June 3, 2025
The Democratic Republic of Congo and Libera, along with three other countries: Bahrain, Colombia, and Latvia have been elected to serve as non-permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, effective January 1, 2026, through December 31, 2027.
One hundred and eighty-eight representatives of the UN member states voted Tuesday at the UN headquarters in New York to elect the new five non-permanent UNSC members to serve alongside 10 other permanent and non-permanent member states.
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The UNSC, one of the UN’s principal structures, is made up of 15 members—five permanent members with veto powers- China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and 10 non-permanent members without veto powers. The Council is in charge of maintaining international peace and security, issuing resolutions adopted by the UN Charter, and recommending new members to the UN General Assembly.
Every year, the 187 UN member states elect five non-permanent members to serve on the Council for two terms or a period of two years. Three African nations—Algeria, Sierra Leone, and Somalia, currently serve alongside Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, Slovenia, and South Korea. Algeria, Guyana, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and South Korea term will end in December. DRC and Liberia will join Somalia on the Council next year
This election marks the third appearance for DRC and the second for Liberia on the UNSC.
While Africa currently holds three non-permanent seats on the Council, critics of the UN and UNSC say it’s politically indefensible and discriminatory to exclude a continent consisting of 54 nations with over a billion people from permanent representations on the Council, given the changing global geopolitical landscape. The observations echo similar sentiments made by African Heads of State, who have long called for a revamp of the UN, Council memberships expansion, and veto powers to include permanent seats for African countries and other nations to make the institutions more reflective of the people it serves.
Foreign policy experts and critics of the august multinational agency, including U.S. President Donald Trump have criticized the UN body and the UNSC for its restrictiveness, lack of accountability, indecisiveness, and ineffectiveness, particularly the power dynamics of the UNSC’s five permanent members’ veto power, which critics say frequently incapacitate immediate response to conflicts, humanitarian crises and mass atrocities.
Citing ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan as examples, critics underscored the current UN structure as a relict of its post-WW II era embedded with a unique set of geopolitical rivalries and challenges that frequently prevent consensus on resolutions among the UNSC permanent members, leading to a failure to uphold the UN Charter core principles.
Experts said that given the current global semiotic shift in geopolitics, expanding UNSC permanent memberships to African nations will not only provide valuable insights into the growing youth demographic, which is forecast to be a global majority in the near future, it will also open the door to innovations and new ideas.
Before leaving office, the Biden administration in September 2024 backed two permanent seats for African countries on the Council, keeping a pledge made by President Joe Biden in 2022 to support UNSC membership expansion. However, the memberships do not include veto powers and the trajectory of obtaining those seats remains open-ended. The current U.S. government, under the Trump 2.0 administration has yet to indicate if it will support the two permanent UNSC seats for African countries.
President Donald Trump, who has long been a critic of the UN withdrew the US from some of the UN agencies and cut funding to agencies, including UNHCR, UNRWA and UNESCO shortly after returning to office in late January, citing that the UN’s agencies and bodies “have drifted from [their] missions and act contrary to the interests” of the US and US allies.
Last month, Trump nominated Mike Waltz, his National Security Council Advisor for the role of USUN Ambassadorship.
