Prof. Kwame Adeyemi is a scholar of international relations at the London School of Economics and the author of The Legitimacy Vacuum: How the UN Filled the Space the Empires Left (2050) — the first synthetic account treating the 2035–2046 decade as a single structural transition rather than a sequence of separate regional stories.
His central thesis — that the Security Council veto existed “to protect the capacity of a small number of states to act as if they were still empires after 1945 had ended empire as a legal category,” and that Ritter’s “arithmetic of defeat” (2029) made empire too expensive to maintain “one budget line at a time, until the states that had used the veto to protect it had nothing left worth protecting with it” — became the defining analytical framework for understanding the UN’s post-2045 institutional evolution.
His Chapter 6 (“The Province Question”) is the first documented proposal — framed as speculative, not prescriptive — that the UN’s demonstrated capacity to absorb legitimacy on Earth positions it as the only existing institution with standing to propose a jurisdictional framework for the lunar surface, where Kosmograd, Guanghan, and ALSO-2 operate under bilateral and trilateral agreements with no unified legal framework. He stops short of proposing a specific mechanism, writing only: “The precedent exists. Whether anyone convenes the conference to use it is a question for the next book, not this one.”
His closing characterization — that the post-2045 UN is “a Security Council with nothing left in its way but its own reluctance to finish the sentence it started in 1945” — explicitly disclaims any claim that a world government exists, while identifying the obstacles to one that have been removed.