ABSTRACT
The meaning of the United Nations Security Council’s primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security is ambiguous. Although it constitutes the normative foundation of the Council and defines its authority, its precise meaning remains unspecified and causes contestation. This has serious implications for the Council’s normative order. Contestation about the meaning of responsibility is a source for practices of normative ordering in the Council. The underlying driver of these processes is justification, which can be understood as giving normative or moral reasons during controversy. This introduction familiarises readers with the core premises of the book, namely, the changing understanding of responsibility in the Council since the late 1990s and the benefits of turning to Luc Boltanski’s pragmatist sociology for the analysis of justification as practice of normative ordering. Finally, the introduction also explains the choice of the 2002/2003 Iraq crisis and the 2011/2012 Syria crisis as case studies. It concludes with a brief overview of the book.
