Recalling Ali Mazrui in Contemporary UN Reform Debates
Seifudein Adem
Contemporary debates on reforming the United Nations, particularly its Security Council, largely revolve around questions of power redistribution and institutional design. Recent contributions by the president of Finland, Alexander Stubb (2026), and the Singaporean senior diplomat Kishore Mahbubani (2026) exemplify this trend. Yet, taken together, their proposals reveal a deeper theoretical divide: whether global legitimacy depends primarily on balancing power or modernizing institutions. Missing from both proposals is civilizational representation—an issue that has been highlighted more recently by the noted scholar of international relations Amitav Acharya (2025). Half a century ago, the Kenyan-born academic Ali Mazrui (1976) also framed the question of UN reform in explicitly civilizational terms and articulated it more fully in his most ambitious work. It is therefore worthwhile to bring in Mazrui and compare his ideas with those of Stubb and Mahbubani.
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Stubb situates UN reform within what he describes as an emerging triangular distribution of power among the Global West (roughly 50 states), the Global East (25 states), and the Global South (125 states). In his view, the crisis of the Security Council reflects a broader systemic transition from Western predominance to contested multipolarity. Reform—through expanded continental representation (with two additional permanent members from Africa, two from Asia, one from Latin America) would therefore ensure greater legitimacy. In addition, he proposes the elimination of the veto and stricter Charter enforcement, including suspension of permanent members that violate it. The UN must reflect the evolving configuration of macro-blocs in order to stabilize competition. For Stubb, the problem is geopolitical disequilibrium.
Mahbubani’s approach is more institutional. His “7–7–7” formula seeks to align representation with twenty-first-century demographic and economic realities by expanding permanent membership to include major regional powers while introducing semi-permanent and rotating tiers. His reformed Security Council would have the following additional permanent members: Brazil, China, the European Union (in place of France and Germany), India, and Nigeria. Unlike Stubb, Mahbubani does not conceptualize global politics as triangular rivalry. Instead, he sees the rising powers as merely seeking recognition within the system rather than its transformation. Reform therefore entails recalibrating representation while retaining the state-centric and legal architecture of multilateralism. From Mahbubani’s point of view, the problem is institutional obsolescence.
Ali Mazrui’s position diverges from that of Stubb and Mahbubani at a more foundational level. Mazrui, who died in 2014, would begin by reminding us that the UN represents states but not civilizations. The imbalance in the Security Council is not merely a matter of who wields power, but also of which cultures are privileged.
As Mazrui (1997) put it:
The UN was formed primarily by the victors of WWII. Those victors belonged to one and a half civilizations (the half being the Asian part of the former Soviet Union). They made themselves permanent members of the UN’s powerful Security Council. They did make one concession to another civilization by also making pre-Communist China a permanent member.
For Mazrui, meaningful reform must therefore address civilizational voice alongside state representation. His proposal aimed to decenter Western dominance without dismantling global order, advocating instead a culturally plural UN that reflects linguistic, regional, and civilizational diversity. The underlying problem, for Mazrui, is not merely institutional or geopolitical, but the persistence of Western cultural hegemony within global governance. Mazrui’s linguistic framework illustrates his perspective. Mazrui identified five “world languages”: English, French, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. English and French qualify as established world languages, given their global diffusion, large number of speakers, and adoption across multiple regions and states. Russian, Chinese, and Arabic, by contrast, are languages that, in Mazrui’s view, merit elevation to world status due to their geopolitical weight, demographic significance, and civilizational depth. The inclusion of Russian is partly justified by the realities of power and technological achievement, as well as its wide use across Eurasia.
Chinese presents an even stronger case, not only because of the sheer number of native speakers but also due to China’s historical contributions to world civilization and its emerging status as a superpower. Arabic, while less globally widespread, is elevated by its unique position as a bridge between Asia and Africa and its central role in the historical development of world culture—especially through the spread of universal religions such as Islam. The exclusion—or demotion—of Spanish, despite its large number of speakers, is due to the need to counterbalance Eurocentrism in global cultural arrangements. Since English and French already represent Western Europe, adding another Western European language would reinforce the existing civilizational imbalance. A world language, according to Mazrui (2008: 80), is one that is adopted by at least 10 countries as the main language of business, that has a minimum of 500 million fluent speakers, and is spread beyond its continent in a major way.
