Politics & International Relations
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an international organization established in 1945 to promote peace, security, and cooperation among nations. It provides a platform for dialogue and negotiation on global issues, including human rights, humanitarian aid, and sustainable development. The UN consists of multiple specialized agencies, programs, and bodies working towards the common goal of maintaining international peace and security.
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11 Key excerpts on "United Nations"
eBook - PDFWar and Governance
International Security in a Changing World Order
- Richard Weitz(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
The United Nations is considered the most universal multinational security institution in existence, perhaps in history. Not only does it include more member states than any other, but it has a large programmatic and administra- tive staff, engages in a multitude of activities, and employs a broad definition of international security that addresses a wide range of sources of conflict— threatening polices, economic deprivation, gross human rights violations, and other possible causes of war. The United Nations was born out of wartime vio- lence and has formally sought to establish perpetual world peace. The pream- ble to the UN Charter includes commitments to human rights and to “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,” but its primary goal, listed first, is “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” 1 Although it has not achieved this ambitious objective, the UN has been helpful in advancing international security in several respects. In the absence of a competing multi- national security institution wielding so much legitimacy and other potential peace-promoting resources, the UN seems likely to remain the world’s most widely used security institution. HISTORY Revulsion against the violence of World War I led U.S. president Woodrow Wilson and other statesmen to establish an international body, the League of Nations, to prevent its recurrence. The last of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, de- livered to Congress in January 1918 to underscore the Allied Powers’ lofty war aims, called for a “general association of nations [to] be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political The United Nations Chapter 2
eBook - PDF- John Merrills, Eric De Brabandere(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
12 The United Nations The reference of disputes to international political institutions has a history as long as that of arbitration. For present purposes, however, it is unneces- sary to go further back than 1919, when, with the creation of the League of Nations as a reaction to the First World War, the first attempt was made to establish a universal organisation with broad responsibilities in this area. Following the failure of the League, or more accurately its member states, to take effective action to forestall a second bloodbath, a fresh effort to bring disputes within the field of operations of a world organisation was made with the creation of the United Nations Organisation in 1945. 1 The purposes of the United Nations, as set out in Article 1 of the Charter, are to maintain international peace and security; to develop friendly relations among nations; to achieve international cooperation in solving problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian charac- ter and in promoting human rights; and to be a centre for harmonising the actions of states in attaining these ends. Of these interrelated purposes, the maintenance of international peace and security occupies the primary place. Here, according to the Charter, the Organisation has two distinct responsibilities: to bring about the cessation of armed conflict whenever it occurs, and to assist the parties to international disputes to settle their differences by peaceful means. The scope of the Organisation’s powers in this second area, the ways in which they are exercised in practice and the effectiveness of the United Nations’ contribution are the subject of this chapter. While United Nations peacekeeping and the powers of the Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter play an important role in the maintenance of international peace and security, these activities are not always questions of dispute settlement.
eBook - PDF- Richard Devetak, Jim George, Sarah Percy(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
At times, the United Nations behaves like an independent actor in world politics, making its influence felt on states and others, and taking action in the world. At other times, it operates like a forum, where states and others come to discuss among themselves, with the United Nations providing an institutional setting where negotiations can take place. At still other times, the United Nations is a resource in the hands of other players, acting as an instrument or tool by which these others hope to advance their goals. The three functions of actor, forum and resource must be combined by scholars in order to get a more complete picture of the power and nature of the United Nations (Hurd 2011b ). The United Nations as an actor International organisations such as the United Nations are actors in world politics. They are constituted by international law as independent entities, separate from the states that are their founders and their members. The practical expression of this independence varies greatly across organisations, but in a formal sense they are corporate ‘persons’ – much like firms are ‘persons’ in domestic commercial law. At a minimum, this means that they have legal standing, with certain rights and obligations. These qualities were explicitly recognised for the United Nations in the ICJ opinion on Reparations for Injuries suffered in the Service of the United Nations in 1949, but that case merely affirmed what had existed in prior custom and practice: interstate organisations are legally independent from their founders. Beyond this legal minimum, being recognised as an actor requires some kind of social recognition, plus some kind of capacity for action. For the United Nations, these are evident in the ways that states treat the United Nations as a player of consequence in world politics – states appear to believe that it matters what the United Nations does and says.
