The U.N. General Assembly is due to adopt its ninth update of its Global Counter-terrorism Strategy (GCTS) by the end of June, marking the 20th anniversary of its first passage. So the coming months will be a test of whether U.N. member states can withstand the choppy waters of multilateral negotiations and reach consensus on a new strategy that will guide the future of U.N. counterterrorism activity. As one of the fastest-growing areas of the United Nations, counterterrorism is not going to fall off the agenda anytime soon, but failure to agree on a consensus resolution could severely undermine multilateral action.
The problems the U.N. faced in 2025 — from unprecedented budget turmoil to deepening tension at the U.N. Security Council — invites skepticism that the 192 members of the U.N. General Assembly can agree on anything this substantial and potentially controversial. Yet, other agreements at the end of 2025 suggest there are paths for a successful outcome that protects consensus while ensuring a balanced strategy grounded in the respect for human rights and the rule of law.
It will not be easy. Every negotiation for a new GCTS has been harder than the last. This time around, everything could blow up, without careful diplomacy to guide the process.
The Effect of 2025 on Consensus at the U.N.
Despite the seemingly never-ending cascade of reforms, adversarial actions, crises, and spats at the U.N. last year, diplomatic successes somehow continued. The General Assembly managed to reach an agreement on a new five-year mandate for the U.N. Peacebuilding Architecture in November, as well as a resolution on strengthening the U.N. crime prevention and criminal justice program in December, while the Security Council extended the mandate of the U.N. Counter-terrorism Executive Directorate at the end of the year. These resolutions on critical issues related to the peace and security work of the U.N. show that agreements that protect hard-won gains can still be made.
Negotiations for the next iteration of the counterterrorism strategy are set to begin in March, and the outcome will guide the counterterrorism engagement of the United Nations for the coming years – the strategy is usually reviewed every two to three years — by ensuring that priorities are agreed and by establishing appropriate guardrails for counterterrorism policy, programming, and practices. It is of critical importance that states do not sign off on a new agreement that regresses from the careful progress made in recent years to make the strategy more effective. First adopted in 2006, the strategy was built around four pillars: addressing conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism; establishing measures to prevent and combat terrorism; building states’ capacity and strengthening the role of the U.N. system; and ensuring respect for human rights and the rule of law as the fundamental basis. Since then, the strategy has been adopted via consensus at the conclusion of each of the previous eight reviews, and each review has carefully worked to strengthen and update priorities in each of the four pillars. This is what diplomats will be charged to replicate again this year.
Tasked with guiding this process from the start through to completion will be two co-facilitators: Ambassador Elina Kalkku, the permanent representative of Finland to the United Nations, and her counterpart from Morocco, Ambassador Omar Hilale. While we would stop short of calling their role a poisoned chalice, it is by no means a golden one. As the last negotiations of this strategy in 2023 showed, consensus is close to breaking. International diplomacy and issues related to counterterrorism have only become more challenging since.
As two individuals who have either negotiated previous GCTS resolutions or advised delegations through multiple processes, the best advice we have is for the co-facilitators and member states committed to protecting responsible multilateral action in this area is the following three principles:
- The process will not guarantee — but will define — the outcome. How the negotiation process is set at the outset will significantly shape the trajectory. The way the co-facilitators set expectations for the kind of review that is conducted and what parts of the text are opened up for negotiation is crucial to the success of the negotiation.
- Consensus cannot come at unreasonable costs. Weakening of previously agreed text should be a non-starter: The GCTS contains carefully reached compromises on a range of issues, from addressing drivers of terrorism, to states’ responsibilities, to partnerships with civil society, and respect for human rights. The legacy of the 20th anniversary cannot be to weaken the U.N.’s main strategy for its counterterrorism work.
- The resolution is called the Global Counter-terrorism Strategy for a reason. To stay focused on an efficient and constructive negotiation, level heads in New York will need to steer a process that keeps the lid on states’ individual priorities that would veer the body away from the needed consensus. The review should stringently avoid any attempts to bring narrow domestic positions into the strategy, especially those that expand new definitions or categories of terrorism.
Process Lessons
If this year’s strategy review is opened to member states for substantive negotiations, diplomats will likely spend considerable time rehashing many of the same debates that preoccupied negotiations in 2023 and, indeed, each of the past eight reviews. There are many areas that could — in an ideal world — be strengthened. However, it is hard to argue that there are significant gaps that the General Assembly has missed in the 28 pages of the current strategy. The strategy covers topics at length, from countering terrorist narratives, to emerging trends including use of technology, to respect for human rights and gender equality, to engagement with civil society, to financing of terrorism, to the role of foreign fighters, to border security — and the list goes on.
During the last review in 2023, the most contentious elements included definitional debates, with proposals from some states for language condemning terrorism inspired by xenophobia or attacks on religious texts or sites, or wording about countering “extremism” without the qualifier of a link to violence. States fiercely debated the concern that such proposals infringed on freedom of expression. Many stakeholders, including the Special Rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism as well as civil society groups, highlighted the links between such proposals to expand definitions of terrorism with over-criminalization and the broad application of the terrorism label. A top concern today is to protect a text that mitigates against overbroad counter-terrorism mandates, which have become cover for — or resulted in — human rights abuses and severe restrictions to civic activity (“civic space”) around the world.
