United Nations Invocations of the ‘Responsibility to Protect,’ State Sovereignty and State Actions

Abstract

The United Nations lies at the heart of the international system established at the end of the Second World War. The maintenance of international peace and security was (and remains) the first of the purposes assigned to it. Its Charter defined norms that if respected, would make it a more effective instrument for preventing and resolving conflict than the inter-war League of Nations had ever been. Initially, the Cold War prevented the new United Nations from fulfilling many of its creators’ hopes and expectations, but its moment seemed at last to have come when the Cold War ended in 1989 (Goulding, 2003, p. 346).