The Board of Peace (BoP) was established ostensibly to find a solution for the ongoing Gaza War, but it is evidence of the structural failure of contemporary multilateralism. Under the so-called system of global governance set up after the World War II, institutional structures, such as the United Nations were designed as enforcement mechanisms to, for example, demand ceasefires and reaffirm the prohibition on the use of force under Article 2 of the Charter, but remain strained by veto oppositions, selective enforcement and financial influence, which creates doubts about its efficacy and legitimacy. But an important clarification is needed: legitimacy is a social phenomenon, reinforced through response of states, rather than through enforcement mechanisms, absent from the international system. Consequently, rules are upheld and international institutions are effective in circumstances where states collectively find value in upholding them, which is often driven by strategic, rather than normative considerations. The widening confrontation involving the United States, Israel and Iran has only made clear that legal principle and geopolitical action increasingly deviate.

It is within this environment of institutional friction the BoP presents itself as an alternative, emerging from outside the traditional evolutionary path of international law. Closely linked to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803[1] in late 2025 and later formalized through its “Davos Charter” in early 2026, it was welcomed into the Gaza reconstruction framework. While Resolution 2803 provided the initial legal "hook" for the BoP, the subsequent Davos Charter effectively decoupled the Board from UN oversight, transforming it from a temporary transitional body into a permanent, global authority.

The BoP’s founding plan reportedly omits formal UN oversight, introduces a $1 billion buy-in for permanent membership and concentrates authority within a powerful Executive Board. Significantly, the Charter hands to the Chairman of the BoP, the current U.S. President Donald Trump with unilateral veto power for life, i.e., even after he leaves the White House, a move that establishes a personalized leadership model unprecedented in modern treaty-based institutions. It has established the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) as a technocratic governing body and an International Stabilization Force (ISF) accountable to the Board rather than the Security Council. 

Supporters offer three main defenses. First, performance legitimacy. Traditional multilateralism is seen as legally sound but operationally slow, while the BoP aims to ensure funding and enable speedy deployment and overcome veto paralysis, with legitimacy expected to follow concrete results. Second, realist necessity. In an era of great-power rivalry, where too many competing voices prevent any real action., the BoP argues that smaller coalitions of the capable can act decisively because they don't need a global consensus to move. In this new world, excluding most countries is not a mistake, but it is a functional tool used to trade democratic debate for operational speed. Third, strategic selectivity. Under this, the BoP is framed as a broader model for high-stakes regions, suggesting not a total U.S. withdrawal from global governance, but a strategic recalibration. This move acknowledges that the U.S. is a weakening power that can no longer uphold the expansive global framework it once built. Instead of trying to maintain universal rules, the U.S. is using the BoP to retreat into a “community” of influence, concentrating its remaining strength only where its strategic interests are greatest. This gives the White House the best of both worlds, namely the ability to exert total control within these select zones while evading any responsibility or accountability for the rest of the world.

In essence, these arguments expose two significant details. First, the post-1945 so-called universal order is now being actively displaced – not just undermined – by the very power that created it, to pave way for what can be described as a parallel order, which can be described as selective, performance-driven and geopolitically targeted. International law and norms, because of their intersubjective nature were contested in their interpretation and applicability and often motivated by strategic considerations rather than normative ones, but there was a universally held social agreement that they provide a framework for what constitutes as ‘expected behaviour’. And of course this was repeatedly undermined, even by the U.S., when its strategic needs clashed with norms and procedures, e.g., Kosovo 1998 and Iraq War 2003. But now, Trump is upending it from its roots. International law and norms now become nothing more than negotiated contracts among contributors, where authority flows from operational capacity rather than procedural equality. The shareholder model competes with the community-of-states model. This is in line with Trump’s ambition to remake the international order ‘the Trump way’.

This transformation is a recipe for instability. First, the apparent neutrality of international bodies is weakened by political alignment, which inevitably weakens their legitimacy claim for any action. A body like the BoP would inevitably be evaluated according to power politics principles and this alone would create perceptions of diminished trust by regional actors. Second, the requirement of a $1 billion membership fee is seen by critics as undermining the principle of sovereign equality by making power dependent on financial capacity rather than institutional balance and moving towards capital-weighted power. Third, the exclusion of certain actors is likely to push these actors – who possess sufficient capacities – to hinder the process.

The Board of Peace thus represents more than a peace initiative; it is a geopolitical experiment in “shareholder” governance where the mission is not to solve conflict, but to manage it for the benefit of the powerful. It was created under the guise of stabilizing Gaza, but that mask has slipped: with hostages returned and the international gaze drifting, the BoP has become a tool for the U.S. to exert "international guardianship" while ignoring the ongoing violence on the ground. It promises agility and capital concentration. But by replacing procedural equality with financial gatekeeping and institutional continuity with personalized authority, it constructs a brittle framework.

Admittedly, the existing multilateral framework is stagnant, but proposing a private, capital-backed club to replace universal laws is dangerous. It is hardly a recipe for future stability, and there are doubt about how long it can survive given the geopolitical resistance is hardening against it. Ultimately, the BoP’s failure to act on ceasefire violations proves that a model based only on power and money cannot provide the lasting legitimacy it claimed to offer, it is merely a new name for old-fashioned spheres of influence.

[1] UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025) endorsed the "Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict." It authorized the establishment of the Board of Peace (BoP) as a transitional administration and the creation of an International Stabilization Force (ISF). Critically, the resolution was passed without an explicit reference to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, creating a "legal gray zone" that allowed the BoP to later expand its mandate via the Davos Charter (January 2026) without further Security Council approval.