Humanity today faces a growing range of global problems that require urgent attention—from the multiple wars and terrorist attacks fueled by violent extremism, repression by autocratic regimes, and conflicts in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Greater Middle East, and elsewhere, to the growing global dangers posed by climate change, economic shocks rippling through closely coupled economies, and increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. These interconnected issues cannot be dealt with effectively by any one state or group of states; we unavoidably share responsibility for one another’s security. Yet meeting these challenges, which undermine human security, human development, and human rights, also exceeds the operational and political capacities of global governance institutions created in the mid-twentieth century for critical but different purposes.We live in a convergent era. Growing global connectivity, in particular, both enables forces of disorder and opens new opportunities to tackle centuries-old afflictions, such as global poverty, gender discrimination, and the spread of disease. For these and more recent issues like environmental degradation, the 2010 - 2020 decade has been convergent. Powerful technologies and the intensified movement of people, goods, services, and capital associated with today’s hyperconnected global economy provide new ways to advance the Sustainable Development Goals for 2015-2030 launched previously by world leaders at the United Nations. The UNFCCC conference in Paris offered a critical opportunity to deliver on the agenda for combating climate change. The UN is also rethinking how it does conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, and there remains contentious debate about how best to promote human rights and the international rule of law. In short, the times ahead have potential to cross a threshold into a new era in global governance and human experience. This Report engages that prospect with the breadth that it deserves.The Hague Institute for Global Justice’s Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance offers pragmatic reforms using new tools and networks to build better global institutions and a new global ethic, with the aim of focusing policymakers, opinion leaders, and international civil society on the need for more dynamic and creative global solutions to looming global challenges. Responding to new threats and opportunities requires that we overcome the deep-seated divisions driving the present crisis of global governance, which will take time. With the launch of this Report, a concerted effort will begin to promote these and related global governance innovations, looking toward and continuing through the UN’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2020.The Intersection of justice and security—or just security—is critical to understanding and tackling today’s global governance threats and challenges.Justice, including through the rule of law, is essential to safeguarding human security at the personal and communal level. Conversely, a just society is an illusion without security. Analyzing key global challenges through the prism of just security highlights both acute tensions and potential complementarities to be, in the first case, recognized and in the second, managed or reinforced. It lends fresh insights and greater urgency to tackling often intractable problems across and within borders.The goal of just security is to forge a mutually supportive global system of accountable, fair, and effective governance and sustainable peace. This vision is rooted in long-standing international commitments to human rights, international law, and the critical role of flexible and evolving multilateral institutions, states, and nonstate actors in global governance. Beyond the United Nations and other global institutions, a growing number of regional organizations, including the African Union, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Union, and the Union of South American Nations, are shaping global trends. Equally important are civil society, the business community, municipalities, and the media, each offering unique perspectives and assets and varying in size and reach. These increasingly global actors can work together in a network approach to governance toward inclusive and innovative solutions to some of the world’s most complex and pressing global issues.Three major challenges and opportunities for global governance are fragile and conflict-affected environments, climate and people, and the hyperconnected global economy.First, in fragile states and regions, large gaps in security, justice, and governance are readily identified but hard to fill. Despite a surge of UN peacekeeping and stability operations begun at the turn of the millennium, coping with state fragility and violent conflict remains as complicated and costly as ever, and billions of US dollars are spent annually in the quest for sustainable peace. Multiple, concurrent, and recurring intrastate conflicts, exploited by international terrorist and criminal organizations, have reversed the declining trends in political violence witnessed since the end of the Cold War. In 2014 alone, the number of refugees increased by 2.1 million to record levels, and the number of persons internally displaced by armed conflict grew by 5.2 million, another unfortunate record. At the same time, the growing roles of women, civil society organizations, and businesses, whose voices are amplified through modern communications technologies, offer new opportunities for effective peacebuilding, governance renewal, and transformational justice. Responding to these threats, challenges, and opportunities, the Commission’s recommendations include the followings.