The Importance of Being Expert: The UN, Legitimacy, and the Battle for Knowledge

In October 2025, the United Nations will mark its eightieth anniversary. What should have been a moment of celebration instead underscored the institution’s fragility. Chronic arrears—led by the United States—have forced budget cuts across peacekeeping, various services, and technical programs. Washington’s decision to withhold dues, is often cast as nationalist vandalism. Yet in truth it reflects a broader, longer-standing frustration with the UN’s performance: sprawling mandates, lofty rhetoric, and results that too often fall short.

This frustration is not confined to Washington. Other capitals, more discreetly, share it. Peacekeeping is criticized as expensive yet inconclusive. Development agencies generate new initiatives and acronyms even as global poverty data plateau. Secretariat reports, subjected to heavy negotiation, are often stripped of their analytical edge. The cuts, then, are not merely an expression of nationalism. They expose a widespread perception of weak accountability and unmet expectations.

The UN’s crisis is not only financial. It is epistemic.

Here lies the paradox. The challenges that define our century—climate shocks, cyber threats, pandemics, conflicts—demand collective action beyond the capacity of any single state. Yet the institution created to embody that cooperation is widely viewed as politicized, inefficient, and opaque. The UN’s crisis is not only financial. It is epistemic. On what basis can it claim legitimacy in the twenty-first century?

The only plausible ground is knowledge and transparency.

Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, legitimacy has rested with sovereign states, grounded in territory and citizen consent. Immanuel Kant, in Perpetual Peace (1795), envisioned a federation of free states bound not by coercion but by law and reason. Yet he too recognized the impossibility of a world parliament: the missing piece was a demos.

International organizations cannot rely on elections for legitimacy. Their authority must derive from something else. In the twentieth century, that “elsewhere” was expertise. Technical bodies like the International Telegraph Union (1865) and the Universal Postal Union (1874) earned trust by producing standards and knowledge no single state could supply. The UN stands in that lineage. It was never intended as a world government but as a hub of impartial analysis, coordination, and technical capacity.

Constructivist scholars such as Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore describe IOs as autonomous bureaucracies—“agents of global change” (Rules for the World, 2005). Following Max Weber, their authority rests on “domination through knowledge” (Economy and Society, 1922). But this creates a tension: bureaucracies expand mandates to accumulate expertise, yet expansion without delivery produces a legitimacy crisis.

Evaluating the UN is uniquely difficult. Unlike a state, it is not a single actor with a single mission. It is a mosaic of entities, mandates, and activities: some technical and apolitical, others deeply political and constrained by the will of member states. Success and failure frequently coexist—even within the same crisis. A few examples:

• Peacekeeping. MINUSMA in Mali is often portrayed as a failure: violence escalated, and the mission was expelled in 2023. Yet for nearly a decade, UN forces protected civilians, enabled humanitarian aid, and contained conflict that might otherwise have destabilized the region. In Lebanon and Cyprus, peacekeepers have quietly prevented renewed war for decades. Outcomes depend on the benchmark: preventing catastrophe or delivering transformation.
• Climate. In 2024, UNEP cut back environmental monitoring due to budget shortfalls, weakening global early-warning systems precisely when climate risks are intensifying. Yet the same institution was central to the Montreal Protocol, which phased out ozone-depleting substances and remains the most effective environmental treaty in history. Decline and achievement sit side by side.
• Ukraine. Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, the UN has been politically marginalized by Security Council paralysis and overshadowed by NATO and regional actors. Yet it played an indispensable role in coordinating humanitarian assistance and brokering the Black Sea grain corridor, which stabilized global food markets. Paralysis at the top coexisted with delivery on the ground.

The lesson is that “does the UN work?” is the wrong question.

The lesson is that “does the UN work?” is the wrong question. The better question is: does the UN deliver what only it can—impartial knowledge, coordination, and technical standards that no state can produce alone?

Political theorists distinguish between input legitimacy (consent and procedures) and output legitimacy (performance). For states, input legitimacy flows from elections. For international organizations, input legitimacy is thin: treaties and resolutions confer legality, but they do not generate trust among citizens. That leaves output legitimacy—delivery—as decisive.