In addition to world languages, Ali Mazrui’s linguistic framework includes regional languages and communal languages. In Mazrui’s new world order, every child would be required to learn three languages: a world language (e.g., English or French), a regional language (e.g., German or Swahili), and either a national language (e.g., Swedish, Persian, or Amharic) or a subnational language (e.g., Gujarati or Luganda). Placing Mazrui alongside Stubb and Mahbubani highlights both his distinctiveness and his limits. Compared with Stubb, Mazrui shifts the focus of debates about UN reform from systemic balance to cultural legitimacy. Stubb’s triangular framework acknowledges macro-cultural blocs (West, East, South), but treats them strategically rather than normatively. According to Mazrui, legitimacy in a post-Western order requires recognizing non-Western civilizational traditions as constitutive actors rather than merely as geopolitical camps.
The contrast between Mahbubani and Mazrui is sharper. Mahbubani’s reform redistributes authority among major states while leaving its state-centric orientation. His approach does indeed make the UN more representative in terms of geography, demography, and economic influence. But it ignores the cultural grammar of multilateralism. Mazrui would question the very assumption that states alone are adequate units of representation. In doing so, Mazrui exposes a Eurocentric blind spot in the mainstream reform proposals. At the same time, Mazrui’s approach entails practical and theoretical complexities. Civilizations are neither territorially fixed nor politically unified; linguistic communities do not map neatly onto coherent strategic interests.
By introducing civilization as a unit of representation, Mazrui also risks essentializing cultural categories and underestimating intra-civilizational diversity. Stubb and Mahbubani avoid this problem by remaining within a state-centric framework, but at the expense of largely leaving the issue of civilizational hierarchy unaddressed. The comparative insight from this analysis is twofold. First, UN reform debates operate on different normative levels. Second, each level captures a dimension of legitimacy that the others neglect. Within this triad Mazrui stands as the most conceptually radical voice. He extends the reform debate beyond who governs and how, to the more fundamental question of whose civilization counts. In doing so, he reframes UN reform not just as an adjustment of seats and vetoes, but as part of a broader struggle over the cultural foundations of global order.
The stability of the global order, for Mazrui, depends on how successfully the balance between the increasing similarity among people (homogenization) and the growing concentration of power within a single civilization (hegemonization) is managed. When the balance between the two is excessively distorted, the equilibrium between peace and violence could shift toward conflict. In this sense, war and peace at the global level become reflections of deeper civilizational misalignments and a flawed reconciliation between homogenization and hegemonization could strain the social fabric of world order to the point of rupture.
References
Acharya, Amitav. 2025. The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West. New York: Basic Books.
Mahbubani, Kishore. 2026. “Dream Palace of the West.” Foreign Affairs, March/April.
Mazrui, Ali A. 2008. “The Power of Language and the Politics of Religion.” The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 97 (394): 79–97.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1997. “Globalization and the Islamic Paradigm of International Relations: Allies or Adversaries?” Paper Presented at the Conference on “Islamic Paradigm of International Relations” sponsored by SISS and the Center of Political Research and Studies, Cairo, Egypt, 6 December.
Mazrui, Ali A. 1976. A World Federation of Cultures: An African Perspective. New York: Free Press.
Stubb, Alexander. 2026. “The West’s Last Chance.” Foreign Affairs, January/February.
Seifudein Adem is a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Research and Education at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. He has taught at universities in Ethiopia (Addis Ababa University, 1988–92), Japan (University of Tsukuba, 2000–05; Doshisha University, 2018–23), USA (Binghamton University, 2006–16), and China (Hong Kong Baptist University, 2017). Adem is Ali Mazrui’s intellectual biographer and has published ten books with, for, or about Mazrui, including Postcolonial Constructivism: Mazrui’s Theory of Intercultural Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). From 2006 to 2016, he served as associate director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University.