At the end of 2014, the United Nations had launched two important reviews by groups of eminent external experts, diplomats, and political personalities to look more comprehensively at its core business: preventing wars and maintaining global peace and security. The first was a review of the United Nations’ peacebuilding architecture by an Advisory Group of Experts (AGE); the second was the even more ambitious review of the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations and special political missions through a High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO). While the first review was mandated by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council, the second was undertaken at the initiative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Both the AGE and the HIPPO presented their respective reports at about the same time, the first on 29 June 2015 and the second a few days earlier, on 16 June 2015. On 2 September 2015, the Secretary-General followed the reviews up by issuing his own report to the UN General Assembly on UN peace operations. All three reports were meant to trigger a strategic discussion among member states about the future of the United Nations to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of its creation in 1945. They were seen as continuations of previous UN strategy reports, in particular Boutros-Ghali's 1992 “Agenda for Peace,” Lakhdar Brahimi's 2000 Report on United Nations Peace Operations and Kofi Annan's sponsored 2005 Outlook Document. However, the 2015 reports lack the strategic depths of their predecessor reports.

The 2015 reports were obviously written with the intent not to cause any political controversy with member states and to circumvent possible institutional sensitivities among UN departments. Although the reports make plenty of references to the great dangers facing the world (a use of language that is typical of so many UN reports), they rarely go beyond analyzing organizational, managerial, and petty bureaucratic issues. At times, the reports read as narrow wish lists of individual member states, UN departments, and their organizational units. The focus is on improving what is and does not to go much beyond this. Not surprisingly, instead of presenting sharp and provocative strategic options for the future of collective security, member states are now confronted with three different and, in many parts, incongruent reports, with a combined total of over 180 pages and almost as many recommendations and new initiatives.