Review: Cooperating for Peace and Security Evolving Institutions and Arrangements in a Context of Changing US Security Policy

Abstract

COOPERATING FOR PEACE AND SECURITY Evolving Institutions and Arrangements in a Context Changing US Security Policy Bruce D. Jones, Shepard Forman, and Richard Go wan, editors New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 348 pp, US $85.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-521-88947-6It is a platitude the conversation on multilateralism global institutions have not adapted to 21st century realities. Setting the record straight is the first reason to pay attention to this volume edited by Bruce Jones, Shepard Forman, and Richard Gowan. The table contents serves as a reminder the transformations have occurred over the last 20 years. Despite not being reformed itself, the UN security council has strengthened peacekeeping, created international courts, stepped into counterterrorism, and diversified its toolbox for preventing the proliferation weapons mass destruction. It has also added legal and regulatory efforts to its usual crisis-management work, and, as David Malone argues in his contribution to the volume, has even advanced a new understanding international sovereignty.Yet this book is more than just a list changes have taken place and problems remain unsolved. Rather, it builds upon Helga Haftendorn's, Robert Keohane's, and Celeste Wallander's claims, made in their 1999 book, Imperfect Unions, that the ability an institution to thrive, or even to survive, depends on its adaptability and that adaptation requires organisations be sensitive not only to general changes in their environment, but specifically to the interests and foreign policy preferences their most important members (313).The editors and contributors Cooperating for Peace and Security rely on the distinction between two worlds international security. Washington is a prominent actor in the first one, which deals with its national security priorities, proliferation, and terrorism. Its in the second world - focused on such issues as humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and international criminal justice - oscillates between benign ignorance and disruption, even as the United States devotes considerable sums to international cooperation and arrangements on these issues. Obviously, even in the so-called first world, the American is not free from historical fluctuations and traditional ambivalence, as Stewart Patrick skilfully demonstrates. Most the book's essays address his fundamental questions of whether the UN could serve as an effective collective security organization, capable confronting the main threats the twenty-first century - and whether the United States [is] willing to allow it to play such a role (39).Still, in both worlds there was only a limited extent to which the United States, for all its unrivaUed power, shaped the evolution the multilateral security architecture in the post-Cold War era (9). The book therefore analyzes the roles - diplomatic brokers, resources contributors, norm entrepreneurs - played by others, be they states (such as the UK on humanitarianism) or international secretariats (the UN itself) in these efforts to adapt and innovate so as to deal more effectively with the threats and challenges a quickly changing international system.None the essays pretends these reforms have been perfect. The book is not shy about the fact many them foUowed crises, some missed their target, and a few significant and needed reforms did not take place at aU. But most the authors are also quick to assert there are no quick or easy fixes for current chaUenges. …