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8 United Nations peace-making in Cyprus: from mediation to arbitration and beyond James Ker-Lindsay Introduction For the past sixty years, the United Nations (UN) has played a central role in the management and resolution of conflict in international affairs. Under chapter VI of the UN Charter, which refers to the ‘Pacific Settlement of Disputes’, the organisation is specifically authorised to play a part in the termination and settlement of international disputes. Since then, one of the most protracted UN attempts to manage and resolve conflict has been in
United Nations forces The overriding purpose of the United Nations is the preservation of peace. With this in view it seeks to limit the right of any state to resort to war. Article 2 (4) includes among the Principles of the Organisation that ‘all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against
: The number of Member States has increased from 51 to 193. The accession of new states has changed the voting ratio in the UN. UK The UK is a founding member of the United Nations and became a member on 24 October 1945
This book provides a critical, conceptual-historical analysis of democracy at the United Nations, detailed in four ‘visions’ of democracy: civilization, elections, governance and developmental democracy. ‘I know it when I see it’ were the famous words of US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on defining obscenity. It is with the same conviction and (un)certainty that liberal peacebuilders and democracy promoters have used democracy to achieve both the immediate goals of peacekeeping and the broader, global mission of the UN. Today, democracy may have gained an international dimension, yet its success as an organizational practice depends on how it has been defined. Drawing on political theory and democratization scholarship, the book questions the meaning of this well-‘known’ idea. It analyses the way in which the UN, through its Secretary-General, relevant agencies and organizational practices, have thought about, conceptualized and used democracy. The book shows that while the idea of democracy's ‘civilizing’ nature has played a prominent part in its use by the UN, an early focus on sovereignty and self-determination delayed the emergence of the democracy agenda until the 1990s. Today, a comprehensive democracy agenda incorporates not only elections but a broad range of liberal-democratic institutions. Despite this, the agenda is at an impasse, both practically and philosophically. The book questions whether an extension of the UN democracy agenda to include ‘developmental democracy’ is feasible.
This book offers a brief review of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations from 1947 to 2014. It examines international politics at the United Nations from 1988 to 1991 when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) dissolved. The book offers new explanations for the dwindling support for UN peacekeeping operations from late 1993 to 1995. It examines the diplomatic discussions at the Security Council, the General Assembly and the UN Secretariat on the objectives and principles of success of the operations from January 1992 to mid-1993. It is accepted by researchers and even the UN Secretariat that peacekeeping operations can be divided into two separate time periods: from 1947-88, or the Cold War era, and from 1988 to the present, the post-Cold War era. The book further explains what occurred in the UN during 1995 that called for a re-examination of the new concept and practice of peacekeeping in civil wars. It shows how the international community succeeded in providing only part of the requirements for the many operations, and especially for the large multidimensional operations in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and Somalia. Finally, the book emphasises the importance of regional organisations with regard to the maintenance of international peace and security.
As other chapters in this volume confirm, the role of international organisations in the formation and expression of rules of customary international law, as well as the extent of such a role, remains controversial in legal doctrine and practice. This chapter explores several aspects of the practice of the Secretariat of the United Nations as a specific example in an attempt to identify significant points that may inform the general debate on the issue. In so doing, it follows a practical approach based on the recent work of the International Law Commission
Human Rights and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the United Nations The UN is a universal global IGO and the center for global multilateral diplomacy. According to Article 1 of the UN Charter the purposes of the UN are: To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international
This chapter examines specific ideological and aesthetic dimensions of the representation of children in American films produced during and directly after the Second World War in relation to the promotion and operations of the United Nations. 1 It addresses how pitiable and vulnerable children from the world’s warzones – specifically groups of orphaned, abandoned and injured children from
This study explores the normative dimension of the evolving role of the United Nations in peace and security and, ultimately, in governance. What is dealt with here is both the UN's changing raison d'être and the wider normative context within which the organisation is located. The study looks at the UN through the window of one of its most contentious, yet least understood, practices: active involvement in intra-state conflicts as epitomised by UN peacekeeping. Drawing on the conceptual tools provided by the ‘historical structural’ approach, it seeks to understand how and why the international community continuously reinterprets or redefines the UN's role with regard to such conflicts. The study concentrates on intra-state ‘peacekeeping environments’, and examines what changes, if any, have occurred to the normative basis of UN peacekeeping in intra-state conflicts from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. One of the original aspects of the study is its analytical framework, where the conceptualisation of ‘normative basis’ revolves around objectives, functions and authority, and is closely connected with the institutionalised values in the UN Charter such as state sovereignty, human rights and socio-economic development.
Introduction Kosovo is not a security issue for Europe only: it must be seen in the context of global political processes. In this chapter, I argue that Kosovo was an episode in the long-term process of the domestication and marginalisation of the United Nations (UN) by the United States. These relations of domination are underpinned by Manichean dichotomous myths of good