As our year draws to a close, 2022 has been a year where we have shown the price of abandoning peace.
Yet we may have seen only the first waves of pain that come with abandoning the world order.
For this year has brought a shift in geopolitics, which means the United Nations can no longer uphold the sovereignty of nations in any binding way, with its security council effectively disabled.
This is a colossal change. The remit of the United Nations was to uphold world peace: and it had done a fair job over decades at achieving increased cooperation and reduced aggression.
As the UN defines it: “The Security Council takes the lead in determining the existence of a threat to the peace or act of aggression.”
But the five permanent members of the council each have a veto. Thus, with Russia, as one of those five permanent members, has launched an invasion into a neighbouring state, and refused to honour its sovereignty in any form, the United Nations Security Council cannot define Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an act of aggression.
This has put the United Nations into a position somewhere between a debilitating precedent and a complete breakdown of its leadership and decision-making structure: and, honestly, there isn’t a lot of space between the two.
For, if any permanent member can use their own veto to wage war wantonly and at will, where does that leave the UN Charter – and that’s the best-case scenario.
If, in fact, as Russia now claims, sovereignty is no longer an abiding principle of our world order, then how do we decide which wars are ‘justified’ and which are not: when no country’s existing borders are any longer a defining factor?
We could, indeed, have renewed spats with Uganda, or from Somalia, an all-out invasion, and now it wouldn’t matter where our Kenyan borders have long been, all we can do is argue over decades and centuries of history to try and decide who has the right to attack who.
The Somalis can claim that their kindred of northern Kenya was always one people and that now gives them the right to invade and seize our northern lands — Russia-style.
So, our world order is gone. And 2022 has shown us, too, the degree to which our food and energy depend on a stable and cooperative world order.
If we sink further into aggression, we all suffer more. So at Christmas, which for Christians is about peace: my prayer is that we re-establish the basis of our world peace in the year ahead, and undo this 2022 collapse before it takes us all.
The writer is a development communication specialist.
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