The Blue Sky Series: An Independent Review of the UN’s Counter-Terrorism Architecture

The Global Center’s Blue Sky Series offers an independent review and analysis of the evolving United Nations’ counterterrorism architecture and provides recommendations to member states to fulfill their commitments under the UN Charter and international human rights and humanitarian law.

For twenty years, the Global Center on Cooperative Security has worked towards ensuring that global counterterrorism efforts fully respect human rights, safeguard civil society, account for nuanced gender and identity factors, and are accountable under international law. The Blue Sky reports have supported the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy review resolution negotiations, informed civil society advocacy, and enhanced efforts to strengthen the accountability of UN entities responsible for implementing the Strategy. Each report in the series is informed by interviews with representatives of UN agencies and member states, academia, civil society groups and activists, as well as extensive desk research.

Blue Sky VII: Beyond Incremental Reform: Right-Setting Counterterrorism at the United Nations

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.