- Karen Mingst, Margaret P. Karns(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
The Cold War’s end found the United Nations in greater demand than ever before to deal with peace and security issues as well as environmental and development issues, population growth, humanitarian disasters, and other problems. UN peacekeepers have been called on to play roles in rebuilding Cambodia; disarming combatant forces; organizing and monitoring elections in Nicaragua and Namibia; monitoring human rights violations in El Salvador; and overseeing humanitarian relief in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and many other post–Cold War problem areas. Beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the UN’s enforcement powers have been used more in the post–Cold War era than at any previous time.By 1995, however, the early post–Cold War optimism about the United Nations had diminished substantially. The peacekeepers in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda found little peace to be kept, although their presence did alleviate much human suffering. Despite almost continuous meetings of the UN Security Council and numerous resolutions, the UN’s own members lacked the political will to provide the military, logistical, and financial resources needed to deal with these complex situations. In addition, the UN faced a deep financial crisis because of the increased cost of peacekeeping and other activities and the failure of many members, including the United States, to pay their assessed contributions. The UN celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1995 but failed to use the occasion to enact necessary reforms in its administration, financing, and structure.What is the role of the UN in world politics? In light of the substantial changes in the world since the UN’s founding in 1945 and the very different needs it faces today, how has the UN itself changed?The United Nations in World Politics: Vision and Reality
The establishment of the United Nations in the closing days of World War II was an affirmation of the desire of war-weary nations for an organization that could help them avoid future conflicts and promote international economic and social cooperation. The UN’s Charter built on lessons learned from the failed League of Nations created at the end of World War I and earlier experiments with international unions, conference diplomacy, and dispute settlement mechanisms. It represented an expression of hope for the possibilities of a new global security arrangement and for fostering the social and economic conditions necessary for peace to prevail.
eBook - PDFManaging World Order
United Nations Peace Operations and the Security Agenda
- Richard Alqaq(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- I.B. Tauris(Publisher)
2 DEFINING THE WORK OF THE United Nations: FROM THE CHALLENGE OF THIRD WORLD ACTIVISM TO A RESURGENT WESTERN SECURITY AGENDA ‘International organisation can be thought of as a historical process rather than a given set of institutions.’ Robert W. Cox (‘The crisis of world order’, 1980). ‘Like all other institutions, the United Nations is changing, redefining its rules and its mission in the world. It has a limited but important role to play in a hungry and divided world that is already in the middle of a class war between the rich and poor nations – and doesn’t quite know it.’ James Reston (The New York Times, 23 May 1975). Decolonisation and the ‘tyranny of the majority’ It is has often been noted at one time or another that the United Nations is ‘in crisis’ or ‘in flux’, its future indeterminable due to its relations with one or other major power, or a result of some wayward activity on the periphery. In fact, every decade of the UN’s existence has thrown-up some difficulty concerning its supposed functioning and programme of work. These disputes are important to international life not least because they often represent various competing 36 MANAGING WORLD ORDER visions of how this sphere should be organised and arranged. And while today the speci ficity of the UN’s outlook is often taken as fixed and pre-set—that is, its orientation around peace operations, human rights and counter-proliferation— this was clearly not the case during the Cold War, when the organisation was at times racked by contests to shape and reshape its workload. Although the early years of the UN were marked by what can only be considered, in Evan Luard’s terms, as ‘Western domination’, by the 1960s the organisation had taken on a much more proactive stance on a number of issues.
eBook - PDFInternational Organization
Theories and Institutions
- J. Barkin(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
At its most basic, the UN refers to a set of member countries (currently 191), a constitutional document (the Charter of the UN), and six basic organs: the General Assembly (GA), the Security Council, the Secretariat, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and the Trusteeship Council. These organs are directly mandated by the Charter. Many of the organs have in turn created subsidiary agencies (see the organizational chart of the UN, fig. 5.1). There are a number of autonomous agencies that are part of the UN sys- tem but these are not administratively subsidiary to the central organs of the UN. 1 54 ● International Organization: Theories and Institutions Figure 5.1 An organizational chart of the United Nations system. And finally, there are regional organizations designed to provide some of the func- tions of the central organs for regional issues. As with autonomous agencies, these regional organizations are generally not administratively subsidiary to the central organs, but are encouraged within the UN system as regional mini-UNs. The subsidiary agencies, which are often thought of as major IOs in their own right, have in common that they have been created by, are in principle overseen by, and can be disbanded by their superior organizations. In other words, they are answerable to the central organs of the UN. They usually draw at least a portion of their budgets from UN funds as well. Apart from these similarities, subsidiary agen- cies can be quite different in focus, scope, and scale. Their foci run the gamut from international security (such as specific peacekeeping operations), to economics and development (e.g., the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development [UNCTAD] and the Regional Economic Commissions), to human rights and humanitarian intervention (including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCHR] and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [UNHCR]).