·Create next-generation UN conflict mediation and peace operations capacity: build responsive capacity to provide experienced mediators, including a greater proportion of women, for crisis and conflict prevention and peacebuilding; build capacity to deploy civilian, police, and military personnel to meet urgent peacekeeping requirements; build a new cadre of experienced personnel to serve as Heads of Mission and members of mission senior management teams; beyond transitional justice, invest in transformational justice; and coordinate activities closely with and materially support regional actors and local civil society, with particular attention to inclusion of women in peace processes.·Strengthen the Responsibility to Prevent, Protect, and Rebuild: invest in early-warning capabilities and Responsibility to Protect (R2P) action plans for an approach to atrocities prevention that involves all UN agencies and programs; embed UN mission monitors in all forces participating in R2P implementation; and set concrete, achievable goals for all international actors seeking to prevent, react to, and rebuild after mass atrocities.Second, with each successive report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the need to take extraordinary and decisive action addressing the causes and impact of climate change becomes more evident and urgent, as does the need for new, more productive approaches to meeting climate challenges, including greater public-private collaboration. A steady rise in emissions of greenhouse gases globally is heating the atmosphere and the oceans, melting polar and glacial ice, and raising sea levels and ocean acidity to the detriment of sea life and human security alike. The changing climate strikes hardest at those with the least capacity to adapt, other than to move. The IPCC projects the number of climate change refugees at 100 million in 2025 and 150 million in 2050. Humanity’s impact on the global climate is ever more clear, but its response has yet to address the deep injustices created by too little adaptation support for such vulnerable populations. Mitigating and adapting to climate change globally may well require a new understanding of what constitutes security and justice in the twenty-first century. Responding resolutely yet creatively to this quintessential global governance challenge, the Commission makes the following major recommendations:·innovate climate governance: facilitate new kinds of engagement between the UNFCCC and other international regimes, subnational authorities, and civil society and business groups; establish an International Carbon Monitoring Entity, a Global Climate Action Clearinghouse, and a Climate Engineering Advisory Board to review all experiments involving atmospheric modification; and define a global goal for climate adaption comparable to the 2 degrees Centigrade atmospheric warming target set for climate change mitigation;·develop a green technology licensing facility within the Green Climate Fund: harness private-sector innovation for climate mitigation and adaptation, especially in support of vulnerable populations in developing countries.Third, economic and technological globalization have created a hyperconnected global economy with significant benefits for many but worsened economic inequalities for others, as well as new threats to global economic stability and to public, corporate, and personal security. The US financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 spread throughout the global financial system, caused bank losses of more than US$4.1 trillion, and drove global unemployment up by thirty million. National and regional economies remain vulnerable to capital flight, billions of US dollars-equivalent are lost annually to illicit financial flows, and connectivity facilitates novel kinds of crime, espionage, and intellectual property and natural resource theft. But three billion people (and climbing) can access the Internet, contributing—along with other means of modern communication—to an explosive growth in global trade. Expanding access to new technologies and participation in the global economy has the potential to lift tens of millions of people out of abject poverty, creating a more secure and just world. In response to these inherent risks and opportunities, the Commission offers the following recommendations.·Establish a G20+ within a new framework for global economic cooperation to avert financial shocks and deliver on the Post-2015 Development Agenda: enhance G20-UN- Bretton Woods institutional coordination to prevent the spread of cross-border financial shocks, promote inclusive economic reform, and foster the equitable growth necessary for achieving the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.·Develop a global network of cybercrime centers and increase Internet access in the Global South through enhanced capacity-building: bolster the global response to cyber attacks through INTERPOL and national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), and increase Internet access and cybersecurity in the Global South through multiple initiatives, including the International Telecommunications Union’s Connect 2020 Agenda and the promotion of cyber hygiene.A practical and integrated reform approach, underscoring and closely linking security and justice concerns, enables progress on all three global issues, as well as a better appreciation for key cross-cutting issues such as gender, migration, and anticorruption. When managed effectively, the hyperconnected global economy provides tools that can empower international and local responses to the special needs of fragile and conflict-affected environments. So can new communications technologies and the Big Data revolution help to unleash human creativity and collective action for addressing the climate crisis. At the same time, our small, dense, interconnected world cannot prosper if more than a billion inhabitants fail to cross a basic threshold for a safe, dignified life, or if rising sea levels, extreme drought, powerful floods