Writing from the LSE Department of International Relations, Prof. Kwame Adeyemi published The Legitimacy Vacuum in 2050 as the first synthetic account treating the 2035–2046 decade — the weapons suspension resolution, the base drawdown, the Ramat Gan convention, and the Palestinian UN admission — not as a sequence of separate regional stories but as a single structural transition, and asks what filled the space they left.
The Central Thesis
Adeyemi’s Chapter 1 thesis is the book’s most quoted passage: “For eighty years, the Security Council’s paralysis was not a design flaw incidental to great-power politics; it was great-power politics, formalized. The 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. What happened between 2035 and 2046 was not that the empires were defeated. It’s that the arithmetic Ritter described in 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.”
The Veto-Restraint Convention
Adeyemi traces the informal veto-restraint convention — first visible in the 2045 Palestine admission vote — through its subsequent codification: by 2048, all five permanent members had, at least once, publicly committed to non-use of the veto on matters the Secretary-General’s office classified as “humanitarian floor” issues, a category that by 2049 formally included food access, water access, and protection from displacement, following the 2047 General Assembly resolution establishing the Humanitarian Floor Doctrine. He is careful to note this is convention, not Charter amendment — “a promise the permanent members have found it more expensive to break than to keep, which is the only kind of promise this century’s institutions have reliably honored.”
The Province Question
Chapter 6, “The Province Question,” is the book’s most forward-looking section and the one Adeyemi flags as speculative rather than documented. He notes that the Shackleton Crater arc — Zvezda, Guanghan, and the now-expanded American ALSO-2 installation, operating under bilateral and trilateral agreements with no unified legal framework — represents “the same jurisdictional vacuum the Security Council occupied in 1946, transplanted four hundred thousand kilometers.” He draws the explicit parallel: a UN that has demonstrated, on Earth, that it can absorb legitimacy no single state can any longer afford to hold alone, is the only existing institution with the standing to propose a jurisdictional framework for the lunar surface before competing national claims harden into the kind of frozen-conflict geography that took six years and the Vienna Accords to resolve in Ukraine.
He stops short of proposing a specific mechanism: “The precedent exists. Whether anyone convenes the conference to use it is a question for the next book, not this one.”
The Removed Obstacles
Adeyemi’s closing chapter is explicit about what has been achieved and what has not. No unified planetary government exists or is proposed as of his writing. But he identifies what he calls “the removed obstacles”: no state any longer holding an unresolved military occupation as a live Security Council agenda item for the first time since the Council’s founding; no single member state maintaining the kind of overseas basing network that had made “great power” and “global military presence” synonymous terms for a century; and a General Assembly whose membership no longer treats abstention from the humanitarian floor doctrine as costless. His closing sentence: “None of this is a world government. It is, for the first time in the Charter’s history, a Security Council with nothing left in its way but its own reluctance to finish the sentence it started in 1945.”