Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2004
Abstract
The chapters in this volume paint a picture of the Security Council as an organ alternatively robust and paralyzed, playing at best a limited role in international peace and security in the UN's first forty-five years and a more significant part ever since, at least until the 2003 Iraq crisis. There can be little question that the Council's members, with the prodding or acquiescence of other key actors in the United Nations, have used that organ in ways barely if at all contemplated by the Big Three (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union) or the others that joined them in San Francisco. Diplomats and political scientists studying this practice can help discern useful patterns and lessons regarding the Council's effectiveness in addressing the myriad new issues that states bring to the United Nations.
International lawyers, however, seek to transcend description by focusing on whether and how the Council's actions have contributed to the development of a set of legitimate and effective norms to govern state behavior. This inquiry has two core elements pointing in different directions. The first focuses on law as an output of the Council's work-how the Council's decisions themselves advance the role for international law by offering important prescriptions, interpretations, endorsements, or enforcements of international law. A second concern is on law as an input into the Council's decisions, in which we ask whether the Council itself has been constrained or affected by extant norms of international law. These questions are intertwined, in that the Council's willingness to advance international law is very much a function of its views on the state of the law.
Publication Information & Recommended Citation
Ratner, Steven R. "The Security Council and International Law." In The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century, edited by David M. Malone, 591-605. A Project of the International Peace Academy. Denver, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004.
Comments
From The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century, edited by David M. Malone. Copyright © 2004 by The International Peace Academy, Inc. Used with permission of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.