In Barcelona, President Cyril Ramaphosa describes the visible crises of our time and points toward a deeper failure: the inability of existing global institutions to support peace, justice, and effective collective action.
President Ramaphosa begins with the visible crises of our time—war, genocide, climate disruption, inequality, fragmentation, and political hatred amplified by algorithms. But as his argument develops, he identifies something deeper: the collapse of effective global political capacity. The United Nations, he says, has become “toothless” because those entrusted with defending international law are often the ones violating or blocking it.
This is the deeper relevance of Coordinated Action Networks.
The problem is not simply bad actors or bad policy. It is that the world’s formal institutions of global order—the UN, the Hague, and related structures—were never designed to enable people and communities to work things out together at the scale now required.
We need a way for communities to engage, to speak to one another honestly, to find common ground, and to act together—across nations—in pursuit of peace, justice, and development.
Coordinated Action Networks address that missing capacity at its source: by supporting the communication and shared understanding through which communities can work things out together locally and act together across borders.