Fratelli Tutti can guide a United Nations system struggling with misaligned values

The UN’s centre of gravity has shifted away from advocacy on justice towards the long-term management of systems that can, at times, perpetuate rather than mitigate dependency.

In his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis demonstrates how the parable of the Good Samaritan can be a parable for everyone, not only Christians, and reminds us: “Sooner or later, we will all encounter a person who is suffering. Today there are more and more of them. The inclusion or exclusion of the person suffering at the roadside defines every economic, political, social and religious project.” 

For Pope Francis, inclusion and charity did not simply mean providing for the most urgent basic needs of the marginalised. “A truly human and fraternal society will be capable of ensuring in an efficient and stable way that each of its members is accompanied at every stage of life. Not only by providing for their basic needs, but by enabling them to give the best of themselves.”

He often refers to migrants and refugees and the injustice of their limited rights, upholding their right to dignity and the right to contribute to society: “they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person. Hence, they ought to be agents of their own redemption.”

Fratelli Tutti, published in the turbulent months of October 2020, refers to the United Nations on several occasions, in a rare example of explicitly naming a global political institution. Pope Francis cautions against the UN’s de-legitimisation, not out of deference to the institution itself, but because of its potential role in advancing justice and the common good. The United Nations, he suggests, must remain a space capable of fostering genuine cooperation between nations, rather than becoming an instrument of narrow political or economic interests.

Six years after the encyclical, however, the UN secretary-general António Guterres, has warned that due to imminent financial collapse, the UN as we know it could implode. The United Nations, will now, whether by choice or by necessity, need to reform to survive, and we could look to the guidance from Pope Francis to steer that reform. 

Just weeks before releasing Fratelli Tutti, in an address to the UN General Assembly in New York, Pope Francis reaffirmed the importance of the United Nations as an instrument of service to the whole human family, and called for “an effective promotion of the poorest” that makes them “protagonists” in the social fabric.

Pope Francis was calling us to reimagine the United Nations through its role in promoting justice – including the most marginalised at the highest level as protagonists, not just recipients of aid and humanitarian responses – and through its role in elevating the agency and sovereignty of marginalised states and peoples.

Since the United Nations launched its humanitarian agencies after the Second World War, such bodies like the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) have increasingly interpreted aid in terms of the services and protection that they can provide, while offering limited agency and deprioritising justice.

Today the United Nations consists of 193 member states coordinating 28 separate organisations, employing well over 100,000 staff. Of these, the majority are employed to work on in-country programmes designed to alleviate suffering and lift marginalised populations out of poverty. UNHCR, for example, now employs around 20,000 staff and operates country programmes in 138 countries, weighted towards contexts most affected by forced displacement.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1974 – just a decade after the independence of most formerly colonised countries and nearly 30 years after the founding of the UN – the entire UN system employed no more than around 20,000 staff. UNHCR at that time was a comparatively small office, managing a global assistance budget of under US$20 million (versus the 400 times larger $8 billion today), focused primarily on lobbying and coordination. Time-bound assistance aimed at durable solutions such as voluntary repatriation, local integration, and resettlement.

It was not yet a mass delivery system, nor an organisation structured around long-term country programmes or permanent refugee management, but one that was explicitly oriented towards advocacy – advocating for justice for refugees. 

Today, the existential funding cuts faced by the UN’s humanitarian agencies are forcing questions about how they can remain relevant to people living in contexts of oppression and displacement. However, the questions the UN humanitarian system poses often reveal a narrow interpretation of human need, justice and sovereignty.

Refugees I know in East Africa are commonly asked whether they need more or less assistance, or greater or lesser degrees of safety. These questions are so self-evident that they rarely open up genuine deliberation; they tend to confirm, using a guise of “community participation”, what has already been assumed and decided.

What surfaces less often are the trade-offs that sit beneath these choices. Whether people would accept material support at the cost of agency, or safety at the expense of control over their own lives, is rarely framed as a question at all. Yet when these tensions do emerge – explicitly or implicitly – the responses are often more complex.

In many conversations I have had, people do not reject assistance, but they resist the conditions attached to it, particularly where those conditions limit their ability to shape their own futures. They reject the injustices that underlie global refugee crises. They feel the frustration communicated by Pope Francis who recognised that “Migrants are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person. Hence they ought to be agents in their own redemption. No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice, by our decisions and the way we treat them, we can show that we consider them less worthy, less important, less human.”