and storm surges, trafficking gangs, and networks of violent extremists threaten the security, well-being, and survival of millions.A coherent set of global governance reforms to better promote just security requires innovating and streamlining global institutions and engaging critical regional organizations, local authorities, the business community, and civil society across generations more effectively. Advancing progress requires a strong grasp of the impediments to previous reform efforts. In particular, these include:(i) a lack of political will to change, particularly among powerful countries or within entrenched bureaucracies; (ii) poor design and advocacy for a specific policy or institutional reform; and (iii) limited skill and effort invested in sustaining a reform program through to completion.By helping mobilize pressure for global (intergovernmental) institutional reforms while serving as resourceful partners for global institutions with fresh perspectives, nonstate, regional, and local actors are an integral part of still nascent network governance. To succeed in the twenty-first century, the United Nations and other global institutions must extend their traditional convening role for Member States to include innovative ways to engage these increasingly influential actors. Seizing the opportunities for improved global governance, though cognizant of the risks and challenges to reform, the Commission makes the following recommendations.·Establish the UN Global Partnership: give a greater voice to underrepresented policy issues, such as women’s rights, migration, and training a modern workforce, through new social compacts and a new hub and online platform whereby the entire UN system can tap into the expertise of civil society and the business community.·Expand UN Security Council membership and nontraditional engagement: create more opportunities for countries, regional organizations, local authorities, and nonstate actors to contribute to peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding, while increasing the Council’s representative legitimacy and restraint in the use of the veto.·Establish a UN Peacebuilding Council: transform the Peacebuilding Commission into a Council—similar to the Human Rights Commission’s transformation in 2005—with new coordination authorities, new financial and knowledge resources, and a new focus on prevention, including through “peacebuilding audits.”·Strengthen and more fully use the International Court of Justice: expand acceptance of the World Court’s jurisdiction and make use of its authoritative advisory opinions in innovative ways.·Enhance the working relations between the UN Security Council, International Criminal Court, and UN Human Rights Council: support sustained dialogue, sanctions to enforce judgments and arrest warrants, and leverage the Human Rights Up Front initiative’s system-wide conflict analysis and recommended early actions in response to large-scale human rights abuses.·Launch the UN Parliamentary Network: establish a parliamentary advisory body for the UN General Assembly to raise greater awareness and participation in UN governance, consistent with other networks in place for the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and regional organizations.An effective strategy for reform requires smart coalitions of like-minded states and nonstate actors to mobilize and sustain support for change. The ideas, networks, resources, and leadership skills of all actors with something to contribute need to be assessed, cultivated, and harnessed at the earliest stage of initiatives to reform global governance, including from governments, civil society groups, the business community, regional organizations, and local authorities. Three examples emblematic of these features are the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and the international effort to adopt R2P as a global norm. Clear interim milestones, backed up by well-honed communications, monitoring, and coordination tools, are also important to success. In particular, the Commission recommends investing in a hybrid approach that taps into the strengths of two major avenues to global governance reform designed to overcome deep-seated divisions in the international community:·reform through parallel tracks acknowledges that different kinds of multilateral reform negotiations will require different negotiating forums and will proceed at different speeds. In doing so, it can facilitate a careful sequencing of reforms based on criteria such as urgency, political feasibility, and cost.·marking the UN’s seventy-fifth anniversary in 2020 with the culmination of a multi-stakeholder and formal multilateral negotiation on global institutional reforms, a World Conference on Global Institutions could serve as a rallying point for smart coalitions and simultaneously generate political momentum for multiple, urgent global reforms. Every effort should be made to engage the voices and ideas of civil society at the most local level, as well as under-represented groups, in the lead-up to the World Conference.When security and justice are recognized as jointly pivotal to global governance, today’s most urgent challenges can be overcome. Just security can inform a practical reform program that innovates our global institutions, laws, policy tools, and relationships. Leaders from all countries, including from powerful states and emerging global actors, have a particular responsibility to ensure that the United Nations and other global institutions continue to inspire, safeguard human rights, and give even the most vulnerable people a reason for hope. Guaranteeing security and justice for all peoples and nations is the practical and moral imperative of our time. Just security is intended to enable humanity not only to survive but to thrive with dignity, offering the basis for a new global ethic and new direction for global governance.