Redefining Peace at the Crossroads: Multilateralism, Justice, and Sustainability in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) 2025
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The 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in 2025 unfolded amid profound geopolitical polarization and systemic fragility. While the official theme “Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions” aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 16, the speeches revealed that consensus on these principles remains fragmented. This study conducts a qualitative thematic analysis of leaders’ statements, systematized through a comparative thematic classification table and heatmaps. Five coding dimension security, justice, development, rights, and sustainability provided analytical anchors, but results demonstrate that peace was consistently framed through integrative themes: a justice development nexus in Africa and Latin America, a law rights security triad in Europe, multilateral cooperation in ASEAN, sovereignty versus justice polarization in North America and Israel versus Arab states, and sustainability justice interdependence across the Global South. Compared with UNGA 78 (2023) and UNGA 79 (2024), three trends crystallized: the securitization of sustainability, deepening discursive polarization over the meaning of peace, and a crescendo of demands for UN and Bretton Woods reform. Theoretically, the findings extend the constructivist and critical institutionalist approaches, confirm the growing relevance of environmental security, and challenge liberal institutionalist assumptions about great-power cooperation. Practically, the speeches diagnose urgent global imperatives: climate finance as a form of peace finance, justice as a preventive security measure, reform as a means of institutional survival, and digital governance as a new frontier in peace. By treating the 2025 Assembly not merely as rhetoric but as a diagnostic instrument of global order, this article demonstrates that peace in the twenty-first century is being redefined as a multidimensional construct of justice, sustainability, and legitimacy yet fractured by sovereignty-first resistance.
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