What if … the United Nations was disbanded next Friday?

People have been asking “What if …” forever. Over the next few months, Al Jazeera will explore some of the biggest challenges of our time and ask leading experts: “What if …”

Established 80 years ago in October, the United Nations has become a fixture in the lives of people across the globe.
Over the last eight decades, as well as playing a vital role in steering the world through global health crises, the organisation has played a central role in shaping international law, diplomacy, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping, and, rightly or wrongly, preserving what most people understand to be the world order.

However, while many still regard its role as vital, the UN has come under increasing criticism for prioritising the agendas of the Western world over the needs of the Global South. It has also faced scrutiny for failing to prevent mass atrocities, including the genocides in the 1990s in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the brutal violence in Sudan’s Darfur region, despite the presence of UN troops.

Many would argue that the organisation has been entirely sidelined during Israel’s war on Gaza, with its legitimacy contested by Israel and its traditional role in brokering a ceasefire reflective of international law usurped by the United States.

So, why bother with the UN at all? Could individual states not just deal with their own problems? After all, the UN is not even the first attempt at some form of global governance. Its predecessor, the League of Nations, founded in 1920, barely survived the second world war. Why should we expect the UN to continue forever?

Al Jazeera spoke to several experts and asked them to break down what they thought would happen if the UN were disbanded next Friday.
What would happen to migration?
If you disbanded the UN on a Friday, you would be looking for a way to reinvent it by Monday.
So many of the challenges the world faces today are transnational. Take refugees, for example: there are at least 100 million refugees, displaced people and irregular migrants globally. That is not a problem any one state can solve; it needs a transnational response.

We are already seeing aid cuts, particularly from the US, reducing food security in UN-supported camps and driving up malnutrition and social tensions.

As assistance dries up, more refugees are moving from camps to urban areas. There, they can sometimes survive through the informal economy, but their arrival — through no fault of their own — can place new pressures on the resources and services available within those urban areas.

If the UN were to disappear entirely, some refugees would undoubtedly move [from camps] towards the Global North; a process that would probably have an impact on Europe within a year. But others would find themselves trapped in increasingly precarious situations. The poorer the refugees, the less able they are to travel.

Without the UN, states would no longer be held to account for how they treat refugees, and standards would quickly fall. You would see the US model of unilateral action spreading — and groups like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (the Israeli-US private aid model that has resulted in more than 600 people being killed trying to access food) stepping into the vacuum.

And of course, there are thousands of jobs — both within the UN and among its partner organisations and suppliers — that would also vanish overnight.

Jeff Crisp, a research associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, formerly with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
What would happen to international law?
For the larger states, especially the US, international law has always come second to sovereignty. The influence of bodies like the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), which enforce international law under separate statutes, has been shrinking for some time.

So when we talk about the legal implications of disbanding the UN, we are really discussing a process that is already under way. Great institutions have withered before – the League of Nations being the obvious example. The UN has been losing political clout for a while and could disappear altogether, especially since much of its funding comes from the US. If it did, we would likely return to a world of sealed borders and pure Westphalian politics (a system where each state has absolute sovereignty over its own territory) – not exactly ideal.