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In times of major disasters such as hurricane Katrina or the Sichuan earthquake, the need for accurate and timely information is as crucial as is rapid and coherent coordination among the responding humanitarian community. Effective humanitarian information systems that provide timely access to comprehensive, relevant, and reliable information are critical to humanitarian operations. The faster the humanitarian community is able to collect, analyze, disseminate and act on key information, the more effective the response will be, the better needs will be met, and the greater the benefit to the affected populations. This paper presents fundamental principles of humanitarian information management as endorsed by the international humanitarian community, introduces generic systems design premises and presents two recent collaborative efforts in humanitarian information systems development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a long time NATO paid no attention to the phenomenon of terrorism. The attacks on 11 September 2001 spurred the Alliance on to speedily adopt a number of remedial measures. Due to its restricted membership, legal limitations, institutional features, mode of decision-making and almost exclusively military capabilities NATO is not well-suited to effectively counter the threat of transnational terrorism. The Alliance's contribution may, however, be enhanced through internal organisational improvements, enhanced consensus among allies and closer co-operation with other international organisations and regional bodies including UN, EU and OSCE. The effective struggle against terrorism requires a global anti-terrorism coalition, radically different designs for security structures and the use of predominantly non-military instruments. The ‘war on terrorism’ has not been won and its intermediary results look inconclusive at best. The Alliance cannot play a central role but can constructively contribute to this endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Since the early 1990s, West Africa has been an innovative laboratory for United Nations (UN) peacekeeping. In 1993, the UN deployed military observers in Liberia, alongside a regional organisation – the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) – for the first time in its history. The UN also sent military observers to Sierra Leone (UNOMSIL) in 1998 and took over ECOMOG's peacekeeping responsibilities in the country by 2000. ECOWAS peacekeepers were ‘re-hatted’ as Blue Helmets in Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire in 2003 and 2004 respectively. After providing a brief background of the domestic, regional and external dimensions of Sierra Leone's conflict, this chapter examines the evolution, performance and politics of the UN mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), as well as peacekeeping cooperation between the UN and ECOWAS. The chapter argues that the UN (particularly the most powerful members of the fifteen member Security Council) was shamefully negligent in African countries like Sierra Leone for most of the 1990s following debacles in Somalia (1993) and Rwanda (1994). Although there was criticism of rebel atrocities, much of the international community and UN agencies failed to condemn the gross human rights abuses committed by government troops during Sierra Leone's civil war or to support disarmament efforts effectively. Indeed, Sierra Leone hardly appeared on international radar screens at all until the late 1990s. In the context of a major security vacuum and lack of strong UN interest, ECOWAS took up the burden of peacekeeping – with mixed results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 20 May 2002, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, joined East Timorese President Xanana Gusmão and the heads of state from over a dozen countries to lower the United Nations (UN) flag and raise the Timorese one. Four months later, Timor-Leste became the 191st member state of the UN. East Timor presents two contradictory stories in the history of UN peace operations. On the one hand, it is an outstanding success. In two and a half years, a territory that had been reduced to ashes after the 1999 referendum on independence held peaceful elections and celebrated independence. On the other hand, however, East Timor can be seen as a series of missed opportunities and wastage. Of the UN Transitional Administration's annual budget of over $500 million, only around one-tenth actually reached the East Timorese. At one point, $27 million was spent annually on bottled water for the international staff – approximately half the budget of the embryonic Timorese government, and money that might have paid for water purification plants to serve both international staff and locals well beyond the life of the mission. More could have been done, or done earlier to reconstruct public facilities. This did not happen in part because of budgetary restrictions on UN peacekeeping operations that, to the Timorese, were not simply absurd but insulting. Such problems were compounded by coordination failures, the displacement of local initiatives by bilateral donor activities and the lack of any significant private sector investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly studies and policy debates about peacekeeping in Rwanda have largely focused on the question of whether or not it was possible, in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of genocide in April 1994, to rapidly reinforce the small peacekeeping presence on the ground and thereby halt the ongoing mass killing that killed over 750,000 people in three months. Against a series of arguments that this was a feasible policy option, most forcefully made by the serving Force Commander Romeo Dallaire, and also by the Carnegie Corporation project on Preventing Deadly Violence's Scott Feil, scholars such as Alan Kuperman have made strong arguments to the contrary. This debate has shaped the lessons learned, and unlearned, from Rwanda. While this debate remains unresolved, this chapter argues that the real failures in peacekeeping in Rwanda occurred far earlier than this juncture. The real failures occurred in 1993 in designing a ‘neutral international force’ – which became