Seifudein Adem
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Apr 9 2026
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Contemporary debates on reforming the United Nations, notably its Security Council, largely revolve round questions of energy redistribution and institutional design. Recent contributions by the president of Finland, Alexander Stubb (2026), and the Singaporean senior diplomat Kishore Mahbubani (2026) exemplify this pattern. Yet, taken collectively, their proposals reveal a deeper theoretical divide: whether or not international legitimacy relies upon totally on balancing energy or modernizing establishments. Missing from each proposals is civilizational representationan concern that has been highlighted extra lately by the famous scholar of worldwide relations Amitav Acharya (2025). Half a century in the past, the Kenyan-born educational Ali Mazrui (1976) additionally framed the query of UN reform in explicitly civilizational phrases and articulated it extra absolutely in his most formidable work. It is due to this fact worthwhile to usher in Mazrui and evaluate his concepts with these of Stubb and Mahbubani.
Stubb situates UN reform inside what he describes as an rising triangular distribution of energy among the many Global West (roughly 50 states), the Global East (25 states), and the Global South (125 states). In his view, the disaster of the Security Council displays a broader systemic transition from Western predominance to contested multipolarity. Reformthrough expanded continental illustration (with two extra everlasting members from Africa, two from Asia, one from Latin America) would due to this fact guarantee larger legitimacy. In addition, he proposes the elimination of the veto and stricter Charter enforcement, together with suspension of everlasting members that violate it. The UN should mirror the evolving configuration of macro-blocs so as to stabilize competitors. For Stubb, the issue is geopolitical disequilibrium.
Mahbubanis strategy is extra institutional. His 777 formulation seeks to align illustration with twenty-first-century demographic and financial realities by increasing everlasting membership to incorporate main regional powers whereas introducing semi-permanent and rotating tiers. His reformed Security Council would have the next extra everlasting members: Brazil, China, the European Union (instead of France and Germany), India, and Nigeria. Unlike Stubb, Mahbubani doesn’t conceptualize international politics as triangular rivalry. Instead, he sees the rising powers as merely looking for recognition throughout the system fairly than its transformation. Reform due to this fact entails recalibrating illustration whereas retaining the state-centric and authorized structure of multilateralism. From Mahbubanis perspective, the issue is institutional obsolescence.
Ali Mazruis place diverges from that of Stubb and Mahbubani at a extra foundational stage. Mazrui, who died in 2014, would start by reminding us that the UN represents states however not civilizations. The imbalance within the Security Council just isn’t merely a matter of who wields energy, but additionally of which cultures are privileged.
As Mazrui (1997) put it:
For Mazrui, significant reform should due to this fact deal with civilizational voice alongside state illustration. His proposal aimed to decenter Western dominance with out dismantling international order, advocating as an alternative a culturally plural UN that displays linguistic, regional, and civilizational range. The underlying drawback, for Mazrui, just isn’t merely institutional or geopolitical, however the persistence of Western cultural hegemony inside international governance. Mazruis linguistic framework illustrates his perspective. Mazrui recognized 5 world languages: English, French, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. English and French qualify as established world languages, given their international diffusion, giant variety of audio system, and adoption throughout a number of areas and states.Russian, Chinese, and Arabic, in contrast, are languages that, in Mazruis view, benefit elevation to world standing as a result of their geopolitical weight, demographic significance, and civilizational depth. The inclusion of Russian is partly justified by the realities of energy and technological achievement, in addition to its extensive use throughout Eurasia.
Chinese presents a fair stronger case, not solely due to the sheer variety of native audio system but additionally as a result of Chinas historic contributions to world civilization and its rising standing as a superpower. Arabic, whereas much less globally widespread, is elevated by its distinctive place as a bridge between Asia and Africa and its central position within the historic improvement of world cultureespecially by means of the unfold of common religions resembling Islam. The exclusionor demotionof Spanish, regardless of its giant variety of audio system, is because of the have to counterbalance Eurocentrism in international cultural preparations. Since English and French already symbolize Western Europe, including one other Western European language would reinforce the prevailing civilizational imbalance. A world language, in line with Mazrui (2008: 80), is one that’s adopted by at the very least 10 international locations as the principle language of enterprise, that has a minimal of 500 million fluent audio system, and is unfold past its continent in a serious approach.
