From International to Human Security

Abstract

The UN system is involved in the whole gamut of issue-areas in international politics. The second half of this book consists of chapters that focus on the role of specific international organizations (IOs) in these issue-areas. This chapter and the next look at collective security. There are two reasons to begin with collective security. One is that in many ways it provides the core design function of the UN, the IO at the heart of the contemporary multilateral system. It is the issue that features most prominently in the UN Charter, and is probably still the function most closely associated with the UN in the popular imagination. The second reason is that many students of international relations are more skeptical of the role of IOs in the realm of security than in other issueareas, and those analysts who question most pointedly whether IOs matter at all tend to focus their skepticism on security issues.1 Security thus constitutes at the same time a central function of IOs and a hard-case test of whether or not they matter in international relations.