People from the global north often struggle to understand what it is to live without agency and under the shadow of injustice. Those of us who have grown up in liberal democracies as citizens have a deep, often subconscious sense that we contribute in some way to collective decisions. There is no authority or institution that can fully replace our agency and claim to act on our behalf without us having any say in the matter. Politicians, law enforcement, institutions are, at least in principle, accountable to us.

For refugees in East Africa, this dignity is constricted, not only because they have no political rights in the country that hosts them, but also because their circumstances are shaped by a broader global political economy. Citizens in faraway countries, who may never have encountered these contexts directly, still influence the lives of refugees through their governments, donor agencies, and multilateral institutions.

These actors, often spearheaded by UN institutions, fund and sustain the systems within which refugees live, and in doing so, shape the conditions they experience. In some cases, this includes endorsing restrictions on movement, work and settlement as part of broader political arrangements.

For refugees in East Africa, where my organisation works, the loss of agency is not abstract. It is structured into the conditions of their daily lives. In Kenya, for example, refugees have for decades been subject to encampment policies that restrict their movement largely to two remote and environmentally harsh regions: Dadaab and Kakuma. Opportunities to work, to move freely or to settle independently remain tightly constrained despite on-going deliberations towards a more integrated refugee response.

These arrangements are often presented as administrative or logistical necessities, but they are also shaped by political trade-offs. Western governments in step with the UN, have, at different moments, supported and financed Kenya’s refugee hosting model alongside its cooperation in broader regional security agendas, including efforts to counter Islamist militancy in the Horn of Africa, and investments to host and train armed forces within Kenyan borders. The result is a system in which restrictions on refugee freedoms are not only tolerated but, indirectly, sustained through international funding.

Over time, this system has absorbed vast resources. Across three decades, the combined cost of maintaining these camps – through UN agencies, international NGOs, and bilateral aid – has run into billions of dollars, plausibly in the range of $7-10 billion. Yet despite this sustained investment, and a far-too-shallow commitment to more integration for refugees in Kenya, the underlying structure has remained largely unchanged.

For people who have grown up with agency over their own governance in globally dominant nations, meaningful communication with refugees is shaped by asymmetries of experience. We too easily project that refugees will want safety and material benefit because these are challenges that we can more easily understand, and without fully empathising with the situation, we assume that if we were in this position, this is what we would want.

Over the last 80 years, leaders and policy makers at the United Nations have collectively tended to prioritise material provision in ways that consistently side-line agency. Ever-growing country programmes have shifted the UN’s centre of gravity away from advocacy on justice and towards the long-term management of systems that can, at times, perpetuate rather than mitigate certain forms of dependency, trading sovereignty for top-down interventions labelled as “protection” and “assistance”.

The United Nations imagined by Pope Francis, on the other hand, would not be defined primarily by the unwieldy management of crises but by its willingness to confront the conditions that produce them.

That would mean coordinating global action to prevent climate catastrophe, while addressing the fact that its impacts fall disproportionately on the Global South. It would mean working towards nuclear disarmament and questioning the economic incentives that sustain the arms trade. It would require confronting extractive economic systems, tax havens and patterns of trade that disadvantage weaker states. It would also mean advocating for a fairer approach to human mobility, where the ability to move is not determined by the accident of a passport, but by a shared sense of responsibility.

If the UN were to take justice and agency seriously, uncomfortable questions follow about the scale and form of its current role. Would we still need vast, long-term refugee camps run by UNHCR? Would we require such expansive programmes delivered by UNDP, UNICEF, or the FAO? 

The limitations of UN humanitarian responses can be understood not only as a matter of incentives and political will, but of imagination. Too often, the system assumes that meeting material needs is sufficient, without fully engaging with what people value at moments of greatest vulnerability.

Pope Francis, however, reminds us that we are “capable of identifying with others without worrying about where they were born or come from” and, in doing so, come to experience them as “our own flesh” (Isaiah 58:7). For the United Nations, this kind of imagining would mean recognising those it serves not simply as recipients of aid, but as protagonists in shaping a more just world. In the process it could save itself from extinction. 

Edmund Page is the CEO of Cohere, an organisation headquartered in Nairobi and Kampala that partners with 100 refugee-led organisations across Africa to shift decision-making and agency closer to communities affected by forced displacement.