eBook - PDFNew World Disorder
The UN After the Cold War - an Insider's View
- David Hannay(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- I.B. Tauris(Publisher)
Chapter III The work of the United Nations and its structure It is a challenge to anyone writing about an international organisation to make the material comprehensible and capable of assimilation by the ordinary reader, or indeed by any reader who has not worked in the organisation in question; to avoid drowning in the alphabet soup of acronyms which proliferate in all such organisations; and also to avoid allowing the complexities of bureaucratic process to camouflage and obscure any proper analysis of the substance of the issues at stake. In no case is this challenge more acute than when dealing with the sprawl-ing and fissiparous structure of the UN, its different central institutions and its many semi-autonomous agencies. That is the justification for preceding a narrative account of the UN’s activities in the period fol-lowing the end of the Cold War by a kind of snapshot of the structure and working of some of the UN’s principal component parts at the out-set of the period in question. The UN ended the Cold War in terms of legal and institutional struc-tures much as it began it in 1945, when the Charter came into force and set out the powers and functioning of the various main bodies of which the UN was composed: the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat, to name only the most prominent. One major change had been made when, in 1965, the Security Council had been expanded from 11 members to 15, with-out, however, changing the role of its five permanent members (China, France, the Soviet Union, the UK and the USA) or diluting their power of veto. The Economic and Social Council, too, was enlarged from 12 New World Disorder 18 to 54 members. And the addition, in 1948, of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights remedied an omission from the original charter of an element which was to be of increasing significance as time passed.
eBook - PDFGlobal Governance Reform
Breaking the Stalemate
- Colin I. Bradford, Johannes Linn, Colin I. Bradford, Johannes Linn(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Brookings Institution Press(Publisher)
T he fifty-one countries that founded the United Nations in 1945 meant to create an organization that would save the world from the kind of global catastrophe that they had endured twice in three decades—a major war among nations. The leaders of those countries based their design for the organization on the prevailing realities of their time. Nation-states were by far the most important, if not the only, significant actors on the international scene and certainly the only ones that could cause large-scale violence and make decisions to avoid it. Their relationships with one another depended at root on their relative national power, defined primarily in terms of military strength. Threats to any country would come primarily from other countries, and an adequate response required something other than a competing national alliance—it demanded a world alliance against such threats to global interests. More than six decades later, those assumptions no longer hold, and the threats confronting the international community challenge it to update the UN system and to revise how the UN relates to regional and bilateral organizations. This chapter reviews the dramatic changes in the nature of the problems confronting the international community and the resulting gaps in its capac-ity to tackle those problems. It assesses the efforts to adapt and reform the UN leading up to the 2005 world summit and the lessons learned in the 60 United Nations Reform ann florini and carlos pascual 4 process, and it concludes with key questions that need to be addressed to guide the next stage of UN reform. The chapter does not attempt to provide definitive answers on what a “reformed” UN should look like, a task that would require a much more extensive treatment. Instead, we offer sugges-tions on how to move toward a more viable reform process, based on two observations. The first observation is that the UN’s vast membership has diverse goals for UN reform.
