His winning essay argues that the world’s shipping lanes are guaranteed by law and protected by no one in particular, and that a clause of the UN Charter nobody has ever used is the way to fix it.
Andrew Igdal has won the 2026 New Voices 4 Global Solutions Essay Contest for “Room to Maneuver: The Case for a UN Maritime Force Under Article 109.”
Eighty percent of world trade by volume moves by sea, and most of it squeezes through a handful of narrow passages. The Strait of Malacca alone carries 23.7 percent of seaborne trade volume. The Strait of Hormuz carries 11.1 percent. The Suez Canal carries roughly 10 percent. Igdal’s essay starts from a question that sounds simple and turns out not to be: who is responsible for keeping those routes open?
The legal answer is that nobody in particular is. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea established freedom of navigation as a right and created no mechanism to enforce it. Enforcement was left to flag states, and many of the states where the world’s merchant fleet is registered have, in the words of a House of Lords committee, no meaningful capacity to enforce anything. Igdal calls this the Charter’s most consequential and under-appreciated gap.
The costs of that gap are measurable. Recent disruption in the Red Sea cut traffic through the Suez Canal by 90 percent and added roughly a million dollars to the cost of a single voyage. Freight costs rose more than 40 percent and transit times stretched from two weeks to over a month when the International Rescue Committee suspended its humanitarian shipping route to Sudan. In Yemen, where food insecurity threatens half of a population of roughly 34 million, sea-freighted cargo delivered by the UN World Food Programme fell 81 percent year over year.
The essay also traces what happens when protection is provided and then withdrawn. During the Somali piracy crisis, around 90 percent of World Food Programme aid to Somalia arrived by sea. Naval escorts began in November 2007, and no escorted WFP ship was ever attacked. When the escorts lapsed in mid-2008, shippers refused to load WFP cargo for Somalia at all. Igdal’s conclusion is blunt: armed protection of humanitarian sea corridors works, and without it the corridors collapse.
His proposal is a new chapter of the UN Charter establishing a standing maritime collective security organization with three mandates. It would protect freedom of navigation at designated chokepoints, secure humanitarian maritime corridors when disruption risks mass civilian harm, and provide shared surveillance and response against maritime coercion by state and non-state actors. It would run on two layers: a persistent network of uncrewed surface vessels, aerial drones, and shared monitoring systems, and a rotating conventional fleet contributed by member states, with command rotating among contributing regions rather than sitting permanently with one capital. Funding would be assessed in proportion to each member’s share of global seaborne trade by volume, so that the countries most dependent on open sea lanes carry a share of the cost that matches the benefit they receive.
The mechanism is Article 109 of the UN Charter, which allows member states to convene a general conference to review the Charter in full. It was also the subject of this year’s contest theme, “From Charter to Change: Reimagining Global Governance through Article 109,” which asked entrants to name the limits of the current UN system and propose one specific reform a general conference could adopt. The framers expected Article 109 to be used early in the organization’s life. It has never been used once. Citizens for Global Solutions treats it as a live legal mechanism rather than a historical curiosity and has made the case for its use a priority of its current work, including a 2027 special edition of Mondial devoted to Charter review.
Igdal grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in western North Carolina. He holds bachelor’s degrees in physics and economics from NC State University and is now a PhD student in public policy at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, where he is part of the Webber Energy Group and researches the economics of electrical transmission infrastructure and residential electrification programs. Outside his academic work he spends time with family, plays basketball, backpacks, rock climbs, reads and writes, and keeps a deliberate connection to rural communities and to the question of how energy and sustainability work reaches places that have been underserved by it.
“While my typical focus is on US energy systems, I’m grateful and excited for the opportunity to listen to and learn from folks focused on important global issues and solutions and chip in my perspective,” Igdal said.
The prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to the 42nd Ventotene International Federalist Seminar, held from 30 August to 4 September on the island of Ventotene in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Organized by the Altiero Spinelli Institute for Federalist Studies, the seminar brings students, young professionals, academics, and policymakers from around the world together for a week of lectures, policy workshops, and debate on democracy, European integration, and global governance.
Ventotene is where Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi were held as political prisoners by the Italian government during the Second World War, and where they drafted the Ventotene Manifesto, which argued for a federal Europe as a way to prevent future wars. The document became a foundation text for European integration.
Igdal’s essay will also appear in Mondial, the journal CGS co-publishes with World Federalist Movement Canada, in the 2027 print edition devoted to Charter review.
Read “Room to Maneuver: The Case for a UN Maritime Force Under Article 109” in full.
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New Voices 4 Global Solutions is the annual essay contest of Citizens for Global Solutions, open to US-based students aged 18 to 30. Entries were judged on responsiveness to the theme, depth of analysis, originality, clarity of writing, use of credible sources, and respect for differing viewpoints. The prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to the Ventotene International Federalist Seminar and publication in Mondial. Views expressed in contest entries are the author’s own.
