Human Security and Preventive Action Strategies

Abstract

The United Nations system has, since the end of the cold war, been substantially expanding the role of international organization in the formulation and promotion of international norms on major global issues. This has reflected both an intergovernmental recognition that there is a widening agenda of global issues in need of multilateral attention, and a perception that the UN provides the most effective forum for achieving progress on that agenda. This has also invested the UN with enhanced normative authority to address specific global issues in systematic, less ad hoc, ways that make manifest the ‘collective intentionality’ of the international community.1 In the area of peace and security, the UN has also sought to assert a greater normative authority, but successes have been fewer and progress more erratic. Initial optimism over cooperation among the permanent five members of the Security Council in the early 1990s has faded as complex political and humanitarian crises have led to increasing P5 divisions and some serious setbacks for the organization in the Balkans and Africa. This is in spite of the fact that states increasingly take the view that Security Council authorization is required for legitimate international intervention. Systematic approaches grounded in norms are particularly important for international interventions to prevent or manage conflict, since such approaches would help to establish precedents and principles in a post-cold war world that is still largely in search of such certainties.