In addition to world languages, Ali Mazruis linguistic framework consists of regional languages and communal languages. In Mazruis new world order, each baby can be required to be taught three languages: a world language (e.g., English or French), a regional language (e.g., German or Swahili), and both a nationwide language (e.g., Swedish, Persian, or Amharic) or a subnational language (e.g., Gujarati or Luganda). Placing Mazrui alongside Stubb and Mahbubani highlights each his distinctiveness and his limits. Compared with Stubb, Mazrui shifts the main target of debates about UN reform from systemic stability to cultural legitimacy. Stubbs triangular framework acknowledges macro-cultural blocs (West, East, South), however treats them strategically fairly than normatively. According to Mazrui, legitimacy in a post-Western order requires recognizing non-Western civilizational traditions as constitutive actors fairly than merely as geopolitical camps.
The distinction between Mahbubani and Mazrui is sharper. Mahbubanis reform redistributes authority amongst main states whereas leaving its state-centric orientation. His strategy does certainly make the UN extra consultant by way of geography, demography, and financial affect. But it ignores the cultural grammar of multilateralism. Mazrui would query the very assumption that states alone are ample models of illustration. In doing so, Mazrui exposes a Eurocentric blind spot within the mainstream reform proposals. At the identical time, Mazruis strategy entails sensible and theoretical complexities. Civilizations are neither territorially fastened nor politically unified; linguistic communities don’t map neatly onto coherent strategic pursuits.
By introducing civilization as a unit of illustration, Mazrui additionally dangers essentializing cultural classes and underestimating intra-civilizational range. Stubb and Mahbubani keep away from this drawback by remaining inside a state-centric framework, however on the expense of largely leaving the problem of civilizational hierarchy unaddressed. The comparative perception from this evaluation is twofold. First, UN reform debates function on totally different normative ranges. Second, every stage captures a dimension of legitimacy that the others neglect. Within this triad Mazrui stands as probably the most conceptually radical voice. He extends the reform debate past who governs and the way, to the extra elementary query of whose civilization counts. In doing so, he reframes UN reform not simply as an adjustment of seats and vetoes, however as a part of a broader wrestle over the cultural foundations of world order.
The stability of the worldwide order, for Mazrui, is determined by how efficiently the stability between the rising similarity amongst folks (homogenization) and the rising focus of energy inside a single civilization (hegemonization) is managed. When the stability between the 2 is excessively distorted, the equilibrium between peace and violence might shift towards battle. In this sense, struggle and peace on the international stage change into reflections of deeper civilizational misalignments and a flawed reconciliation between homogenization and hegemonization might pressure the social cloth of world order to the purpose of rupture.
References
Acharya, Amitav. 2025. The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West. New York: Basic Books.
Mahbubani, Kishore. 2026. Dream Palace of the West. Foreign Affairs, March/April.
Mazrui, Ali A. 2008. The Power of Language and the Politics of Religion. The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 97 (394): 7997.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1997. Globalization and the Islamic Paradigm of International Relations: Allies or Adversaries? Paper Presented on the Conference on Islamic Paradigm of International Relations sponsored by SISS and the Center of Political Research and Studies, Cairo, Egypt, 6 December.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1976. A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective. New York: Free Press.
Stubb, Alexander. 2026. The Wests Last Chance. Foreign Affairs, January/February.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
- The Hedley Bull Ali Mazrui Dialogue as a Metaphor for IR
- Civilizational Nationalism: Concept, Cases, and Global Implications
- Indias Civilizational Imagination of Southeast Asia
- Westphalianism to Civilizational Statism: Trendy Mirage or Foundational Shift?
- Neo-Ottomanism as Civilizational Nationalism: Turkeys Quest for Identity
- Civilization as an Alternative Unit of Analysis in International Relations
About The Author(s)
Seifudein Ademis a visiting professor on the Institute for Advanced Research and Education at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He has taught at universities in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa University, 198892), Japan (University of Tsukuba, 200005; Doshisha University, 201823), USA (Binghamton University, 200616), and China (Hong Kong Baptist University, 2017). Adem is Ali Mazruis mental biographer and has printed ten books with, for, or about Mazrui, together with Postcolonial Constructivism: Mazruis Theory of Intercultural Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). From 2006 to 2016, he served as affiliate director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University.
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United Nations