The raison d’être of the United Nations Security Council lies, one might argue, in trying to prevent its own demise, which effectively would abolish the world’s most authoritative forum for great power deliberations on matters of peace and security. As noted by an author of a recent introduction to the history of the Security Council, there has in over 60 years of its existence ‘never been a sustained clash between permanent council members’.1 In order to uphold this rather impressive record and the primary collective good – global order – associated with it, the council does not have to adopt any single binding resolution, let alone facilitate political or military intervention so as to thwart a particular scenario or redress a situation that has already come about. The legal standing of the Security Council is of course chiefly derived from the UN Charter agreed between the major great powers after the Second World War, an arrangement which paved the way for ‘council jurisprudence’ that consists of what today amount to more than 2,000 resolutions with binding effect for all UN member states. That jurisprudence, Ian Hurd explains in a book devoted to legitimacy and power in the Security Council, has over time induced states to

behave as if they acknowledge the sovereignty of the Council, and their behavior is changed by their efforts to accommodate and exploit it in the pursuit of their interests. The Council’s presence changes the incentives in ways that states have not consented to and from which they cannot simply choose to free themselves.2