It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
Eleanor Roosevelt
When the United States struck the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites in Iran on 22 June 2025, it did not seek a United Nations Security Council resolution. It filed a letter under Article 51 of the UN Charter five days later, claiming collective self-defence of Israel, and proceeded. When Israel and the United States resumed the war on Iran on 28 February 2026, no UNSC resolution was sought either. On Russia and Ukraine, the Council has been paralysed since 2022 because its key permanent members are declared and undeclared belligerents on opposite sides. On Gaza, Resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025 endorsed the establishment of President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace; the body that subsequently emerged, with him as chair for life, a $1 billion fee for permanent membership, and an explicit ambition to function as a global institution rivalling the United Nations. No country from Sub-Saharan Africa was invited. The Council was the legal cover. Not for the first time has the UNSC been used as a flag of convenience, nor has the only apex body in the multilateral system for decision-making to assure the global public good of peace and security, subverted itself.
MISUSE AND PARALYSIS
The pattern has a longer history. The 1991 Gulf War proceeded under Resolution 678, which authorised “all necessary means” to liberate Kuwait. The 2003 invasion of Iraq carried no comparable authorisation; the United States and the United Kingdom stretched earlier resolutions to manufacture a justification two-thirds of the Council had refused to provide. In 2011, Resolution 1973 authorised force in Libya for the protection of civilians, with India, Brazil, Russia, China and Germany abstaining; what followed was a NATO campaign of regime change that exceeded the resolution’s mandate and left Libya in a state of collapse from which it has not recovered. In Syria, the Council went the other way: between 2011 and the present, repeated draft resolutions to address the war and the use of chemical weapons were vetoed, the body unable to muster even a humanitarian consensus. As Hardeep Singh Puri’s pathbreaking Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, drawing on his own years on the Council, has documented, the body has alternated between misuse and paralysis, often supporting the waging of war not peace.
The message is clear. UNSC’s authority is something powerful states use and invoke selectively. If until now they had sought to institutionally capture or legitimise their own belligerent actions and military interventions through the UNSC, they now use it to shore up parallel, non-universal and unrepresentative institutions. In most cases, unilateralism prevails over multilateralism and pliant states being used for post conflict mediation over the UN.
THE UNSC REFORM MANDATE
UNSC reform is not optional. It is mandated. The Open-Ended Working Group on Council reform of the General Assembly was established in 1993. The Inter-Governmental Negotiations were launched under Decision 62/557 of September 2008 with an explicit charge: to negotiate “equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council and other matters related to the Council.” That is the legal basis for the entire process, and it is a commitment the membership undertook. The IGN has run for those seventeen years without text-based negotiations. The 2024 UN Pact for the Future called for action; the IGN has not acted. Article 108 of the Charter requires that any amendment be approved by two-thirds of the General Assembly and ratified by two-thirds of UN members including all five permanent members. While 2/3rd of UNGA vote may be achievable, reform of the body the P5 dominate is gated, by design, on the consent of the P5.
The lip service to that mandate has narrowed. There is now open disinterest among some P5 in expansion of permanent membership. Shutting out entire continents like Africa and Latin America, and major countries like India who represent one-sixth of humanity, the fourth largest and fastest-growing economy and the oldest and biggest democracy, is a surefire recipe for the UNSC’s ineffectiveness and mark of illegitimacy. The UNSC is deprived of the contribution of countries who could make a difference as consequential war and peace actors. Moreover, the refusal to reform the veto system is a guarantee of paralysis.
CURRENT STAT E OF PLAY
It is against this background that India participated in the IGN meeting at the UNGA in April 2026 and set out its vision and action agenda. India’s Permanent Representative to the UN in New York, Ambassador Parvathaneni Harish, signalled that India will accept a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council but not without the authority that defines one.
Two positions were held in parallel. The first is principled. As long as the veto exists in the Charter, any new permanent members must hold it on equal terms with the current five. This is the African position, and India’s Ambassador reiterated alignment with it on the floor. The second is tactical. The G4 group, of which India is a steadfast member, through Brazil, has offered a 15-year deferral on the exercise of the veto by new permanent members, reviewable at the end of that period. India endorsed the offer. The two operate at different altitudes, the first setting the principled floor, the second the political ceiling at which India is prepared to do business. It is not willing to accept membership architecture that marks it as structurally junior to the 1945 victors.
India’s historical case rejecting unambiguously the two-tier model at the IGN is instructive. The sole major reform of the Council in its 80-year history, in 1965, expanded only the nonpermanent category. The ratio of permanent to nonpermanent members shifted from five-to-six to five-to-ten, and the relative power of the veto-wielders increased. A reform that looked like redistribution was, in effect, concentration of power. A class of new permanent members without veto would not rebalance the Council; it would entrench the asymmetry by adding a lower tier beneath the existing one, with the P5 retaining authority to decide when, if ever, the lower tier was elevated.
THE P5 POSITIONS
The P5 have managed this stasis with a divide and rule stratagem. All are united in not giving up the veto. On expansion, China is studiedly indirect in its opposition. In recent IGN statement it called for greater Global South representation in generic terms while highlighting that several member states are not in favour of a one-time election for permanent seats; the opposition China attributes is the opposition China shares and encourages. Much of the procedural work against expansion is done by the Uniting for Consensus group, also known as the Coffee Club, a 12-member body led by Italy, with Pakistan as its most active operational partner against India. Russia has supported India and Brazil’s permanent membership of UNSC and African inclusion without further Western expansion but not been active in the IGN on advancing the issue. Under President Joe Biden, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield in September 2024 had offered two African permanent seats without veto, a nonpermanent rotating seat for the Small Island Developing States, continued support for the G4, and US readiness for text-based negotiation. The Trump administration has stepped back from that offer. The United Kingdom and France are vocal supporters of the G4 and remain the most consistent procedural advocates for permanent reform among the P5.
INDIA’S CAS E
India has been in the forefront of the holistic reform of the UNSC negotiations beyond expansion too. In doing so it has adopted positions that mature powers do in serious negotiations. The seat would formalise a standing India already has. It is the Council that needs the reform, not India that needs the Council. India sits with the L.69 coalition and the G4, aligned with the African Union’s Ezulwini Consensus, and committed to text-based negotiation. That is a coherent, and winnable, coalition. By securing the African Union’s admission to the G20, India and PM Narendra Modi showed the way in inclusivity and democratic representation in global governance, and built trust and solidarity with the African continent, including towards UNSC reform.
India has been making the case for Council reform for the better part of 40 years. What has changed is the accumulating evidence that the UNSC is unable to meet the challenges of an increasingly conflict-prone world. More importantly, we are at a moment when the UNSC has no choice but to transform or die. And its rebirth would also rescue the UN whose original raison d’etre was to “save future generations from the scourge of war” and which is otherwise facing an existential crisis and financial starvation.
The Council must be made worth reforming, because the architecture taking shape outside it is worse than the architecture that has stalled within it. Also, till such time as India builds the national capabilities and strength to become indispensable for global peace and security governance at the highest level, India’s vocation is to keep the front burner lit for itself and as the voice of the Global South, so as to be at the UNSC’s horse shoe table as peace actors and decision makers. The flame may appear small. But the room would go completely dark without India keeping the fire burning.
Diya Jalaye Rakhna!
- Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations.
