ABSTRACT
The high level panel has identified the new global security agenda as built around meeting four basic classes of threats to both state and human security. Moving beyond self-defence cases to response to external threats generally, the UN Charter clearly empowers the Security Council to take any action ‘necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security’. The distinction – if it can be operationalized, with criteria of legitimacy simplified, standardized and commonly accepted – is an important one. The effectiveness of global collective security system, as with any other legal order, depends ultimately not only on the legality of decisions. One institutional reform which might be achievable in under another millennium, is doing something to address more systematically a problem which cuts right across the traditional security and development agendas. By all means start from the proposition that the frontline responsibility for addressing every class of security threat we are going to be facing over the next few decades.
