Dear Participants of BERMUN 2025,
You are likely reading this on a phone or computer. Between design and manufacturing, 43 different countries are involved in making an iPhone. In our interconnected world, even something like making a phone, impacts people globally.
Because our actions affect each other, and countries cannot all play by their own rules, the international system has many rules and norms that are increasingly threatened by authoritarianism. With the US stepping back from global leadership in the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization (WHO), defunding of the UN, and challenging WTO agreements, our theme, Building a Rules-Based Order to Withstand Authoritarianism, asks the question, “What does the UN do in a world moving away from the post World War II rules-based order to withstand increasing authoritarianism and zero-sum relationships?”
The rules-based order, which the UN is at the heart of, is defined by political scientist John Ikenberry, as “a system where states cooperate within a framework of agreed-upon norms, rules, and institutions, often anchored in liberal principles like sovereignty, free markets, multilateralism, and human rights." Treaties and institutions set standards for human rights, trade, the environment, etc.
Authoritarianism directly opposes these systems of set universal rules and norms, because rules must bend to the interests of the autocrats, oligarchs, and governments. Anne Applebaum identifies authoritarianism’s threat in Autocracy Inc. China, for example, has attempted to replace wording about human rights with group sovereignty in UN documents. Additionally, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an alliance of countries including India, Russia, China, Belarus, and more, collaborate to silence any governmental dissidents. Weakening international rules and bodies leads to a might-makes-right order.
Importantly, according to political scientist Daniel Ziblatt, norms or the “unwritten rules of the game”, are also violated. Besides violating rules and treaties, aggressive actions, such as China’s disregard for maritime law in their expansion into the South China Sea or the United States announcing high tariffs, have come without customary diplomatic negotiations and diplomacy.
Amid these trends, Amitav Acharya and Kehinde Andrews have criticized the current order for allowing powerful nations to not abide by the rules. Led by the West and America, Acharya believes that the order has been plagued with “economic inequality, racism, and wars of choice waged usually in the global South.”
While acknowledging these flaws, the UN has recognized the need for change and the need to live up to the aims that both its system and its criticisms are based on. This is what we aim to do at BERMUN 2025: to improve, and in some cases, change the UN and to the emerging multi-polar order. At the same time, the principles of the UN and the rules-based order are as noble now as they were 80 years ago, after the horror of World War II, when in the words of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, it sought to “save us from hell”. The UN and the system of treaties and norms it ushered in gave states an alternative way to settle conflict to bloodshed. Since its founding, conflict has decreased globally. The UN has played the role of the decolonizer in the 1950s and 60s, the peacemaker in the 1990s, and the equalizer in the 21st century. It has secured development, and though it has fallen short, it has striven for fairness: equal rules that everyone can be measured up to. Authoritarianism strains the rules-based system; at BERMUN, we seek to make it a stronger, better version of itself.
