A Comprehensive Overview of the Security Council

Abstract

The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century. Edited by David M. Malone. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004. 746 pp., $65.00 cloth (ISBN: 1-58826-215-4), $29.95 paper (ISBN: 1-58826-240-5). The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century is a project of the International Peace Academy, edited by the president of the Academy, David Malone. On leave from the Canadian Foreign Service, Malone served as Canada's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1992 to 1994. The forty-nine contributors he has assembled are an impressively diverse group. Many are academics; many have United Nations (UN) or nongovernmental (NGO) experience. They come from a number of UN member-states. The book itself is encyclopedic, containing 746 pages and thirty-nine chapters. The three Appendixes contain information on (1) Security Council mandated peace operations between 1945 and 2003, (2) multinational operations tasked and authorized by the United Nations from 1945 to 2003, and (3) Security Council mandated sanctions regimes. The volume concludes with more than four pages of acronyms, an eighteen-page bibliography, and a twenty-four-page comprehensive index. In the Introduction, Malone asserts that “our approach is not theoretically driven. We are content to let our research and conclusions serve as theory fodder for others” (p. 3). He notes that the Security Council initially viewed its role as preventing a third world war. After the end of the Cold War, however, it began defining its function in terms of preventing regional conflicts that might spillover into global disasters. He sees Operation Desert Storm as a significant turning point in the activities of the Council. According to Malone, “the success of the coalition's military campaign against the Baghdad regime, in retrospect, appears to have induced an era of euphoria in the Council, an era that could not have arisen during the Cold War” (p. 5). A second opening chapter, by Peter Wallensteen and Patrik Johansson, places “Security Council Decisions in Perspective.” Four flow charts present data from 1946 to 2002 on: …