Humanitarian Action and Coordination

This article presents an analysis of the history of UN humanitarian action in both natural and human-made disasters. It discusses a network of institutions that struggle to respond to ‘complex humanitarian emergencies’. It identifies the tensions over jurisdiction and turf, and then examines UN institutions and their NGP partners that go to the scene of modern humanitarian emergencies.

Peaceful Settlement of Disputes and Conflict Prevention

This article examines the issues traditionally dealt with by the Secretary-General of the UN. These issues are negotiations, fact-finding, mediation, good offices, conciliation, and arbitration. More recent inventions such as international tribunals and regional arrangements are studied as well. The concept of ‘culture of prevention’ is introduced in this article.

Legal Perspectives

This article provides a summary of the author's writing and teaching at several well-known law schools. The article addresses how the international organizations with a global reach have changed the mechanisms and reasoning behind the making, implementation, and enforcement of international law. It also notes the disappearance of a rather religious faith in law and multilateral approaches that had become characteristic of the legal culture among those who helped design the world organization in the 1940s.

Regional Groups and Alliances

This article provides an analysis of the regional groups and alliances. The article describes their advantages and disadvantages in comparison with the universal UN. The article also looks at the distinct difference in capacities between regions such as Europe and Africa.

Women and Gender

This article discusses women and gender, and first identifies the differences between the concepts. It moves on to a critical examination of the norms and their institutional manifestations, along with selected UN system efforts to promote women's rights in development, peace and security, human rights, and health. The article also provides a balanced evaluation of how much things have changed for girls and women over the last sixty years.

Secretary‐General

This article discusses the intricacies of trying to be a Secretary-General. It describes the evolution of the roles of the Office of Secretary-General in the context of international politics. The article also provides an outline of the articles of the Charter that relate to the Secretary-General, the evolution of the office during the Cold War, and how the office has encountered challenges in the ‘new era’.

Trusteeship Council

This article examines the Trusteeship Council, a principal organ whose work was essential to the settlement arising from World War II. It involved establishing procedures for the independence of the defeated powers' colonies. This article details the pioneering efforts of the UN at facilitating the decolonization of trust territories. This is part of the world organization's contribution to the processes of self-determination for peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. It also reveals that the work of the Trusteeship Council was linked to what may have been the most important political change of the twentieth century.

Evolution In Knowledge

This article looks at the impact on the classroom and scholarship of the dominant approaches that come from Anglo-Saxon academia and think-tanks. These approaches are also reinforced by the authority of publishers and journals in North America and Europe. It also tries to examine how the proverbial woman in the street has responded to different levels of knowledge over the years. The article argues that unpacking the influences of both the UN of states and the UN of secretariats is a key research challenge, and that communicating with larger publics is a main civic challenge.

Peace Enforcement

This article examines the use of military force to back up Security Council decisions. It starts with an analysis of the elastic definitions related to the topic and provides a concise survey of the key cases after the renaissance of the UN in the 1990s. It documents the extent to which subcontracting to major powers and regional organizations was the only feasible way to project military force to support international decisions. The article further contests the notion that there has been a significant change in the underlying determinants of UN enforcement. This article also shows that UN peace operations are remarkably cheap.

Disarmament

This article evaluates the achievements and limitations of the world organization in the field of disarmament. It stresses the role of the UN as part of the efforts to control arms as a way to achieve international peace and security. It also notes specific cases where progress was achieved or not, as well as the more recent efforts to handle the problems of anti-personnel land mines and small arms and light weapons. The article also tries to draw out some of the broader implications for international relations of the UN experience with formal multilateral arms control, among others.