ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the advent of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and two particular issues of deliberation, namely criteria for intervention and the exclusivity of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) authority, which resemble the discussions that took place in San Francisco 60 years earlier. It illustrates the fact that the UN remains what it always was and what, indeed, it was designed to be, namely an arena for acting out and managing the politics of the Great Powers. The debate over authority was a serious bone of contention among delegates at the 2005 World Summit, and as negotiations became increasingly fraught and acrimonious, the whole R2P project looked at times to be seriously imperilled. The realisation of R2P's full potential is dependent on a significant diminution in the institutional way that the logics hold among the UN membership today, but the parallels between United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO) and the 2005 World Summit suggest that they remain deeply ingrained.
