Just when the world needs it most, the multilateral system is coming apart. The institutional spaces created to confront threats like war, authoritarianism, and ecological disaster are collapsing because of direct attacks and longstanding cracks in their foundations.
The old global order has ended, while a new one has yet to be built. How wonderful if a more rights-based, just and democratic international order could arise whole-cloth and instantaneously. After all, the urgency is palpable and that sense of free-fall is frightening.
But the world is not in free-fall, it is accelerating toward a number of possible futures. There’s the one that illiberal, authoritarian forces are actively creating, where multilateralism is being replaced by transactional, anti-rights efforts like Trump’s “Board of Peace.” Others hope for a return to the familiarity of the post-war order, even if its claim to democratic principles was always inflected with the hypocrisy of manipulation by the United S tates and other dominant powers.
But another future is possible: a third way that rejects both authoritarian consolidation and the pipe-dreams of return to a “normalcy” that always excluded the majority. Achieving that third option—a future that is truly democratic and inclusive, where people and the planet are safe and thriving—will require the construction of portals to get there.
These portals are already being constructed by activists and advocates working at the nexus of global policymaking and grassroots movement building worldwide. Here are three lessons drawn from their work, which provide tips on how to repurpose and salvage the best from old systems, combining them with new approaches, to build the just multilateralism of the future. Weaving Networks of Genuine International Community When Trump lost the election in 2020, Biden celebrated the global return of the United States to the “ head of the table .” This kind of false nostalgia, imagining the United States as a benevolent patriarch, derails the creation of a truly international community of equals. Meanwhile, U.S. leadership continues to perpetuate catastrophe, from sponsoring genocide in Gaza and waging illegal war on Iran to the ongoing sabotage of climate policy progress .
Today, the system’s collapse lays bare the weakness of a global policymaking apparatus overwhelmingly concentrated in the United States and Europe, which together represent less than 15 percent of the world’s population . Consider the fact that the Seventieth United Nations Commission on the Status of Women—meant to represent the concerns of more than half of humanity—was held in New York City under the auspices of a U.S. government that has restricted travel from 75 countries . The UN is today headquartered in a country that is openly hostile to multilateralism and stands in violation of the UN Charter.
What’s more, racialized U.S. travel bans, coupled with U.S. defunding of the United Nations, are accelerating the relocation of UN agencies and processes to hubs throughout the world. This last trend offers possibilities. A decentralized multilateral system could support a more egalitarian international community. Today, hopeful momentum for international accountability and cooperation comes from actions like South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and efforts by Colombia and the Netherlands to advance a global exit from the fossil-fuel era .
Such collaboration among states is matched by movement power, increasingly propelled by transnational activist exchange. Movements in solidarity with Palestine have traded strategies and messages across nearly every border, ramping up pressure for policy action. Climate justice organizers have used policy spaces like the annual UN climate conference or fights against cross-border pipelines as essential convening sites for joint strategizing and information-sharing.
This knitting together of social movement networks, along with collaboratio ns led by Glob al South nations, is accelerating amidst the collapse of the old order. It holds some of the greatest promise for revitalizing the international community. Grassroots Communities Caring for One Another Amidst escalating crises, decency and mutuality can be built from principles embodied in ongoing resistance at the community level. When Israel blocked aid to Gaza even as it continued to bomb the enclave, Palestinian communities shared what they could to help each other . In Minneapolis, people offered physical protection to neighbors under government assault . Communities in Sudan devastated by war survive because of their long tradition of mutual aid .
Actions like these are saving human lives and, indeed, the very notion of shared humanity. Global crises—from climate change and armed conflict to pandemics and nuclear weapons—easily traverse borders. In this interconnected world, it is imperative to learn from community practice of care and make human interdependence a cornerstone of the new multilateralism.
Opportunities exist for the establishment of that cornerstone. The instability of multilateral collapse and authoritarian rise has made some policymaking spaces more malleable. Advocates who try to advance feminist or progressive policy ideas have often been met with skepticism by established leaders who have dismissed these approaches as niche or irrelevant. In doing so, they’ve missed the opportunity to advance popular policies—on healthcare, paid leave, child care, peacebuilding, and more—that both meet people’s needs and appeal to voters. The failure to democratically advance such effective and just policies has resulted in the election all around the world of authoritarians promising to take care of voters (and eliminate their so-called “enemies”).
In the United States and around the world, now is the time to map out and engage with policymaking allies who recognize the current crises for what they are: windows of opportunity to advance big and transformative progressive policy prescriptions. To do so, however, will require learning from communities who have faced the worst of these violent years and translating into policy the practices of care and mutual aid that communities are already seeding. Getting Serious about Building Power Attempts over generations to advance progressive and feminist global policy action have often failed to generate and sustain power. The global women’s movement’s heyday of progress in the 1990s grew from feminist brilliance and mobilization —but equally from certain states’ choices to momentarily embrace human rights as part of their own strategic agendas. Rather than actual allyship between states and advocates of social justice, these were marriages of convenience that easily dissolved when conditions changed.
In 2000, UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was a landmark recognizing and mandating women’s roles in peacebuilding, a guide that has since been routinely ignored by official peace processes . Similarly, in 2014, Sweden’s feminist foreign policy agenda was lauded as the first of its kind. It was trashed (with little backlash) eight years later when a right-wing government won election. In every case, the women’s movement lacked the constituency to defend hard-fought gains.
Constituencies for change often emerge during a crisis, when people are most primed for action. This is the time to channel the energy of growing popular constituencies that already back progressive and feminist politics into multilateral policy spaces. That won’t happen automatically. Trusted partners across movements and policymaking, whose work is rooted in shared values, must deliberately forge alliances.
That’s just what MADRE did at recent UN conferences held in New York. We brought international delegations of grassroots feminists to meet with potential allies in diplomatic offices, propelling aligned policy aims. And we connected with U.S. social movement leaders to deepen coordination across borders and to build local constituencies for a more just multilateralism.
This kind of sustained transformation—towards a multilateral system that protects and cares for everyone—will not happen because powerful elites simply change their minds. It will happen when the momentum for change becomes undeniable. Such momentum can be sustained with these three lessons: forging new bonds of international community, translating community care into policy, and targeting movement power to defend and advance those policy gains.
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