the United Nations (UN) Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) – to help implement the Arusha Accords. These failures were in part the result of poor communication and coordination; in part the result of political dynamics between the UN Security Council and the UN Secretariat; in part of the conception in the UN Security Council that Rwanda was a mission of tertiary importance. These factors led to the deployment of a mission that was poorly matched to the real challenges that awaited it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The inherent paradox in the United Nation's (UN) interventionary role in Kosovo is that it did not occur until after a ceasefire had been reached on the ground. In fact, as this chapter examines, one of the two major questions relating to the UN's role in the Kosovo war was that the UN Security Council (UNSC) in particular, was bypassed by the major Western powers that employed NATO as the vehicle for their intervention. As a result, this undermined the authority of the UNSC as the legitimating body for international interventions both in terms of the maintenance of international peace and security and on the basis of humanitarian concerns giving rise to the ‘doctrine of humanitarian intervention’. As NATO dispensed with the normal practice of seeking a UNSC resolution to mandate its action, both the legality and moral underpinning of the operation were heavily questioned. A second major issue raised for the UN by the Kosovo crisis relates to the evolution of the UN's' functions as the lead organisation in the international administration of war-torn territories. Through the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), the UN assumed responsibility for the civilian administration of post-War Kosovo. In practice, UNMIK has been governing a de facto protectorate, kept in relative peace by the maintenance of a weighty, NATO-led military and security presence, the Kosovo Force (KFOR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The involvement of the United Nations (UN) in Somalia was a product of the new international climate created by the end of the Cold War and by the dramatic success of Operation Desert Storm, and its aftermath in 1991. For the UN, the Somali operation, which at its height employed a force of 28,000 at an estimated cost of US $1.5 billion, broke new ground in two ways. Under Resolution 794 of 3 December 1992, the Security Council invoked Chapter VII of the Charter to authorise the establishment of an Unified Task Force (UNITAF), under US command and control, ‘in order to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia’. This was the first time that an unambiguously internal and humanitarian crisis had been designated as a threat to international peace and security, thus justifying peace-enforcement measures. Second, with this and subsequent resolutions, the UN dropped the pretence that its involvement in Somalia arose out of an invitation from the government – although the Council continued to refer to ‘urgent calls from Somalia … to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance’ – since no government existed with the authority to issue such an invitation. For the first time, statelessness was acknowledged to be a threat to an international society composed of sovereign states. The UN did not extend its prerogatives in these ways either willingly or as the result of a deliberate and carefully worked out international strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nations and peoples of the United Nations are fortunate in a way that those of the League of Nations were not. We have been given a second chance to create the world of our Charter that they were denied. With the cold war ended we have drawn back from the brink of a confrontation that threatened the world, and, too often, paralysed our organisation. Historians may look back on the first years of the twenty-first century as a decisive moment in human history. The different societies that make up the human family are today inter-connected as never before. They face threats that no nation can hope to master by acting alone – and opportunities that can be much more hopefully exploited if all nations work together. The first edition of this book attempted to assess the chances that an international society would be able to respond positively to the second chance identified by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the then United Nations (UN) secretary-general. It did so by examining three major international interventions of the early post-Cold War period in Cambodia, former Yugoslavia and Somalia. Well before the book went to press, it was already clear that the answer was not a foregone conclusion. Partly in reaction to failures on the ground and partly due to the escalating demands for UN intervention around the world, optimism gave way to pessimism as the prevailing mood surrounding UN peacekeeping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations (UN) operation in Cambodia from 1992 to 1993 was, at the time, the most ambitious and expensive undertaking in the peacekeeping experience of the organisation. At a cost of around US $1.7 billion, 22,000 military and civilian personnel were deployed to implement the Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, the Paris Agreement, which had been concluded at an international conference in Paris on 23 October 1991. That settlement made provision for a UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) charged with holding the ring politically, so that elections under its aegis could determine the future governance of a country long afflicted by violent upheaval and human suffering. UNTAC was provided with exceptional resources but its mandate was restricted to peacekeeping. Peace enforcement, which had been demonstrated early in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, was not part of UNTAC's remit, which was confined, in essence, to a quasi-administrative role. The critical problem confronted by UNTAC virtually from the outset of its deployment was how to discharge its responsibility for filling a political vacuum in the face of obstructive violence by contending Cambodian parties. The notorious Khmer Rouge refused totally to cooperate in implementing the Paris