Beyond Incremental Reform: Right-Setting Counterterrorism at the United Nations
Author : Franziska Praxl-Tabuchi, Matt Schwartz, Annabelle Bonnefont, Jihane Ben Yahia
Date : June 2026
Since 2012, the Global Center’s Blue Sky reports have offered an independent analysis of UN counterterrorism efforts to inform UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy review resolution negotiations, support civil society advocacy, and enhance efforts to strengthen the accountability of UN entities responsible for implementing the Strategy.
The seventh report in the Blue Sky series, “Beyond Incremental Reform: Right-Setting Counterterrorism at the United Nations,” comes at a particularly challenging moment in multilateral cooperation. The report offers a sober assessment of the UN counterterrorism architecture and explores opportunities to reign in and realign the world body’s counterterrorism efforts with its human rights and civic space protection commitments under the UN Charter.
“Beyond Incremental Reform” looks back at the past 20 years of the global counterterrorism agenda and takes stock of key developments at the UN since the last Strategy review in 2023. In doing so, the report highlights a broad range of structural imbalances between normative authority and operational power, accountability mechanisms and political incentives, and coordination and consensus. The report concludes with a series of recommendations to the UN and its member states to place accountability, human rights protection, and gender justice priorities at the center of the architecture and UN counterterrorism practice, and improve coherence across the UN system, not through additional layers of coordination but through clearer thresholds, responsibilities, and consequences.
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