This article examines, from a political and security perspective, why it has become increasingly difficult to speak of the United Nations and peace eighty years after the Organization’s founding. Multilateralism, long supported and led by the United States, arguably reached its peak after the end of the Cold War. Yet decades of fiscal deficits, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the rise of the Trump administration have weakened U.S. support for multilateralism and reduced overall engagement with the UN system. Russia’s use of the veto during its invasion of Ukraine should be seen not as a failure of the Security Council but as an inevitable consequence of the Charter’s structure, which prevents the Council from acting when a permanent member’s vital interests are at stake. As a result, regional bodies such as the OSCE and ad hoc “minilateral” groupings increasingly handle conflict management, bypassing the UN. At the same time, duplication, bureaucracy, and inefficiency within the Secretariat and specialized agencies have drawn heightened criticism amid financial strain, prompting calls for substantial structural reform. Although the rise of the so-called Global South—driven by decolonization in the 1960s—has profoundly altered the composition of the membership and expectations of the UN, the Security Council’s structure remains rooted in the great-power configuration of 1945. The author concludes that the period during which UN collective security genuinely functioned was in fact very limited. Accordingly, middle powers such as Japan must work to halt the erosion of multilateralism and help rebuild confidence in the UN system by upholding the rule of law, defending democratic values, and advancing initiatives such as a Free and Open Indo-Pacific.

The UN's authority has declined as it has failed to respond to the surge and intensification of armed conflicts. Over the past decade, peacekeeping has seen sharp cuts in budgets and personnel even as conflicts and casualties have increased. While vetoes have been exercised with growing frequency, Article 51 self-defense—both individual and collective—has also been abused. At the same time, funding for humanitarian and development aid has fallen markedly, widening the crises. Yet these developments are occurring within the UN's own institutional framework: the Organization is designed to prioritize, above all, the prevention of war between great powers. The current fiscal crunch of the UN reflects not only the policies of the current U.S. administration but also structural factors—sluggish growth and fiscal deficits among traditional donor states. This is not an environment conducive to radical UN reform; for now, the course to be pursued is rigorous adherence to principles and patient diplomacy focused on curbing departures in the use of the veto and self-defense.

This paper critically examines climate security theory, which views climate change as a “threat multiplier” in security terms, and related discussions within the United Nations Security Council. It aims to reframe climate change mitigation as a “peace multiplier” from the perspective of peace studies, which conceives climate change impacts as structural violence, in other words, a “violence multiplier.” Through qualitative literature review, it analyzes: first, trends in climate security discussions and the incorporation of scientific knowledge within the Security Council from 2007 to 2025; second, the usage of similar concepts such as “peace multiplier,” “peace-positive adaptation,” and “climate-resilient peace”; and third, the design and practice of the UN Climate Security Mechanism (CSM). The results show that while the relationship between climate change and violent conflict is converging toward an understanding in both academia and international politics as “one of many factors,” the debate remains skewed toward conflict risk, with weak perspectives on peace studies, such as structural violence and subsistence disruption. Although the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and the CSM present frameworks that integrate climate-resilient peace and development, as well as “climate, peace and security” (CPS), risks of securitization based on threat narratives persist. Peace studies can provide a theoretical foundation for reframing UN CPS activities and climate change measures as “climate peace,” which contributes to violence reduction and peacebuilding, drawing on insights from environmental peace, human security, and positive peace.

This paper examines the concrete peace proposals developed by liberal political scientists in postwar Japan as they confronted the ideological tensions between the universal ideals of "peace" and "democracy" and the geopolitical realities of the Cold War. Although the linkage between these ideals was initially assumed, their inherent conflicts emerged during debates over rearmament and the struggles against the US-Japan Security Treaty.

This study centers on Masao Maruyama, Yoshikazu Sakamoto, and Michitoshi Takabatake, as they shared a commitment to incorporating broadly defined "realistic elements"—a clear-eyed acknowledgment of power dynamics and social forces—while upholding their idealistic goals.

Masao Maruyama critiqued arguments for amending Article 9 of the Constitution premised on the conservative "realism" of the era. He defended Article 9 as an essential "paradox" in the nuclear age and stressed citizens' subjective responsibility. He provocatively addressed the recovery of a lost sense of natural rights through his concept of "self-armament."

Yoshikazu Sakamoto, rooted in the realism of international politics, aimed to construct peace via UN reform. He advocated strategies such as "unilateral initiatives" and the "stationing of UN police forces in Japan," later expanding his focus to overcoming "structural violence."

Michitoshi Takabatake, informed by his participation in social movements (e.g., Beheiren), prioritized citizen subjectivity. Seeking to transcend the limitations of passive constitutionalism, he scrutinized active international contributions through radical institutional proposals, including a "Peace Corps" and "selective conscription" for non-military service.

This paper examines the factors that intensified exclusivity in peace negotiations on the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in southeastern Bangladesh and assesses how this exclusivity affected the recurrence of violence after the peace accord. It argues that, in the final phase of the negotiations, the parties were effectively limited to senior figures in the Government of Bangladesh and the PCJSS, leaving civil society and diverse constituencies within indigenous communities without meaningful avenues to participate.

On the side of the Awami League, incentives driving exclusivity included the urgency of responding to refugees who had fled to India, the desire to deflect pressure from the international community, and security and India-related strategic considerations brought into sharper relief by the influx of Rohingya. On the PCJSS side, as prolonged conflict and reduced support from the Indian government made military weakness increasingly apparent, the organization prioritized securing post-accord political stakes and sought to monopolize the negotiating channel. Such exclusive bargaining, however, fostered internal factionalism including the emergence of the UPDF and further marginalized minority groups, substantially contributing to renewed violence and broader social instability after the accord. The CHT case underscores the necessity of designing peace negotiation processes that substantively include a diversity of actors with real influence.

This paper first delineates two analytically distinct phases of refugee movements: statelessness and displacement. It then contends that conventional refugee studies, constrained by the normative aspiration to resolve refugee problems, have privileged the perspective of statelessness, thereby obscuring the dimension of displacement. Yet displacement endures as a problem even when statelessness is formally resolved. In other words, the attempt to conceptualize refugee issues exclusively through the eradication of statelessness reveals inherent theoretical limitations. Accordingly, this study seeks to elucidate the phenomenon of displacement — a dimension deeply intertwined with refugee movements yet insufficiently theorized within conventional refugee scholarship. Second, it examines these two phases — statelessness and displacement — in the early writings of political philosopher Hannah Arendt. Within the field of political theory, Arendt’s reflections on statelessness, particularly in The Origins of Totalitarianism, have been extensively analyzed. By contrast, the dimension of displacement, present in her writings on refugee experience, has received comparatively little attention. In contrast to the international refugee protection regime, which aims to address refugee problems through processes of legal institutionalization, Arendt did not conceptualize displacement as a situation that could be resolved within the framework of the nation-state system. Within the international protection regime, refugees are accorded a special legal status and thereby secured. On the contrary, Arendt articulated a vision in which refugees and “the people” would become indistinguishable. Arendt maintained the conviction that human life should be understood not as exceptional but as ordinary. For Arendt, the conferral of refugee status as a privileged legal category forecloses the possibility of refugees being integrated into the people. By foregrounding the phase of displacement in the analysis of refugee movements, this paper ultimately seeks to illuminate the underlying nature of refugee problems, particularly as they manifest in the developing world.