Agreement, which it had signed, while the incumbent administration in Phnom Penh used violence to force the outcome of the elections. In the event, UNTAC took a calculated risk in embarking on elections, which were conducted without serious disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of the United Nations (UN) in former Yugoslavia up to the end of 1994 was a depressing one, especially as it followed the success of the Gulf War and the prospect of a ‘new world order’ in 1991. Regional organisations such as the European Union (EU) and NATO were also infected by the miasma of failure. In this chapter the wreckage is examined: what caused the disappointment of the high hopes of a successful intervention? Was the failure as total as some feared? What lessons can be extracted about relations between the regional and the global organisations in protecting the peace? In the body of the chapter the main currents in the UN's drift to disaster are charted, not in terms of the incidents on the ground, but in the decisions of those who controlled the agenda. In a concluding section some lessons for the future are deduced. The break-up of the Yugoslav Federation Following Tito's death, the rigidities of the Cold War international system held Yugoslavia together for a while, but the demise of communism and the ensuing cataclysmic changes in Eastern Europe released the centrifugal pressures which had previously been contained. By the beginning of the 1990s, there was rising tension between the republics of Serbia and Croatia, the two dominant segments of the old state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The findings of our study have ethical and practical implications. Since the passage of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the promotion of better human rights practices by governments around the world has been one of the most important functions of the United Nations. It is morally wrong for agencies of the United Nations, which include both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to undermine one of their parent organization's most important goals, the promotion of good human rights practices (Clapham 2006; Darrow 2003; Skogly 1993; 2001). The practical implication of our findings is that structural adjustment programs are not producing good economic outcomes mainly because they combine relatively ineffective policies with the undermining of a necessary precondition for economic growth – respect for human rights. The World Bank and IMF should be pursuing equitable economic development. We have defined equitable economic development as the simultaneous achievement of economic growth and advancement in protections of economic and social rights of citizens. Achieving one element without the other should be considered “development failure.” We argue that respect for some human rights will promote equitable development. More precisely, respect for some physical integrity and civil rights and liberties will lead to faster rates of economic growth and progress in achieving respect for economic and social rights to such things as health care, education, and housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Developing countries are likely to have a higher rate of economic growth if they have democratic political institutions and if their citizens have protections of their civil liberties (Kaufmann 2005; Kaufmann and Pritchett 1998; Sen 1999). Critics of the World Bank and IMF have contended that structural adjustment agreements undermine institutional democracy and protections of civil liberties. There were four main variants to this “undermining democracy” argument. The first three critiques focus on the deleterious effects of structural adjustment on the development of democratic institutions and democratic methods for selecting leaders. We find no evidence in support of this critique. In fact, we find considerable evidence to the contrary. Countries undergoing structural adjustment were more likely to develop democratic institutions and democratic human rights than those not undergoing structural adjustment. The fourth argument suggesting that the implementation of structural adjustment programs undermines democratic rights is not about procedural democracy. It is about substantive democracy or the extent to which the actual policies produced in a society reflect what most people want. It's an important contention, and we will return to it later, but it is not an argument that can be tested using the kinds of evidence available for large-scale comparative analysis of the type we have conducted in this project. The first argument was that the World Bank and IMF allegedly were more willing to negotiate with authoritarian governments than with democratic governments, because authoritarian governments were more likely to implement unpopular policies (Pion-Berlin 1984; 1989; 1997; 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In 2000, the World Bank and IMF, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations published a jointly prepared document titled A Better World for All. In it, the world's two most important international financial institutions guaranteed that, in partnership with others, they would make substantial progress in reducing world poverty by 2015. The report proposes measuring poverty reduction in seven areas: world poverty (the percentage of people living on the equivalent of 1 US dollar or less per day), gender gaps in school enrollment, primary school enrollment, infant mortality and maternal mortality (Sadasivam 1997), access to health services, and sustainable development. Among other specific goals mentioned in the report, the promises include decreasing rates of infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-fourths, providing access to all that need health services, and ensuring that all children are enrolled in primary school. Taken together, the goals in the report are commonly referred to as the “Millennium Development Goals.” This report and these promises made in it were necessary because there is a growing consensus that most of the countries we usually refer to as “developing economies” are not developing at all or are not developing as quickly as had been hoped. