Twenty years of the Human Rights Council finds itself at a peculiar crossroads. Humanity faces a stark choice between breakdown and breakthrough. As this fractured world reshapes the paradigm of development, there is an urgent need to unite together for preserving the leave-no-one-behind principle.

In the reports such as UN 80 initiative, four main polarizations have been identified by which the leave-no-one-behind principle may confront challenges more critical than ever. These are power, poverty, capacity building, and right to development.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widening the polarization in power, empowerment and participation toward a common agenda of development for everyone. The emphasis of leaders has moved focused from on driving performance, the short-term resilience to sustained productivity and long-term impact, powered by technology and AI at the core of transformation.

March 11, Elon Musk just confirmed the biggest IPO in history. SpaceX is going public in 2026 with $1.5 TRILLION valuation. Musk has announced that his target is $30 plus billion. Through the biggest IPO ever made beating Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion record from 2019, he is literally about to win the entire AI race surpassing space tourism or Mars missions.

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Economic polarization is once again identified as the most interconnected global risk over the next decade, fueling other global risks. According to the UN’s statistics, an estimated 808 million will be living in extreme poverty up from the previous estimate of 677 million, affecting one in ten people. It is an urgent challenge faced by the world that global daily starvation deaths have doubled in a year.

The poorest in the current world compared with the 1990s are not only undernourished, without access to basic services and suffer from much poorer health, they are lagging behind the development of the world. As economic polarization accelerates, poverty will continue to define the space for the poorest peoples to have access to economic growth, education, resources, and other supports necessary for personal fulfillment in the years ahead.

The trend toward the polarization of capacity building driven by AI has become a global problem. According to McKinsey’s “The State of Organizations 2026”, 55 percent of leaders admit successfully building AI capabilities of employees will bring exponential productivity gains. AI agents and human employees need to collaborate. That means redefining capability requirements and building human engagement with the technology is put at the top of their list of the developmental mandates. The new demand of the capacity-buildings is increasingly defining career progression, and therefore is pressing the workforce, particularly younger generation who require clear development pathways.

 No doubt that sustainable development and the right to development are indispensable. As the progress on the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals is faltering, the inequality in the right to development deepens. The UN’s “The Security We Need” identifies that only one in five targets is on track to be achieved by 2030, and the annual financing gap for the 2030 Sustainable Goals now stands at $4 trillion. In the meantime, global military spending has surged to unprecedented levels.

In 2024, it reached an all-time high of $2.7 trillion. When a sustainable and peaceful future has reached a pivotal juncture, development has to become fragile, and that will bring uncertainty to the protection and promotion of the right to development. The recession of the resources essential for the right to development, in particular, social investment, poverty reduction, education, health, environmental protection and infrastructure has been crowded out undermining progress on nearly all the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The polarized right to development is victimizing in the first place the vulnerable groups. For example, female extreme poverty has hovered at around 10% since 2020. If current trends continue, over 351 million WOMEN AND GIRLS could still live in extreme poverty by 2030 (8.2%).

 To bridge the divides on the road toward a better future where everyone can thrive, especially to help the underrepresented groups to involve fairly in the world’s development, the world needs to work together, and share experiences accumulated and lessons learnt. For example, AI Capacity-Building Action Plan for Good and for All proposed by China aims to support the Global South benefit equitably from AI developments,propel international development cooperation, pursue true multilateralism, and promote the implementation of the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, through North-South, South-South and triangular cooperation and based on the principles of sovereign equality, development orientation, people-centred, shared benefits and inclusiveness, and multi-party coordination and cooperation. As a country ranking the world’s second largest economy, with, for example, in 2024, China-Africa trade volume reached US$295.6 billion, setting a new record high, creating around 4,500 jobs, China’s initiatives of this sort are good for upholding the leave-no-one-behind principle. To that end, more efforts from across the world are needed.

 In sum, the UN has made clear since its very outset in 1945—that term “human rights” mentioned seven times in the UN’s founding Charter. There are only two ways to deal with development: dream it or live it. In a fractured world, being developer of opportunities for leave-no-one-behind is not about doing great and beautiful deeds. It’s doing what one does with beauty and greatness.

Liu Chen is the professor of Public Administration and Cultural Studies. Harvard Kennedy School Mason Fellow, Postdoctoral Fellow, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard. Her research focuses on policy, practice, leadership, and culture and international cooperation.