Vol. 25 No. 3 (2025)

As the United Nations turns 80, this issue asks how far governance has drifted from the ideals that once guided it. Abigail Georgison revisits a critique of the UN security framework first published in IAPSS Politikon in 2007. Drawing on the intervention in Libya, she finds that the Responsibility to Protect has become more a commitment than an enforceable mechanism. The gap between principle and practice reappears in Mohammad Amaan Siddiqui’s comparison of the United States and India, where the power to name “terrorism” and “resistance” decides who is heard and who is criminalized.

The same tension shapes the issue’s studies of reform. Lloyd George Banda, Kelvin Ryna Chilala, Innocent Kazembe Chirwa and Emmanuel George Yusufu find that access to information laws have done little to curb corruption in Malawi without strong institutions behind them. Greta Comedini shows how the Eurozone crisis brought technocratic governments to power and asks what democracy loses when expertise takes over. Gavin Faulkner’s review of Sean Coyle’s Natural Law and Modern Society closes the issue.