ABSTRACT
On August 2, 1990, the role of the United Nations (UN) Security Council changed. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait faced an unusually negative and united international community. The UN Security Council met within hours. The former Cold War adversaries, the United States and the Soviet Union, both reacted against Iraq's unprovoked action and demanded Iraq's withdrawal. It marked the beginning of a new world of cooperation between the leading major powers. “Global governance” became a new term of considerable significance and with a more positive ring to it than “world government,” as Thomas Weiss has pointed out (Weiss 2009). It set a precedent for the following decade of international affairs. The UN was to be used for dealing cooperatively with international crises. Indeed, there were many conflicts to follow. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program records 128 armed conflicts between 1989 and 2008 (Harbom and Sundberg 2009).
