Larry Johnson’s timely and important essay challenges both utopian and realist accounts of UN law and practice by reviving the debate over the nature and functions of the UN General Assembly, particularly the General Assembly’s power to deploy certain legal tactics not only to influence collective security deliberations in the UN Security Council, but also, more significantly, to provide some legal justification for multilateral military “collective measures” in the event of Security Council gridlock. One vehicle by which the General Assembly may assert its own right to intervene in defense of “international peace and security” is a “Uniting for Peace” (UFP) resolution, authorized by resolution 377(V) (1950). At its core, a “uniting for peace” resolution is an attempt to circumvent a Security Council deadlock by authorizing Member States to take collective action, including the use of force, in order to maintain or restore international peace and security. General Assembly resolution 377(V) does not require resolutions to take specific legal form—language that echoes the preambular “lack of unanimity of the permanent members [that results in the Security Council failing to] exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” is sufficient to render a given resolution a UFP, provided the General Assembly resolution calls for concrete “collective [forceful] measures.” For this reason, experts disagree on precisely how many times a UFP has indeed been invoked or implemented, although informed analysts suggest UFP has been invoked in slightly more than ten instances since 1950.
Uniting for “Peace” in the Second Cold War: A Response to Larry Johnson