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.

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........

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