Here the UN faces two problems. First, its failures are spectacular and politically visible, while its successes are technical and cumulative. Rwanda, Srebrenica, or cholera in Haiti scar memory; ozone protection, nuclear inspections, or refugee resettlement rarely inspire confidence. Second, even where it has knowledge, the UN often fails to share it. Field missions collect detailed data on displacement or violence, yet reports are softened or delayed to avoid political confrontation. Expertise without transparency appears technocratic; transparency without expertise looks like spectacle. Both corrode legitimacy.

If the UN is to remain relevant, it must become an analytical superpower: a transparent hub of knowledge whose insights are indispensable to states and societies alike. Such a role has three distinct advantages.

Diplomatic value. Knowledge is the raw material of negotiation. Peace talks collapse when parties cannot agree even on basic facts: how many civilians have fled, which ceasefires are holding, where frontlines run. By providing impartial data, the UN can create a shared baseline for dialogue. The 2022 truce in Yemen, underpinned by granular UN field reporting, showed how facts can open political space when trust is absent.

Economic efficiency. In an interconnected world, duplicating analysis across dozens of governments is wasteful. Climate modeling, pandemic surveillance, or nuclear safeguards demand resources beyond the reach of most states. Centralizing certain forms of knowledge at the UN reduces duplication and creates public goods from which all benefit. The cost of ignorance—delayed warnings, uncoordinated responses, fragmented standards—is far greater than the cost of shared analysis.

Spirit of service. Legitimacy is not entitlement but responsibility. The UN’s role as an analytical superpower is not self-justification but service: to provide tools, data, and platforms that help states and societies make informed choices. Impartial expertise is not a claim of superiority but an act of stewardship for the international community.

without an environment that fosters dissent and contestation, analysis quickly ossifies into orthodoxy

For international organizations to become genuine analytical superpowers, culture matters as much as structure. Technical expertise and centralized data are indispensable, but without an environment that fosters dissent and contestation, analysis quickly ossifies into orthodoxy. Open disagreement—serious, respectful, and public—signals to states and citizens alike that international organizations are not cloisters of bureaucratic conformity but arenas where competing visions of the world can be tested. Without this spirit of debate, IOs risk being seen as mere echo chambers, reproducing fashionable narratives rather than generating the independent judgments that justify their existence.

This is not utopia. It is the logical role of an institution that cannot wield armies or levy taxes but can generate knowledge to enable cooperation.

Seen in this light, U.S. arrears are not irrational. They serve as discipline, exposing redundancy and forcing prioritization. The UN cannot be all things to all people. It must focus on what only it can do: supply impartial knowledge, technical standards, and platforms for cooperation. Everything else risks draining credibility.

The UN cannot be all things to all people. It must focus on what only it can do: supply impartial knowledge, technical standards, and platforms for cooperation. Everything else risks draining credibility.

As Jean-Marc Coicaud has argued, states remain the “containers” of democratic legitimacy (The Legitimacy of International Organizations, 2001). International organizations can only justify themselves by delivering what states cannot. Budget constraints, harsh as they are, may push the UN toward that clarity.

At eighty, the United Nations stands at a crossroads. It was never designed to be a global parliament, still less an NGO competing for moral attention. It was designed to serve as the bloodstream of multilateralism: impartial, technical, indispensable.

Its only persuasive claim today is knowledge—rigorous, transparent, and essential. Only then can it justify even a small slice of democratic authority, convincing states and citizens that entrusting power to an unelected body in New York is warranted.

If it fails, others will fill the vacuum: powers wielding data as propaganda, corporations governing through opaque algorithms, populist movements spinning conspiracies. Either the UN becomes an analytical superpower, or it drifts into irrelevance.

Kant was right: peace depends not on power but on reason shared across borders. At eighty, the UN must rediscover its vocation as a civil service for humanity—custodian of knowledge, servant of the international community, and enabler of cooperation in a fractured world. Only by embodying that spirit of service can it remain legitimate, and necessary, in the century ahead.