “subsequently received a legislative mandate by a governing body” and become special political missions.

The clearest illustration in the overview comes from a moment of acute superpower rivalry. On September 23, 1980, the day after Iraq’s invasion of Iran, Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim wrote to the president of the Security Council to report that he had already appealed to both parties to cease fighting, offered his good offices, and encouraged the Council to meet in consultation. The Council then adopted Resolution 479, which supported efforts the secretary-general had already made.

In November, Waldheim informed the Council that he had appointed the former Swedish prime minister Olof Palme as his special representative. Both governments accepted the appointment. The secretary-general acted, and the Council endorsed. The good offices came first, and the mandate followed. The 2023 appointment on Sudan followed the same sequence.

The second lesson is procedural. The document lists the instruments through which missions receive mandates: resolutions, presidential statements, and exchanges of letters between the secretary-general and the president of the Security Council. The exchange of letters deserves particular attention. It allows the Council to regularize an initiative without negotiating, drafting, and voting on a resolution, a process any permanent member can obstruct.

In a letter on April 1, 1999, Kofi Annan informed the Security Council of his decision to appoint Moustapha Niasse as his special envoy for the Democratic Republic of the Congo peace process, a decision he had taken after consulting the secretary-general of the then Organization of African Unity and the president of Zambia, who was spearheading the regional peace process. The Council’s mandate for the envoy came through a subsequent exchange of letters. This lowers the political cost, on all sides, of the secretary-general moving first.

The third lesson is that special political missions are improvisational by design. The document is explicit that special political missions “are not drawn up on the basis of templates or predefined models” and that their planning has been driven by the needs of each situation, the desires of host states, and the demands of the mandating bodies.

The Suez Canal Clearance Operation shows how little the instrument owed to any model. On November 26, 1956, the secretary-general appointed Raymond Wheeler, a retired American lieutenant general, as his special representative and director of operations. Wheeler contracted a salvage fleet, which completed clearance in April 1957, allowing the Suez Canal to reopen to international shipping. The mission closed the following month. A special political mission, on that occasion, was a fleet of salvage vessels under a soldier’s command, a scenario that was not anticipated in the Charter.

The mandate was as improvised as the operation. Britain and France were belligerents and permanent members of the Security Council, which left the Council unable to act. Authority came instead from the General Assembly, through Resolutions 997 (ES-I), adopted at an emergency special session, and 1121 (XI). The secretary-general chose the head of mission and directed the work. The two permanent members involved could not block the mandate to reopen the canal.

An incoming secretary-general should resist the suggestion that new doctrine must precede action. The special political mission was never a standardized tool. Its adaptability, as the document illustrates throughout, has been its principal value. That adaptability makes demands of its own. It requires a high level of political acumen and creativity from the secretary-general and their senior advisers.

Looking beyond the Overview

Several additional reminders are worth underlining, even if they lie beyond the scope of the overview. The first is that the secretary-general can take meaningful action even without a mandate or a resulting mission. The overview only records missions that received legislative authority, which is an appropriate scope but it overlooks as a result important initiatives that never became missions.

One example is the response to the Falklands/Malvinas crisis of 1982. In Resolution 502, on April 3^rd, the Security Council demanded that Argentina withdraw but gave the secretary-general no role. At first, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar held back while US Secretary of State Alexander Haig mediated. Pérez de Cuéllar only stepped in once Haig’s effort and a subsequent Peruvian one had failed, negotiating with both sides over a framework for a ceasefire, mutual withdrawals, and an interim UN administration. While the talks made some progress, the war ended up running its course. But the case still illustrates how the secretary-general can act and move two warring parties without a mandate and without a mission.

On May 26th, the Council adopted Resolution 505, which welcomed Pérez de Cuéllar’s efforts and asked him to continue his good offices. Yet no special political mission was ever created, which is why the episode appears nowhere in the overview. This initiative did not end the war, but that is not the point. What matters is that the secretary-general acted and moved two warring parties without a mandate and without a mission.

The second reminder is that nothing works without deep personal groundwork by the secretary-general. What made Pérez de Cuéllar’s engagement possible was the credibility he had accumulated before the crisis. As Margaret Thatcher said during the war, the UK had a “special relationship” with him because he had been head of a team of UN observers sent to monitor the 1980 elections in Rhodesia: “He knows we bring colonies to independence. He knows how we arrange things with free elections. He knows that we believe in self-determination, and he has seen us at it. So we have special faith in him.”

The willingness of parties to accept the authority of the secretary-general is earned over years through relationships with leaders and a reputation for impartiality and discretion. This personal capital is built painstakingly and cannot be assembled once a crisis has erupted. It requires, from the first day in office, sustained personal engagement with the leaders whose cooperation may later prove indispensable and a public profile that reinforces the standing of the office and of the officeholder.

The same holds after an envoy is named. Appointing a personal envoy is where the secretary-general’s involvement in a file begins. Well-chosen envoys may carry authority of their own, but their standing with the parties, and with the Council, also derives from the secretary-general’s continued, visible, and concrete support for their work. An envoy dispatched and then left to work alone will be viewed by the parties as a weak interlocutor.

This is not to suggest that the secretary-general should recklessly engage at any cost. Indeed, the stakes are high: Dag Hammarskjöld faced a Soviet campaign to dismantle the office of secretary-general after his intervention in the Congo. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was denied a second term after clashing with Washington over his role in Bosnia. The historical record shows how much depends on the secretary-general judging correctly that the moment is ripe and that the relevant powers will acquiesce.

The third reminder is that the responsibility for mediation and good offices cannot rest on the secretary-general alone. The Suez crisis is remembered for Hammarskjöld’s inventiveness, but the route through the General Assembly was opened by Lester Pearson, Canada’s secretary of state for external affairs, who was candidate for secretary-general himself and lost to Hammarskjöld. It was the latter who helped the former excel on the job, proposing the emergency force at that same session and offered Canadian troops for it. The secretary-general cannot generate that support only by himself; it also requires member states willing to spend diplomatic capital, inside the Council or beyond it. That willingness is essential to turning a secretary-general’s initiative into a mandate.

In July 2025, the Security Council unanimously expressed that willingness. Resolution 2788 encouraged the secretary-general to ensure the United Nations can lead and support mediation and “to continue to use his good offices.” It also called on member states to support and cooperate with him. On July 23rd, the Council will hold an open debate to consider the secretary-general’s recommendations for strengthening the machinery of peaceful settlement that was stipulated by that resolution. The debate is expected to fall within days of the first straw poll on his successor, and Council members may wish to take the opportunity to reiterate their commitment in this context.

At the launch of the DPPA report, Under-Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo drew the important conclusion that “geopolitical division is not an excuse for inaction,” noting that special political missions “operated throughout the Cold War and still achieved breakthroughs.” Those breakthroughs, as this overview shows, often began with the secretary-general exercising his good offices before any mandate or mission existed. The question is whether the same initiative is possible amid contemporary divisions. The argument that current conditions make such breakthroughs impossible risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, with institutional inaction justified by structural constraints producing more institutional inaction. The only defensible standpoint is persistence. The office was built for creative initiative. This document makes that clear.