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who directs the Millennium Development Project, notes that, according to World Bank estimates, 1.1 billion people or about one-sixth of the world's population live in extreme poverty (Sachs 2005). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The record of the United Nations shows a surprising capacity for institutional innovation, conceptual advances, policy adaptation and organisational learning. This can be shown with respect to peacekeeping and peace operations, human security and human rights, sanctions and the use of force, and so on. Yet in 2005, when this book was completed, the United Nations was an organisation in turmoil. On the one hand, there were efforts to initiate the most far-reaching, comprehensive and bold reforms in the UN's sixty-year history. On the other, the organisation was struggling to cope with a string of allegations of fraud and misconduct by foot soldiers and senior officials. A high-profile inquiry into the deeply damaging oil-for-food scandal fingered the son of the Secretary-General (SG) and faulted the SG for failure to conduct a proper investigation of possible conflict of interest. His former chief of staff was accused of shredding documents in relation to the scandal shortly after the inquiry was launched. The explanation that these were duplicates that had been destroyed in order to free up office space did not pass the ‘smell test’ for many American critics. The High Commissioner for Refugees had to resign in the aftermath of allegations of sexual harassment. The chief of the UN's internal oversight office – meant to oversee accountability and integrity in the organisation – left under a cloud with respect to oversight and recruitment lapses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General Bonaparte, following the footsteps of Alexander would have entered India not as a devastating conqueror … but as a liberator. He would have expelled the English forever from India so that not one of them would have remained and … would have restored independence, peace, and happiness to Asia, Europe, and to the whole world … All the Princes in India were longing for French intervention. There is an evident divide between the global North and South. The Non-aligned Movement – with 113 members, the most representative group of countries outside the United Nations itself – three times rejected ‘the so-called “right of humanitarian intervention” ’ after the Kosovo War in 1999 and the subsequent statements from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Many developing countries assert a claim to the privilege of managing world order on a shared basis but exhibit a strong reluctance to accept the responsibility flowing from such privilege, for example with respect to protecting the victims of humanitarian atrocities. Some of the big and powerful countries insist on claiming the benefits flowing from collective decision-making, in the form of greater legitimacy and authority, but resist the constraints on policy options that would result from a genuinely shared process of international policy-making. Curiously, the two feed on each other. The South points to the North's monopoly of power and privilege to excuse its own lack of a sense of international responsibility; the North points to the many instances of the South's failure to honour the international responsibility to protect to justify its refusal to restrict international policy-making to the collective UN forum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of a secretariat with a chief executive at its top converts ad hoc intergovernmental conferences into an international organisation. During the Cold War, the failure of the principal political organs to function as originally envisaged placed a disproportionate burden on the shoulders of the Secretary-General (SG). As a result the office became one with little power but considerable influence. The burden of pacific settlement under chapter 6 of the UN Charter as often as not fell on the office of the SG. It was an SG who conceived the novel institution of UN peacekeeping operations and became the lynchpin of their management and the critical channel of communication between the several actors. Because the UN pursues the two great agendas of peace and development simultaneously, it is not surprising that human security, with roots equally deep in both agendas, grew in fertile UN soil. The SG has had an important role to play in promoting the new concept of human security and the notion of institutionalising the prosecution of humanitarian atrocities and crimes against humanity. Since the end of the Cold War, the SG is looked to in many quarters almost as an alternative voice of dissent in a US-dominated United Nations, when in fact the Cold War ended in a triumph of American values and destroyed the institutional checks on the exercise of US power globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a number of key meetings during and after the Second World War, world leaders drew up rules to govern international behaviour and established a network of institutions to work together for the common good. Both the rules and institutions – the system of global governance with the United Nations as the core – are under serious challenge. The Iraq War brought to a head the larger question of the changing nature of threats in the modern world, the inadequacy of existing norms and laws in being able to address such threats and the need for new ‘rules of the game’ to replace them. Too often has the UN been shown to be proof against occasions of the larger kind. The United Nations is the arena for collective action, not a forum where nations who are unable to do anything individually should get together to decide that nothing can be done collectively. How can the United Nations be so restructured as to empower it to enforce resolutions against recalcitrant regimes like Saddam Hussein's but not take any action against Israel? Unless and until this is done, will Washington re-commit to the international organisation? Conversely, if and when it is done, how many others will walk away from the world body, viewing it ‘not as an independent broker but as a glorified sub-contractor to the United States’? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.’ ‘… truth can be created by assertion, principle can be established by deception and democracy can be imposed through aggression’. Wars are cataclysmic events. Out of the destruction of major wars emerge new fault lines of international politics. This is why the Iraq war has the potential to reshape the bases of world order in fundamental, profound and long-lasting ways. The war proper proved to be swift and decisive. The most pressing task in ‘post-war’ Iraq became to stabilise the security situation, establish a transitional political authority, initiate the necessary steps for post-war reconstruction, peacebuilding and reconciliation, and embed these in durable institutions and structures sufficiently resilient to survive the withdrawal of a foreign presence in due course. The larger goal in the region was to assuage the humiliation inflicted on the collective Arab identity, deal with legitimate Palestinian grievances with the same mix of boldness and firmness shown in Iraq, and impress upon the Arab world in general the need for deep political, social and economic reforms. In this chapter I propose to examine the impact of Iraq through three ‘cuts’: the impassioned debate before the war; the relationship between the goals pursued and the means employed; and the need for the international organisation and the hyperpower to come together in the common cause of peacebuilding after the war. I conclude by reviewing the argument that the world is better off with the ouster of Saddam Hussein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The worst act of domestic criminal behaviour by a government is large-scale killings of its own people; among the worst acts of international criminal behaviour, to attack and invade another country. The history of the twentieth century is in part the story of a twin-track approach to tame, through a series of normative, legislative and institutional fetters, both these impulses to armed criminality by states. Cumulatively and in combination, these attempted to translate an increasingly internationalised human conscience and a growing sense of an international community into a new normative architecture of world order. There is growing recognition of the authority of international consensus over individual state consent as the foundation of legal obligation. The notion of ‘excess state violence’ has evolved to challenge the use of violence by any state in its internal and international behaviour beyond the level that international political actors consider to be legitimate. Saddam Hussein's record of brutality was a taunting reminder of the distance yet to be traversed before we reach the first goal of eradicating domestic state criminality; his ouster and capture by unilateral force of arms is a daunting challenge to the effort to outlaw and criminalise war as an instrument of state policy in international affairs. But what if the second failure is a response to the first, if one country is attacked and invaded in order to halt or prevent atrocities inside its sovereign territory by the ‘legitimate’ government (which already indicates a troubling appropriation and corruption of the word ‘legitimate’)? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the Gulf War (1990–1) marked the birth of the new world order, Somalia (1992–4) was the slide into the new world disorder and Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (1995) marked the loss of innocence after the end of the Cold War. This background and sequence of events and developments help to explain the forging of a normally elusive political will among the major actors of the Euro-Atlantic alliance when, faced with a compelling humanitarian tragedy in Kosovo, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) launched a ‘humanitarian war’ without UN authorisation. As discussed already in chapter 2, by 1999 Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had exhausted their patience. They were determined to confront him if necessary, instead of allowing him to get away with his murderous practices yet again. But the action raised many troubling questions about what we can and should do when faced with a humanitarian tragedy. The triple policy dilemma can be summarised thus: to respect sovereignty all the time is to be complicit in humanitarian tragedies sometimes; to argue that the UN Security Council (UNSC) must give its consent to international intervention for humanitarian purposes is to risk policy paralysis by handing over the agenda either to the passivity and apathy of the Council as a whole, or to the most obstructionist member of the Council, including any one of the five permanent members (P5) determined to use the veto clause; to use force without UN authorisation is to violate international law and undermine world order. The three propositions together highlight a critical gap between the needs and distress felt in the real world and the codified instruments and modalities for managing world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 11 September 2001 (9/11), global terrorism struck at the symbolic headquarters of global power and globalisation. This was followed over the next three years by equally horrific terrorist outrages in Bali, Madrid and Beslan. Iraq saw more terrorist attacks than anywhere else in 2004–5, with large-scale car bombings the preferred modus operandi but also the kidnapping and beheading of foreigners. All these examples confirm that terrorism is indeed ‘an assault on the principles of law, order, human rights and peaceful settlement of disputes on which the … [UN] was founded’. The problem pre-dates the UN. The League of Nations drafted a Convention for Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism. The twenty-first century was foreshadowed also in efforts by the Czech government to bring national laws into unison in order to cope with ‘the use of criminal violence for political ends’. UN interest in terrorism increased in the 1990s with proportionately more attacks being directed at US targets, the rise in the casualty rate per incident, the globalisation of the terrorist networks, the fear of terrorists acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the role of states as sponsors and supporters of international terrorism. Sanctions regimes established in response to the rising concern with terrorism were important in stigmatising terrorism as an illegal and criminal activity, highlighting the role of international cooperation in combating the threat and raising the costs to states of supporting terrorism. But they failed to have comparable effects on non-state terrorist actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘The International Criminal Court is now operational in The Hague. The United Nations is proud to have played an important role in its establishment and in making arrangements for the commencement of its operation.’ ‘No UN institution – not the Security Council, not the Yugoslav tribunal, not a future ICC – is competent to judge the foreign policy and national security decisions of the United States.’ The world has made revolutionary advances in the criminalisation of domestic and international violence by armed groups and their individual leaders. The 128-article Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was adopted at the conclusion of the UN Diplomatic Conference on the Establishment of the ICC held at the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome from 15 June–17 July 1998. The final vote was 120–7 (including China and the USA, two permanent members of the UN Security Council), with 21 abstentions (including India, representing one-sixth of humanity). Participants included representatives from 160 countries plus 33 observers from intergovernmental and 236 observers from non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The ICC Statute received its sixtieth ratification in April 2002 and came into effect in July 2002. On 22 April 2003 Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina, who helped to put his country's former military rulers on trial, was elected as its first prosecutor. By the end of 2004, 135 countries had signed and almost 100 had ratified the Rome Statute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community should be under no illusion: … humanitarian and human rights policy goals cannot easily be reconciled with those of a sanctions regime. Coercive economic sanctions developed as a conceptual and policy bridge between diplomacy and force for ensuring compliance with UN demands. Recourse to sanctions – diplomatic isolation, restrictions on international travel, trade and financial transactions, arms embargoes – increased dramatically in the 1990s. Compared to sanctions having been imposed only twice until 1990 (in Rhodesia and South Africa), more than a dozen have been imposed since then by a sanctions-happy UN Security Council (UNSC) against Afghanistan, Angola (on rebel forces), Ethiopia, Eritrea, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and former Yugoslavia. The United Nations has played a central role in the imposition and implementation machinery of sanctions because of its defining characteristic as the dispenser of international legitimacy. Although once seen as an attractive non-violent alternative to war, sanctions became discredited for their harsh humanitarian consequences on the civilian population. Instead of the authority of the UN legitimising sanctions regimes, the baleful effects of sanctions began to erode the legitimacy of the UN. This was exacerbated by the paucity of intellectual and institutional foundations for the organisation's sanctions policy. Interest shifted to incorporating carefully thought-out humanitarian exemptions or looking for ‘smarter’ alternatives to comprehensive sanctions that put pressure on regimes rather than peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.’ ‘One cannot worship at the altar of nuclear weapons and raise heresy charges against those who want to join the sect.’ This book began with the assertion by the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change that a common understanding on the use of force is necessary for revitalising the role of the United Nations in the twenty-first century. The most lethal force known to mankind so far is nuclear weapons. As the above quotes show, the subject of nuclear arms control and disarmament is back on the international agenda with a vengeance. The triple crisis arises from non-compliance with obligations of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) by some states engaged in undeclared nuclear activities and others that have failed to honour their disarmament obligations; states that are not party to the NPT; and non-state actors seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise and diffusion of human rights norms and conventions and the extension and diffusion of international humanitarian law (IHL) were among the truly great achievements of the last century. The United Nations was at the centre of that effort, led in particular by individuals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The ‘first-generation negative rights’ emerged from constitutional traditions that prevented the state from curtailing the civil rights and political liberties of citizens; the ‘second-generation positive rights’ reflected the agenda of many newly independent but poor countries to prescribe an activist agenda of social and economic rights for their citizens; and the ‘third-generation solidarity rights’ pertain to collective entities rather than individuals based on notions of solidarity. The human rights machinery in the UN system works in three areas: information, analysis and policy development; provision of support to human rights bodies and organs; and promotion and protection of human rights. For all this to be sustainable, robust human rights institutions have to be built at the country level. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has developed the practice of assigning human rights advisers to country teams. The challenge is to build on the progress achieved by helping countries to advance the protection of human rights at home through legislative, judicial and other enforcement measures and mechanisms. Improvements to human rights should be related to human rights capacity-building and be attentive to strains on the limited resources of developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Although the United Nations gave birth to the notion of human security, it proved poorly equipped to provide it’. The challenge posed by the massive earthquake and devastating tsunami of 26 December 2004 was a vivid illustration of the advantages of conceptualising security within the inclusive framework of human security. The natural disaster caused catastrophic loss of life in many countries around the perimeter of the Indian Ocean, including thousands of Westerners vacationing in the pleasure resorts. Mother Nature did not discriminate between Muslim and Christian, Tamil and Sinhalese, poor and rich, native and foreigner. She claimed them all equally to her bosom in the sea to bring forcefully home the realisation that we are indeed one human family. We inhabit the same planet Earth, and artificially constructed enmity and rivalry based on the competitive and exclusionary concept of national security can be irrelevant to securing citizens against the real threats to their safety. The very symbol of ‘us against them’ national security – military forces – was used cooperatively in the international effort to provide disaster relief and assistance to the victims. At the same time, the general expectation was that the lead responsibility for organising international rescue and relief operations belonged properly to the United Nations. Thus even when nominated to the select core group of four aid coordinators, India demurred, saying that the UN should lead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iraq War in 2003 brought to a head a sometimes troubled and uneasy relationship between the world's premier international organisation and its most important member state. The whole affair generated heated controversy about the system of multilateral governance centred on the United Nations and the capacity and propensity of the USA to embark on unilateral adventures. The tension between the competing imperatives to unilateralism and multilateralism in US foreign policy has long bedevilled relations between the UN and the USA with respect to international peace operations, well before the advent of the administration of President George W. Bush. This chapter will seek to demonstrate that the critical UN–US relationship in fact soured over the course of the 1990s with respect to a range of peace support operations. This forms the necessary backdrop to understanding the ill-tempered UN–US exchanges of 2002–5. The UN Security Council (UNSC) is the proper locus of authorising and legitimising the creation, deployment and use of military force under international auspices. The major powers were given permanent membership of the UNSC and the veto power in recognition of their special role and responsibility in underwriting world order and collective security. When collective security proved unattainable and peacekeeping emerged as a substitute technique for keeping the major powers out of competitive involvement in armed conflicts, direct military involvement by the five permanent members (P5) of the UNSC was not welcome. But they still had to consent to the creation, deployment and financing of UN peacekeeping missions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International organisation This chapter situates the changing peace and security role of the United Nations within the larger context of developments in international organisation and the evolution from pacific settlement and collective security to peacekeeping and peace operations. One of the most enduring if least endearing features of human history is systematic violence between members of the human family. In the modern era, this has taken the form of organised warfare between states as the basic unit of the international system. International organisation is an important means for arranging the functioning of the state-based international system more satisfactorily than had proven possible in conditions of international anarchy. But international organisation in turn is characterised by a certain tension. On the one hand, it can be regarded as a step towards the establishment of a world government which would transcend the state system. On the other hand, international organisations are set up and managed by nation-states; the sovereign state remains the basic entity of international relations; and states have shown themselves singularly reluctant to accept significant encroachments upon their sovereignties. Thus international organisation, in addition to serving as a possible pointer to a future world government, can also be viewed as merely an agreement by, for and of states to engage in regular consultation and establish joint machinery for the formulation and implementation of collective decisions. There was a spurt in the number and types of international organisations in the second half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I believe that we must embrace the responsibility to protect, and, when necessary, we must act on it. Created from the ashes of the Second World War with the Allies determined to prevent a repeat of Adolf Hitler's horrors, the United Nations for most of its existence has focused far more on external aggression than internal mass killings. Yet Nazi Germany was guilty of both. Unlike aggression against other countries, the systematic and large-scale extermination of Jews was a new horror. As the above quote from Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggests, the organisation is at long last elevating the doctrine of preventing mass atrocities against people to the same level of collective responsibility as preventing and repelling armed aggression against states. That journey is the theme of this book. Both sets of responsibility require judgements on when, how and how much force to use. This provides the leitmotif of my narrative: the procedural norm which emphasises multilateral forums and approaches for making the decision to use force, the substantive reasons justifying the recourse to force, and the manner in which both these embedded norms have come under pressure in recent times. The second strand in my narrative is the distinction between legality and legitimacy. According to the Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, ‘The maintenance of world peace and security depends importantly on there being a common global understanding, and acceptance, of when the application of force is both legal and legitimate.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]