- John E. Trent, Laura Schnurr(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Verlag Barbara Budrich(Publisher)
The overall design of the United Nations had much in common with its predecessor, reflecting how international institutions tend to evolve rather than change rap-idly. Illustrating the continuity between the two organizations, few people even noticed that the United States joined the League after the Second World War, a year before it was legally wound up at a final ceremony in Geneva in 1946. As with the League, the UN is based on a tripartite parliamentary structure including a Security Council (as a sort of Cabinet), a General Assembly or debating chamber with one vote for each state member but with few powers (sort of like legislatures), and an administrative Secretariat and secretary-gen-eral who, once again, is more secretary than general (a prototype of a public service). Likewise, the International Court of Justice in The Hague (replacing 35 the Permanent Court of International Justice) can only accept cases submitted to it by members and its decisions are more recommendations than orders. Also, the UN has no prosecutor, no police and no jail. And once again, although the UN Charter speaks glowingly of fundamental human rights and it gave birth to the Universal Charter of Human Rights, there are no binding obliga-tions that commit members to protect citizens—even if they sign treaties to do so. There are also significant differences between the League and the UN. The very powerful Security Council was designed to take action whenever its mem-bers are in agreement. Vetoes were accorded to the Great Powers (the Perma-nent Five members) to make sure they do not have to leave the UN to protect their interests—which was one of the downfalls of the League and something we must remember when we discuss criticisms of the veto later. No other mem-bers were given veto power with which to block action, so there is no proto-anarchy as in the League. The Security Council is given exclusive jurisdiction over maintaining peace and security.
eBook - PDF- Malcolm N. Shaw(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
21 The United Nations THE UN SYSTEM The United Nations 1 was established following the conclusion of the Second World War and in the light of Allied planning and intentions expressed during that conflict. 2 The purposes of the United Nations are set out in article 1 of the Charter as follows: 1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end, to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace; 1 See e.g. R. Higgins, P. Webb, D. Akande, S. Sivakumaran and J. Sloan, Oppenheim’s International Law United Nations, 2 vols, Oxford, 2017; The Charter of the United Nations (ed. B. Simma, D. E. Khan, G. Nolte and A. Paulus), 3rd ed., Oxford, 2012; La Charte des Nations Unies: Commentaire Article par Article (ed. J. P. Cot, A. Pellet and M. Forteau), 3rd ed., Paris, 2005; S. Chesterman, I. Johnstone and D. M. Malone, Law and Practice of the United Nations, 2nd ed., Oxford, 2016; La Charte des Nations Unies, Constitution Mondiale? (ed. R. Chemain and A. Pellet), Paris 2006; B. Fassbender, The United Nations Charter as the Constitution of the International Community, Leiden, 2009; The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations (ed. T. Weiss and S. Daws), 2nd ed., Oxford, 2018; B. Conforti, The Law and Practice of the United Nations, 2nd ed., The Hague, 2000; United Nations Legal Order (ed. O. Schachter and C. C. Joyner), Cambridge, 2 vols., 1995; Bowett’s Law of International Institutions (ed. P. Sands and P. Klein), 5th ed., London, 2001, chapter 2; The United Nations and a Just World Order (ed. R. A. Falk, S. S. Kim and S. H. Mendlovitz), Boulder, 1991; B.
- Helge Årsheim(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
1 The United Nations and Religion Officially, the United Nations does not “ do ” religion: there is no formal legal in-strument, specialized program or political entity within the organization that deals with religion as its primary objective. Nevertheless, when the UN Intellec-tual History Project (UNIHP) submitted its halfway report in 2005, the project leaders summarized a priority list for the issues where new thinking and re-search was urgently required and the United Nations should be encouraged to do “ more creative work ” . On the very top of that list, the authors placed “ The growing divide between the Islamic world and the West — with attention to the political, cultural, religious, and development dimensions ” (Jolly, Emmerij and Weiss 2005: 61). Measured with the metrics of the UNIHP, under which international organi-zations should be evaluated according to “ the quality and relevance of the policy ideas they put forward ” (Emmerij 2007: 39), the efforts of the UN to deal with a perceived divide between the Islamic world and the West and its multidimen-sional origins and consequences has unequivocally failed, as the world organi-zation has been unable to influence or mend this relationship in any meaningful manner. This shortcoming can, at least in part, be attributed to one of the other key findings of the project: The failure to distinguish between the different levels of the organization, and to what extent they are responsible for desirable out-comes (Weiss, Carayannis and Jolly 2009: 138). What is regularly called “ the ” United Nations is in reality an entity with at least three different organizational levels, consisting of (1) forums for decision-making, (2) international secretariats and specialized programs, and (3) a broad and increasingly influential group of independent experts and actors in international civil society.
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