The vast majority of states have treated the text of each paragraph in the GCTS as a careful compromise and the final text as achieving a fragile balance across the four pillars. Yet, there are fears at U.N. headquarters in New York that a few states may look to alter agreed language. The co-facilitators should seek to foreclose the scenario whereby states start with maximalist positions and re-open the entire text. A fully open process would quickly take the negotiations off track, with regurgitations of long-standing disagreements and flare-ups reflecting ongoing geopolitical tensions.
A core tenet of the process this year should be to not walk back language already in place in the strategy, in particular regarding human rights, gender, inclusion, and transparency. If some delegations threaten to break consensus over this approach, co-facilitators should remain firm. At a minimum, the first principle must be “do no harm,” and that should supersede the desire to maintain consensus. Consensus cannot come at the cost of a significantly weakened strategy. A 20th anniversary of the GCTS that kept consensus but weakened existing text on human rights would be worse than simply keeping the strategy as is and accepting disassociations or votes against it.
One of the key lessons that co-facilitators of the strategy review could learn from the adoption of the Peacebuilding Architecture Review by consensus in late-2025 is that focusing on proposals related to procedures in the U.N. architecture, rather than new counterterrorism substance, could be the sweet spot. This year’s counterterrorism strategy review might provide a chance to consider an approach similar to that one by calling for the U.N.’s counterterrorism architecture to consider how to enhance impact, rather than debate new areas of work. This would entail following-up on findings from the 2025 report of the Office of Internal Oversight Services and the upcoming Secretary-General’s report on the progress in implementing the current GCTS.
Potential Paths for a Balanced Strategy
Co-facilitators could take three potential paths to pursue a balanced strategy that remains, as the U.N.’s Pact for the Future put it, grounded in the principle that the “respect for human rights for all and the rule of law are the fundamental basis of the fight against terrorism and violent extremism conducive to terrorism.”
1) Technical rollover “lite”
A technical rollover “lite” — whereby dates and a few specific requests for the U.N. system to act upon are updated — was essentially the outcome of the eighth review of the GCTS in 2023. This approach was the only real path available to the previous co-facilitating states — Canada and Tunisia — but still was not popular for some. Intense debates related to issues such as Islamophobia dominated many rounds of negotiations; however, as the process moved towards conclusion, consensus on new language was severely lacking, and very few of the many changes suggested by diplomats were included. One member state almost broke consensus, and another ended up publicly dissociating from the final outcome. It is clear that, as Melissa Lefas and Eelco Kessels argued in these pages in 2023, consensus on this strategy may well have reached its limit. With this starting point and the more frequent calls for votes on General Assembly resolutions in 2025, this option might result in a new strategy, but it might not be one that is adopted by consensus.
2) Technical rollover “plus”
Using the Peacebuilding Architecture Review as the lodestar, a technical rollover “plus” would, for all intents and purposes, direct the U.N. counterterrorism system to continue working on the same areas, but it could include slightly modified language to ensure that all U.N. member states would be able to accept this new version without a call for a vote. This could include updating language on new and emerging technologies or the consideration of UN80 reforms. But it should not unravel previously agreed-upon language. Signifying willingness to re-negotiate established language would carry significant risk for the co-facilitators and could precipitate the opening of Pandora’s box, given the fraught balance on so many potentially volatile issues dating back even further than the previous review. There will be many states that oppose this option as a starting point, but in the name of consensus might end up accepting this shift as a last compromise. The big risk in this scenario is that concessions are made in order to keep some influential delegations on board, but no concession is deemed enough, and so a vote is still called for and consensus breaks. Co-facilitators will need to carefully weigh the assurances they receive from other delegations before tiptoeing down this path.
3) Slimmed down “recommitment to four pillars”
The aforementioned U.N. Security Council Resolution (S/RES/2810 (2025)) renewing the mandate of the Counter-terrorism Executive Directorate in December 2025 featured a short recommitment with a few priority actions reaffirmed. Co-facilitators of the strategy review could decide against renegotiating an updated 28-page resolution — and instead ask states to prioritize a short action plan (we would suggest two pages, half a page for each pillar of the strategy). This would reduce the endless cycle of diplomatic wrangling and instead allow for focus on making the U.N. counter-terrorism architecture more effective and fit for purpose. This might seem unrealistic, but in the recently negotiated Pact for the Future, all U.N. member states managed to boil down counterterrorism-related commitments to just 277 words under the heading “We will pursue a future free from terrorism.” This shows clearly that States can, in a well-managed process, agree on minimalist language that does not involve every pet issue.
Ultimately, if the strategy review is to avoid becoming a poisoned process, U.N. member states are going to have to find a way to compromise. That means co-facilitators will need to navigate a path that can secure agreement, and be clear from the start that a bad outcome is worse than no outcome at all.
– Jordan Street and CJ (Caleb) Pine, Published courtesy of Just Security.
