JANUARY 22 — As the world watches the ceremonial launch of Donald Trump’s much-anticipated Board of Peace at the World Economic Forum in Davos, one striking fact leaps out: the organisation’s founding charter contains no meaningful reference to Gaza — even though its very creation was predicated on a United Nations Security Council mandate explicitly tied to the Gaza conflict. 

This absence is not an oversight; it reflects a deeper and troubling shift in how power, legitimacy, and international order are being reconfigured in the early 21st century.

In November 2025, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2803, authorising support for a transitional governance and reconstruction mechanism for the Gaza Strip following the October 7 conflict and subsequent military escalations. 

That resolution, which passed with no vetoes, was narrowly framed: the mandate was limited in time (through the end of 2027) and in focus (solely on Gaza). 

It was a conditional endorsement of a Trump-led initiative — tied, on paper, to the specific needs of a ravaged territory and its people. 

Yet the Board of Peace charter that Trump is now rolling out bears almost no trace of this origin story.

Instead of a mission centred on post-war Gaza reconstruction and Palestinian self-determination, the charter describes an amorphous and open-ended “peace-building” body meant to promote stability in “conflict-affected areas”. 

Its charter boasts language about “pragmatic solutions” and a willingness to “depart from institutions that have too often failed”, but omits the very conflict whose aftermath justified its creation. 

This absence is not minor — Gaza is the raison d’être that persuaded Security Council members to endorse the initiative in the first place. 

Diplomats hoped that by giving limited backing to Trump’s plan, the UN could secure continued engagement in a negotiated end to the conflict with Gaza at its centre. Instead, member states now find themselves endorsing a body whose charter reads more like a private club of powerful states and individuals than a dedicated mechanism for Palestinian recovery. 

The implications are profound. First, the charter’s silence on Gaza calls into question the coherence between the Security Council’s mandate and the entity it is supposed to endorse. 

Under international law, organisational mandates endorsed by the Security Council are understood to anchor their legitimacy in the UN Charter and its principles — non-intervention, self-determination, and respect for sovereignty. 

By omitting Gaza while invoking a broader peace-building agenda, the Board’s charter appears to repurpose a narrowly tailored UN authorisation into a generalised platform for global conflict engagement. 

Second, this shift exemplifies a broader trend in international affairs: the emergence of ad-hoc institutional mechanisms that operate outside, or alongside, the established multilateral framework.

The UN was created in 1945 precisely to avoid the chaos of competing power blocs and unilateral interventions. 

Its Charter embeds normative principles that, for all their imperfections, remain the closest thing the world has to a universally accepted framework for managing conflict and post-conflict transition. 

Trump’s Board, by contrast, sets itself up as a “nimble alternative” to these institutions — a private, member-driven council with a billionaire pay-to-play model and the former US president as chairman for life. 

Critics have not minced words. 

Observers within and beyond the UN system have labelled the initiative a kind of “Trump United Nations” — an institution where traditional checks and balances are replaced by the whims of a single individual and where membership is contingent on steep financial contributions.

Countries that support the UN’s foundational framework worry that this model undermines, rather than reinforces, the legitimacy of international peace operations. 

Indeed, the charter itself confers extraordinary powers on the chair. 

According to reporting on the text of the document, the only person named in the charter is Donald Trump; all other members are admitted at his discretion, and the chair retains unilateral authority over agendas, meetings, and even the lifespan of the organisation. Permanent membership, meanwhile, is tied to a minimum contribution of US$1 billion, further entrenching the influence of wealthy states and private actors while marginalising smaller countries and, critically, the people whose conflicts the body purports to address. 

This “imperial court”, as some commentators have described it, is problematic on multiple fronts. 

It reinforces a model of global governance driven not by principle or international law, but by power and patronage. It risks creating parallel structures of authority that compete with, rather than complement, established institutions like the UN. 

And in its very structure, it sidelines the voices of those it claims to serve — Gaza’s two million residents remain absent from any meaningful role in shaping the Board’s mission or operations.

For Palestinians, this is particularly troubling.

International law holds that in post-conflict governance scenarios, the rights of the people affected — especially their right to self-determination — must be central. 

Previous UN transitional administrations in Cambodia, East Timor, and Kosovo, for example, were explicitly mandated to prepare the way for local governance and, where appropriate, independence through a clear timeline and mechanisms that included local participation. 

The Board of Peace’s charter contains none of these safeguards. 

Rather than empowering Gaza’s people to rebuild and govern their own future, the Board’s design risks imposing an external administration that remains under the veto of its chairman and the purse strings of powerful donors. 

This is not progressive peace-building; it is the extraction of governance from the hands of the governed.

Some supporters of the initiative argue that the Board’s broader mandate allows it to tackle conflicts beyond Gaza, potentially offering fresh approaches to intractable flashpoints worldwide. 

But this argument obscures the core issue: the repackaging of a UN-mandated, conflict-specific mechanism into a generic global body with unclear accountability.

Legitimate innovation in peace operations should enhance, not hollow out, multilateral norms and institutions.

World leaders are reacting with caution. 

Some have enthusiastically accepted invitations to join; others, including key European allies, have declined or expressed serious reservations. 

The European Union, Canada, and several Nordic countries have either refrained from joining or have demanded greater clarity about the Board’s legal basis and relationship with the UN. 

These reactions reflect a broader unease with initiatives that bypass collective decision-making for personalised power structures.

The enduring lesson of the 20th century’s most devastating conflicts is that peace cannot be imposed from above; it must be built with and through the participation of local communities, grounded in international law, and sustained by shared commitments to justice and equality. 

The United Nations, for all its flaws, embodies these principles.

Trump’s Board of Peace, in contrast, threatens to reshape global governance in ways that privilege influence over legitimacy, wealth over rights, and personality over principle. 

The omission of Gaza from its charter is a symptom of this deeper malaise — a charter drafting error that is, in reality, a reflection of the initiative’s broader ambitions.

If the goal truly is peace, we must ask: peace for whom, and under whose terms?

* Phar Kim Beng is professor of Asean Studies and director of the Institute of International and Asean Studies, International Islamic University of Malaysia.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.